| | | |  President Trump is moving closer toward shaking up his administration in a big way, according to sources familiar with his thinking. The Washington Post reported Thursday night that Trump had decided to fire H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser. Shortly after the story broke, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to the Post’s reporting on Twitter: “Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster - contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC.” It was, notably, not a denial of the Post story or that President Trump had decided to remove McMaster from his position, though others have reported the decision is not so clear. The president is also considering removing a number of his Cabinet officials, several of whom he’s grown concerned about over news reports that they have misused taxpayer dollars for travel or personal luxuries. Trump’s list of most imminent departures includes Ryan Zinke at Interior, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and David Shulkin at Veterans Affairs. All three have faced scrutiny in recent weeks for outlandish spending, including Carson’s purchase of a $31,000 dining room set at the HUD building, Zinke’s $139,000 in door repairs, and Shulkin’s misleading ethics investigators over expensed travel for he and his wife. The coverage has apparently embarrassed Trump for undercutting his campaign pledge to “drain the swamp.” Also earning the president’s ire is EPA director Scott Pruitt for the former Oklahoma attorney general’s apparent preference for first-class airline travel, though it’s not evident Pruitt is in the same precarious positions as the others. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, too, is always potentially on the chopping block. Read more... |
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| | One More Thing—Speculation has been that John Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador who has been a hawkish voice on Fox News and a semi-regular guest at the White House, is the frontrunner to succeed McMaster, but here’s another name to watch out for: Tom Bossert, the 42-year-old homeland security adviser at the White House. | |
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| | In the brand new issue of the magazine, I have a profile of Peter Navarro, the chairman of the White House’s National Trade Council who has becoming something of a Trump whisperer on behalf of tariffs. Here’s an excerpt: This is Peter Navarro’s moment. The gadfly economist, whose idée fixe is America’s capitulation to China on trade, joined the Trump administration on Day One, heading up the National Trade Council, a new office created by the new president. But for the first 13 months, Trump did little to advance his promised protectionist agenda, and Navarro had to keep quiet as free traders like Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, the chairman of the National Economic Council (NEC), held the reins.
But Trump’s announcement of new steel and aluminum tariffs on March 1 and Cohn’s subsequent resignation suggest that protectionism’s time has come. Navarro, 68, began popping up on cable news, and he made his Sunday political show debut on March 5—appearing on three of them. Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Navarro about the significant opposition from the president’s own party to the new tariffs. “Donald Trump ran against 16 Republicans. None of those Republicans supported Donald Trump’s positions on trade. He beat every one of them,” Navarro said, grinning. “And then Donald Trump went on to the Democratic opponent who didn’t support his positions on trade and he beat them, too.” | |
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| | The Trump administration on Thursday announced long-awaited sanctions on 24 Russian entities and individuals in retaliation for Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, finally implementing the mandate Congress passed last August to punish Moscow for their destabilizing activities. “This is just one of a series of ongoing actions that we’re taking to counter Russian aggression,” a senior administration official told reporters Thursday. “As Secretary Mnuchin has made clear a number of times, we’re using all available information to inform future actions, there will be more to come, and we’re going to continue to employ our resources to combat malicious Russian activity and respond to nefarious attacks.” The sanctions announcement comes as the United States and its allies have begun to take a strong stance against Russian destabilization. Also on Thursday, the United States joined with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom to condemn the apparent Russian poisoning of a former British spy in England earlier this month as “a clear violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and a breach of international law.” Read more... | |
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| | The Justice Department is currently deciding whether to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe days before he is set to retire. McCabe, whom President Trump frequently attacked as a partisan flack during his FBI tenure, has been on leave since January but had planned to officially retire in March in order to qualify for his full FBI pension. But that plan hit a serious snag Wednesday when the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility reportedly recommended McCabe be fired over allegations that he misled investigators about whether he talked to a reporter about the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. CNN reported Thursday that McCabe was pleading his case at the Department of Justice, where the ultimate decision rests with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that the administration would respect Sessions’ decision but criticized McCabe’s “well-documented” bad behavior at the FBI. “We do think it is well documented that he has had some very troubling behavior and by most accounts a bad actor, and should have some cause for concern,” Sanders said. | |
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