As the first full week of the Trump administration comes to a close, the White House appears to be getting into something of a groove. On Monday, there was a bit of chaos within the West Wing, with staffers looking a little lost or unsure of where to go and what to do. One veteran White House reporter told me he was milling about outside the office of the press secretary when he ran into White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. Priebus was startled to see a journalist: “I didn’t know you guys could be back here!”
Things have settled down by week’s end, though, with a more upbeat mood in the West Wing and a sense that, after a tumultuous beginning, the White House is humming right along. The press staff are all smiles with the journalists who congregate around their desks before and after briefings. There remains a sense of awe about working in the White House, not unlike that expressed by President Trump himself.
And the source of the good mood around the White House may come from the top as well. Oval Office walk-in privileges remain pretty traditional—family members, chief of staff, the vice president, and the most senior of senior aides. But President Trump is seen as accessible, saying hello to staff as he walks through the halls of the West Wing. It’s been a tough and long first week, but this is a staff that’s happy and excited to be in the White House.
Petraeus’s “Favorite Intelligence Officer” Joins NSC Staff
The personnel of the National Security Council under retired Lt. General Michael Flynn continues to take shape. A White House source confirms that Derek Harvey, a former senior intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been tapped as the senior director at the NSC for Middle East issues.
A native of Elmhurt, Illinois, Harvey is a consummate national security and intelligence professional with an impressive resume. As an intelligence officer in the United States Army, he had stints as an analyst at military commands, American embassies, and the DIA. Here’s how Bob Woodward described Harvey in his 2008 book The War Within:
It was this experience that allowed Harvey to see the insurgency in Iraq early on, and he served as the Iraq senior analyst at the Pentagon from 2004 to 2006. His warnings about insurgency became the basis for the U.S. and coalition forces’ embrace of the Anbar Awakening and the surge that ultimately drove out al Qaeda from Iraq. David Petraeus called Harvey his “favorite intelligence officer”, and he has been praised by Republicans and Democrats alike for his independent mind. After retiring from the Army at the rank of colonel in 2006, he joined the DIA as a civilian analyst.
Harvey worked at the DIA under Flynn and led the team that began poring over the documents recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound after the terrorist leader was killed by the CIA. He was also among those who expressed concern that the U.S. government has not “done anything close to a full exploitation” of those documents. Harvey was previously the director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at U.S. Central Command under General Petraeus.
Spicer’s Double Duty
White House press secretary Sean Spicer may have been a little harsh toward the press in his first week on the job, but perhaps we should give him a break. After all, Spicer is doing double duty as White House communications director ever since Jason Miller, who had run comms in the campaign and was tapped to do so in the administration, decided instead not to take the job.
There are no immediate plans to hire a separate communications director, I’m told, and the offices work closely together. There is a joint communications/press meeting at the White House most mornings, with senior officials from both in attendance. Usually, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and strategic communications director Hope Hicks are there as well to represent, as one staffer puts it, Trump’s point of view.
Kellyanne, Fashion Critic
Kellyanne Conway is the subject of a couple mainstream media profiles out this week, including in the Washington Post and the Hollywood Reporter. In her interview with the Reporter, Conway hits back at those criticizing her bright-colored uniform-like outfit at last week’s inauguration, telling writer Michael Wolff she’s “sorry to offend the black-stretch-pants women of America with a little color.”
Song of the Day
“Communication Breakdown,” by Led Zeppelin
