Over the weekend, a personnel dispute within the National Security Council between the national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, and senior White House aides Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon was eventually brought to President Trump himself. As Politico reported Tuesday evening, Trump overruled McMaster, who had sought to move the NSC’s senior director of intelligence programs to another position, reportedly after “weeks of pressure from career officials at the CIA.” Some of those CIA officials, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned, were pushing for one of their own to take the job in Trump’s White House.
The current NSC official is Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a 30-year-old former intelligence operations officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency who was brought into the Trump White House by the former DIA director, Mike Flynn. Flynn resigned as national security advisor last month. Like Flynn, Cohen-Watnick has been critical of the CIA’s perceived politicization during the Obama administration.
Two sources within the White House tell me that last week McMaster had interviewed a potential replacement for Cohen-Watnick: longtime CIA official Linda Weissgold. Weissgold apparently had a good interview with McMaster, as she was overheard saying as she left the White House she would next have to “talk to Pompeo”—as in Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA. But Weissgold was never offered the job; days later, Trump himself overruled the effort to move Cohen-Watnick out of his senior director role.
During the Obama administration Weissgold served as director of the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis. She was among those who briefed Congress following the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012, a team of intelligence and military experts who reportedly earned the nickname “the dream team” within the administration.
In her position at OTA, she was also involved directly in drafting the now infamous Benghazi talking points, which government officials revised heavily to include factually incorrect assessments that stated the attackers were prompted by protests. According to the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s report, Weissgold testified she had changed one such talking point to say that extremists in Benghazi with ties to al Qaeda had been involved in “protests” in the Libyan city, despite the fact that no such protests had occurred there on the day of the attack.
McMaster’s interview of Weissgold last week raised eyebrows beyond the White House, with members of the congressional oversight committees expressing concerns about Weissgold to top officials in the White House and the intelligence community.
Weissgold did not respond to a request for comment regarding her interview at the White House.
Introducing the “America First” Budget
On Thursday morning President Trump will release his budget proposal—the first outline of the president’s policy priorities in fiscal form. In a preview with reporters Wednesday morning, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, called it an “America First budget.”
“We wrote it using the president’s own words,” Mulvaney said. “We went through his speeches. We went through articles that had been written about his policies. We talked to him and we wanted to know what his policies were. And we turned those policies into numbers.”
The budget, said Mulvaney, doesn’t change the overall spending from the previous year’s numbers, so there would be no change to the federal deficit.
“A Hard-Power Budget”
As Trump promised on the campaign trail, the budget request will show a “fairly dramatic” decrease in foreign aid, which almost entirely comes out of the State Department’s budget. Mulvaney suggested it will likely result in a 28 percent decrease in State’s previous budget request.
“There’s no question this is a hard-power budget,” Mulvaney said. “It is not a soft-power budget. This is a hard-power budget. And that was done intentionally. The president very clearly wants to send a message to our allies and our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration. So you’ve seen money move from soft-power programs, such as foreign aid, into hard-power programs.”
What Are the Defense Numbers?
Defense hawks have worried about the elevation of Mulvaney, a budget hawk, to OMB. The initial number for defense floated from Mulvaney and the administration, $603 billion, represented just a 3 percent increase from President Barack Obama’s final defense budget request. Republicans defense hawks in Congress were looking for at least $640 billion.
So what will President Trump propose? “We plus up the defense top-line number by $54 billion,” Mulvaney said. “We worked very closely with the Defense Department to make sure a couple of things: this funds their needs but does so in a responsible fashion in terms of what they can actually spend this year. The Defense Department has told us this is the amount of money they need and can spend effectively this year. We’re not throwing money after a problem and claiming that we have fixed it.”
It’s not clear, yet, what that $54 billion increase reflects—an increase from Obama’s $583 billion request? If so, that would bring the defense budget request to something like $637 billion, nearly but not quite where defense hawks like Mac Thornberry and John McCain would like it. The OMB did not respond to a request for clarification.
Song of the Day
“The Seeker,” the Who.
