Trump downplays resignation of anti-ISIS envoy: He’s ‘grandstanding’

“Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President Obama in 2015. Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!” Trump tweeted.

McGurk is a veteran diplomat with more than a decade of experience and was reportedly originally planning to leave his job mid-February.

However, his resignation is now effective Dec. 31, after he told his colleagues that he could no longer serve Trump’s administration following the president’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria.

“The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us,” McGurk wrote in an email. “It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered.”

“I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout but — as many of you heard in my meetings and phone calls — I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity,” he said.

Mattis submitted his resignation Wednesday the day after Trump abruptly announced all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria would be pulled out, claiming the Islamic State had been defeated. The decision came against his own advisers’ advice, as well as advice from experts on the region.

Trump also addressed Mattis’ resignation on Twitter Saturday night, reminding the world that he hired him even after former President Barack Obama fired him as the head of Central Command in 2013.

Earlier this month, McGurk said that it would be “reckless” for the United States to withdraw from Syria abruptly, not knowing that Trump was just days away from an unexpected and major policy shift.

“The military objective is the enduring defeat of ISIS,” McGurk told reporters at the State Department on Dec. 11. “Areas that we have cleared of ISIS, they have not returned or actually seized physical space. There’s clandestine cells. Nobody is saying that they are going to disappear. Nobody is that naive. So we want to stay on the ground and make sure that stability can be maintained in these areas.”

McGurk, whose diplomatic career first began in 2004, joined the White House when he was appointed by Obama in October 2015. He was then retained by the Trump administration.

McGurk has also served under former President George W. Bush as his special assistant, as well as as senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also Obama’s special adviser to the U.S. National Security Council and senior adviser to the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

McGurk, 45, also previously served as a law clerk to the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2001.

“Brett is one of our longest serving and most effective officials dealing with the region,” said Gen. John Allen, McGurk’s predecessor, according to the New York Times.

“His departure, following that of Jim Mattis and others, will leave us less safe at a moment when this president seems unwilling to take, or unable to understand, the ‘best advice’ of his leaders,” Allen said. “Day by day, decision by decision, this administration is leaving America and Americans less safe and more vulnerable.”

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently said the Pentagon estimates that 35,000 to 40,000 local security forces are needed to ensure stability in northeastern Syria — but as of December, reportedly only 20 percent of those forces have been trained.

At its height, the Islamic State reportedly controlled an area the size of Britain with a population estimated at 12 million people. Under his leadership, the coalition succeeded in taking roughly half of the territory in the group’s self-declared caliphate by early 2017, when Trump took office.

By the end of 2018, ISIS had lost all but 1 percent of the land it once held in Iraq and Syria — however, the group is estimated to still have between 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in the region.

Trump defended his decision to pull out of Syria yet again late Sunday on Twitter.

“If anybody but your favorite President, Donald J. Trump, announced that, after decimating ISIS in Syria, we were going to bring our troops back home (happy & healthy), that person would be the most popular hero in America. With me, hit hard instead by the Fake News Media. Crazy!” he said.