The other shoe dropped Tuesday, when President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was returning from a trip to Africa at the time. Trump announced his intent to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo as the next Secretary of State and to elevate Pompeo’s deputy, career intelligence officer Gina Haspel, to take the helm in Langley.
While “Rexit” has been on everyone’s mind for months, the end came abruptly. Some will say it’s because Tillerson was at odds with the president on a number of issues and with North Korean denuclearization talks just around the corner, it makes sense to switch secretaries now. But no one has disputed the assertion that although White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told Tillerson to return from Africa ahead of schedule and that he “may get a tweet,” Tillerson himself learned he’d been sacked when an aide showed him that he had, in fact, gotten a tweet.
The timing and manner of this firing stinks, and it’s bound to hurt the president.
Tillerson concerned by Russian actions
The Washington Free Beacon is reporting that Tillerson’s firing is the result of disagreements with the White House over the Iran nuclear deal, which the president wants modified or scrapped, but which Tillerson is said to have been trying to save. Whatever it was that pushed the president to act now, the timing is horrible for one major reason: Russia.
On the plane ride home from Africa, Tillerson spend time with the reporters traveling with him. Among the topics discussed was last week’s nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Great Britain. The secretary appeared to accept British Prime Minister Theresa May’s assertion that the attacker was either working for the Russian government, or had come to possess a chemical agent that could only have come from the Russian government.
He said that despite attempts to work cooperatively with the Russians, “what we’ve seen is a pivot on their part to be more aggressive.” It’s hard to argue that a chemical agent attack on one of your former intelligence officers is anything other than “aggressive.” Tillerson told reporters that it does indeed look as if the attack on the Skripals did indeed come from Russia, although he left himself some wiggle room over whether it was the government or a rogue independent actor.
The State Department itself also issued a blunt statement. “There is never a justification for this type of attack — the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation — and we are outraged that Russia appears to have again engaged in such behavior.”
Yet amidst this brewing crisis between Russia and our closest ally, not only did the president fire his chief diplomat, he has muzzled his other closest advisers. Make no mistake, the firing of under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs Steve Goldstein, who confirmed Tillerson’s tweet-firing for the world, was a warning to anyone else who is thinking of stepping out of line.
What in the world?
Writing at the Lawfare Blog, Matt Tait, a former information security specialist at the Brtiain’s GCHQ, their equivalent of the NSA, wrote that May’s use of the phrase “highly likely” in reference to her government’s certainty that Russia was behind the attack is essentially the equivalent of saying that they’re absolutely positive. They simply don’t attach a rating higher than “highly likely” to an intelligence assessment.
But over on Pennsylvania Avenue, people cannot bring themselves to let “the R-word” cross their lips. In her Monday briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders expressed the administration’s condemnation of the attack, but despite being given several attempts, would not — or could not — utter the word “Russia.”
I try my best to give the Trump administration credit where it is due, and I think that much of the criticism leveled against it is hyperbolic. But the utter inability of the West Wing to say anything negative about Russia, while the entire national security establishment, political and career, is unanimous on the matter, is simply baffling. While I have never bought into the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016, the fact that the President seems to go out of his way to dismiss instances of Russian malevolence is political malpractice.
The president needs to realize how his actions look. The more he waves-away Russian aggression while loudly proclaiming that he never colluded with them, the guiltier he looks…which is unnecessary, since judging by everything uncovered to date, he’s done nothing wrong. It also makes him look like he doesn’t trust the intelligence reports he receives daily.
This administration has been hobbled by too may self-inflicted wounds. It can’t afford many more as big as this one.
