Free Republic

The White House is preparing to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser as early as next month in a move orchestrated by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The move would be the latest in a long string of staff shakeups at the White House over the past year and comes after months of strained relations between the president and McMaster. A leading candidate to become President Donald Trump's third national security adviser is the auto industry executive Stephen Biegun, according to the officials.

Longstanding friction between U.S. President Donald Trump and two top aides, the National Security Advisor and the Chief of Staff, has grown to a point that either or both might quit soon, four senior administration officials said. Both H.R. McMaster and John Kelly are military men considered by U.S. political observers as moderating influences on the president by imposing a routine on the White House. They have also convinced Trump of the importance of international alliances, particularly NATO, which he has criticized as not equally sharing its burdens with the United States. However, all the officials were quick to add...

U.S. lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — and top national security officials in the Trump administration offered the same advice publicly and privately, often clashing with Trump’s Twitter stream: the United States remains staunchly committed to its European allies, is furious with the Kremlin about election interference and isn’t contemplating a preemptive strike on North Korea to halt its nuclear program. But Trump himself engaged in a running counterpoint to the message, taking aim on social media at his own national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, because he “forgot” on Saturday to tell the Munich Security Conference that the results...

Hearing McMaster and Kelly are putting extreme pressure on WH lawyers to block the memo release after meeting with Rosenstein and Wray today

A Russia-led initiative involving China and Pakistan that seeks a political settlement to Afghanistan’s civil war has the makings of a diplomatic alliance that could supplant the United States as the leading power in Central Asia. The grouping was unveiled after a third meeting in Moscow late last month and may be expanded to include regional powers Iran and Turkey, which formed a separate tripartite grouping on Syria with Russia in talks preceding the parleys on Afghanistan. The Afghan government reacted angrily to the Moscow meeting, to which it had not been invited, because the meeting proposed the relaxation of...

Born in 1912, Kim Il Sung went to the Soviet Far East in the 1930s to train with Stalin's military during the war against Japan, which had occupied the Korean peninsula since 1910. The North makes much of Kim, the heroic soldier. But whether he actually fought against the Japanese is a matter of debate. What's clear is that Stalin believed Kim was trustworthy, and after the Soviet invasion of the peninsula in 1945, installed him as the Communist leader in the North. A virtual unknown in his country, he seized power with considerable help from the Soviet Union and...

Beijing and Moscow have criticised the US military’s move to put countering China and Russia at the centre of its latest national defence strategy, with China again hitting back at America’s “cold war and zero-sum game mindset”. Presenting the new strategy – which will set priorities for the Pentagon for years to come – Defence Secretary Jim Mattis on Friday called China and Russia “revisionist powers” that “seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models”. It marks a shift in US defence priorities after its focus for more than a decade-and-a-half on the fight against Islamist militants. The...

Moscow will work to preserve the Iran nuclear deal despite Donald Trump's recent pledge to change it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at his annual news conference. "Unfortunately, our American colleagues still want to operate only on the basis of dictating policy, issuing ultimatums, they do not want to hear the perspectives of other centers of world politics," Lavrov said on Monday. The US is refusing to "acknowledge the reality of the emerging multi-polar world," he added. The Russian foreign minister said that statements coming from the US also "seriously aggravated" tensions in other parts of the world, including...

The Pentagon’s new defense strategy calls for aggressive steps to counter Russia and China, directing the military to retrain its attention on great-power competition after nearly two decades of focusing primarily on Islamist militants and "rogue" nations. The Obama-era Quadrennial Defense Review called for “preserving strategic stability” with Moscow and Beijing and took a rosier view of the prospects for further nuclear arms reductions in partnership with Russia. Now, the new document asserts in blunt language, both Russia and China must be the U.S. armed forces’ "principal priorities." “The erosion of our military advantage is the problem that the strategy...

Despite the “rise and fall of the unipolar concert,” China and Russia’s balancing strategies have backfired: they are not leading to multipolarity, but are actually reinforcing unipolarity. The reason is that China and Russia’s balancing strategies have focused on regional “revisionism,” which has provoked powerful responses in East Asia and Europe to contain them. Russia’s balancing strategy has to a large extent proven to be counter-productive. Instead of preventing the expansion of NATO through a “divide and conquer” strategy, or driving a diplomatic wedge between the United States and Europe, Russian revisionism has united NATO...Perhaps most illustrative of all, a...

