Trump blackballed Elliott Abrams when he was about to be appointed deputy secretary of state because he thought he was someone else, the Washington Examiner can reveal.
Abrams, who was recently appointed special envoy for Venezuela, was a skeptic of Trump during the 2016 campaign, penning a Weekly Standard article headlined “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate.” But he was a far less fiery and trenchant critic than Eliot Cohen.
But both are Jewish neoconservatives who worked in the Bush administration and supported the Iraq War. According to three sources familiar with the matter, Trump spiked the hiring of Abrams in part as a function of mistaken identity.
“[Abrams] was confused with Eliot Cohen — and that’s what was pushed,” a Trump administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner.
Abrams, 71, first came to prominence during the Reagan administration when he was a key player in controversial policies towards Nicaragua and El Salvador. He later took a plea deal after admitting withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.
Cohen, 62, is a political scientist who has spent most of his career in academia but was a counselor in the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. He was a much more outspoken advocate for the Iraq War than Abrams and continued to be a harsh critic of Trump even after his election win.
These differences apparently mattered little to Abrams’ enemies, who set about exploiting the similarities when then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wanted Abrams as his number two at the start of 2017.
“Elliott Abrams was one of the key architects of the Iraq War,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show. “We don’t need people with the failed policies back in.”
That was not true. Abrams was, if anything, a bit player on Bush’s Iraq War team. It was Cohen who lobbied for the invasion of Iraq in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and for 18 months after.
Paul’s public hostility and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s internal opposition (Abrams cited Bannon as his only internal critic at the time) combined to sink his nomination. As if designed to intensify the sting, it happened when Abrams’ elevation to the post of deputy secretary of state was all-but-announced.
“The nom was done,” one source close to the White House said in discussing the Bannon team’s role in the apparent mix-up. “They definitely gleefully rushed it in — but I never resolved whether they knew they were lying.”
