A barrel full of rotten apples

In the weeks after President Trump chose John Bolton to be his third national security adviser in March, Mr. Bolton, a veteran of the George W. Bush State Department whose bellicose manner kept him from a high-level job at the beginning of the Trump administration, engaged in his own speeded-up transition process, aided by a handful of longtime associates.

  NYT

Wait, wait, wait. Whatever happened to Trump didn't like the look of Bolton's mustache, so he didn't "fit the part"?

“Very much like the president, Bolton has picked a small coterie of people from past lives who look more like cronies and buddies than they do the array of senior experts on different issues that past national security advisers have brought in,” said David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who wrote a definitive history of the National Security Council.

Rather than fulfilling Mr. Trump’s promise that he would fill his administration with “the best people,” Mr. Rothkopf said, the president has got “this highly controversial national security adviser who has never crossed a bridge he hasn’t burned behind him, who is surrounding himself with what appears to be a second-tier group of advisers, who have spent a disproportionate amount of time on the swamp side of things — as consultants or working on his extreme political projects.”

OK, but is a Clinton official the best person to ask?

Mr. Bolton also is close to the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, an influential hawk and supporter of Israel from whom Mr. Bolton has sought assistance for his political ventures. Mr. Adelson, a casino billionaire, urged the Trump administration to hire Mr. Bolton for a senior post, according to someone familiar with the relationship, and also urged Mr. Trump to withdraw from the Iran deal. The day after Mr. Trump announced he was doing just that, Mr. Adelson attended a private meeting at the White House with Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Mr. Bolton.

[...]

People familiar with Mr. