Discussions to remove Rex Tillerson from the State Department and replace him with CIA director Mike Pompeo have been going on for months, even if State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert says White House chief of staff John Kelly is telling State the “rumors are not true.”
Those “rumors” were actually a well-sourced New York Times story that said Tillerson could be out “within the next several weeks.” To replace Pompeo, the Times said, President Trump would tap one of his strongest Senate allies, Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, to head up the CIA.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was vague when asked about those reports Thursday. “When the president loses confidence in someone, they will no longer serve in the capacity that they’re in,” she said, not answering whether or not that time had come for Tillerson.
What About the CIA?—Pompeo has viewed his post at the CIA as a dream job. Despite coming into the agency as a political type (a three-term Republican congressman from Kansas), he has established a good rapport with the employees in Langley amid tense relations between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump.
Morale among some officials at the CIA has been down in the last several years, in part due to the broad condemnation among politicians of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques (dubbed by opponents as “torture”) and the government’s justification of using them on terrorism suspects. The previous CIA director’s ambiguous defense of EIT did little to encourage demoralized CIA officials.
“Our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives,” said John Brennan, the director, in 2014. “But let me be clear: We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.”
Early on, Pompeo gained the trust of many within the CIA by tapping a career agent, Gina Haspel, as his deputy director. Haspel oversaw the use of EIT on two terrorism suspects; her appointment was widely viewed as a signal Pompeo would defend the CIA’s work. Pompeo’s congenial approach toward managing the CIA has also helped smooth tensions between the agency and President Trump, who has expressed public skepticism of the intelligence community. After years of Brennan prioritizing the analytical side of the Agency, Pompeo has emphasized the reinvigoration of the operations side.
If Cotton succeeds Pompeo, one question is whether the Arkansas senator will be able to maintain the normalization of relations between Trump and the CIA.
Middle East Peace Watch—At Axios, Jonathan Swan reports that Jared Kushner will “appear at the Saban Forum, an annual meeting of U.S. and Israeli leaders organized by the Brookings Institution, on Sunday to talk about the Trump administration’s efforts to broker a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
The White House declined to comment Thursday when I asked whether Kushner would be revealing details of the administration’s peace plan. But as I recently reported in the magazine, two policy experts who have consulted with the White House say the team, led by Kushner and longtime Trump Organization legal adviser Jason Greenblatt, was preparing to circulate a draft plan as early as mid-December. A White House official denied there was any timetable to release a plan. Read more here.
Must Read Of the Day—My colleague John McCormack traveled to Alabama for the cover story of the brand new issue of the magazine. John reports on the state of things in the U.S. Senate race there. Here’s a taste:
Read McCormack’s full story here.
Shutdown Watch—From the Washington Post: “President Trump has concluded that a government shutdown might be good for him politically and is focusing on his hard-line immigration stance as a way to win back supporters unhappy with his outreach to Democrats this fall, according to people who have spoken with him recently.”
2018 Watch—A new poll of next year’s Senate race in Utah shows incumbent Republican Orrin Hatch defeating his likely Democratic challenger, Jenny Wilson, by 15 points. But Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, would beat her by a whopping 51 points.
Hatch has been in the Senate for more than 40 years and will be 84 years old next Election Day. He has denied reports he plans to retire.
Song of the Day—“Fighting In a Sack” by the Shins
