Free Republic

Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote Wednesday evening that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is purging pro-Israel staff from the National Security Council (NSC), turning the administration against President Donald Trump’s policies. In a Facebook post, Glick noted that “all of these people” whom McMaster has fired this week — Rich Higgins, Derek Harvey, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick — “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds.” She noted that the firings were the latest evidence that NSA McMaster is “deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump”: According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the...

National security adviser H.R. McMaster has started to clean house at the National Security Council, firing two staffers originally hired by Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser shown the door for lying about his communications with Russia, and loyal to Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Last week, McMaster fired Derek Harvey, the National Security Council's top official for the Middle East, The Atlantic reports. And this week, McMaster lowered the boom on Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence. The White House said of Cohen-Watnick's firing that McMaster "has determined that, at this time, a different...

An ongoing staffing purge being conducted by White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has thrown the West Wing into chaos, according to more than half a dozen Trump administration insiders who told the Washington Free Beacon that McMaster has been targeting long-time Trump loyalists who were clashing with career government staffers and holdovers from the Obama administration. The purge is part of a larger drama unfolding inside the administration, between veteran Trump staffers committed to the president's campaign vision of "draining the swamp"‘ in Washington and entrenched bureaucracies seeking to maintain control over policy decision-making, according to these sources,...

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda. His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking. Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in...

Since replacing Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster has worked to wrest control of the National Security Council away from the nationalist wing of the administration, carrying out a series of high-profile staffing changes in the process. The latest move: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the NSC, was shown the door today by McMaster, who, according to a White House official, decided that "a different set of experiences is best-suited to carrying that work forward." The White House said that Cohen-Watnick will remain in another national security position in the administration. Think back: Cohen-Watnick first...