President Trump has been careful in recent months to properly vet members of his inner- circle after being repeatedly stabbed in the back, but he had no idea that his very own National Security Adviser and top military General, H.R. McMaster has been an Obama plant this entire time. McMaster has been working secretly with Obama for months, even authorizing illegal surveillance on President Trump. Just when we think the level of treachery involving this man couldn’t get any worse, this Obama-era military general has just done something absolutely unbelievable to not only Trump, but our entire country. Anyone with...

A new report suggests that President Donald Trump’s national security advisor H.R. McMaster is rushing to save the deeply flawed nuclear Iran deal, which was seen as a hallmark of former President Obama’s legacy, ahead of Friday’s deadline for recertification. “According to multiple sources, H.R. McMaster is reprising the role he played last fall: removing a legislative irritant from Trump so that the president can quietly remain in the deal,” wrote the Daily Beast. President Trump has promised he would terminate the Iran nuclear deal. On Friday, President Trump must decide whether he will waive — or extend — sanctions...

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster An intriguing analysis that challenges the view that Cold War anticommunism was primarily responsible for American military intervention in Vietnam. In his first book, McMaster, a US Army major and Persian Gulf war veteran, and a historian who has taught at West Point, zeroes in on the actions of Lyndon Johnson and his top advisers from the time LBJ became president in November 1963 to the July 1965 decision to escalate the war drastically. The author makes a convincing case...

Guess who's likely to stick around for all four or eight years, and will be empowered in 2018? Stephen Miller, the true-believer senior policy adviser, who trumps Trump on hardline immigration views — and may outlast almost everyone. The two issues Miller cares and knows most about, immigration and trade, will be front and center. And Miller channels (and believes) Trump campaign rhetoric more than anyone internally. Although some of Miller's allies speculate that he could one day wind up as chief of staff, he's seen more as an advocate and adviser than manager or leader. He works super-hard, but...

A retired CIA officer reportedly working with Blackwater founder Erik Prince to pitch the White House on a global, private spy network which as we reported yesterday would allow the White House to circumvent and counter "deep state enemies" within U.S. intelligence agencies, is said to have made the stunning claim that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster worked with the NSA to perform surveillance on Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Steve Bannon and others, according to a report in The Intercept. Former CIA agent John R. Maguire and Blackwater founder Erik Prince The former CIA agent, John R. Maguire -...

National security adviser H.R. McMaster said Saturday that the potential of war with North Korea is "increasing every day" after the nation's latest launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). "I think it's increasing every day" McMaster told Fox News host Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum, when asked if this week's missile launch heightened the possibility of war with the U.S. McMaster pointed to the latest North Korean missile launch, which flew higher than any of its previous long-range weapons, as posing an increased threat to the U.S. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been working...

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster trashed President Trump at a dinner in July with Oracle CEO Safra Catz – mocking his intelligence, five sources told Buzzfeed in a report published on Monday. McMaster reportedly called Trump an “idiot” and a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” according to the sources, four of whom told Buzzfeed they spoke with Catz directly. “[Catz] said the conversation was so inappropriate that it was jaw-dropping,” one source said. McMaster also reportedly disparaged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared...

Multiple sources alleged in a report that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster openly mocked President Donald Trump at a dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, calling him an “idiot” and suggesting that he had the intelligence of a “kindergartner.” Additionally, a sixth source stated that this was not a one time thing, alleging that McMaster often derides Trump’s intelligence level in private, suggesting that he does not have the mental acumen to understand matters pertaining to National Security Council. “[Catz] said the conversation was so inappropriate that it was jaw dropping,” an unnamed source has stated. While we wait for...

RUSH: The left is on this big thing — have you seen the story, Mr. Snerdley? H. R. McMaster supposedly at a dinner party this past summer — it’s BuzzFeed and some other places. Four or five different sources that McMaster was openly telling people what an idiot Trump is, that he has a kindergarten type IQ, that he’s childlike and doesn’t have the intellectual depth to keep up or to understand things. And there are a lot of sources, there are a lot of people here. This is not one or two people anonymously saying this. There are a...

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster was unsparingly critical of President Donald Trump at a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, according to a report BuzzFeed News published on Monday. McMaster called Trump an “idiot,” a “dope” and said he has the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” BuzzFeed reported, citing five unnamed sources with knowledge of McMaster’s and Catz’s conversation.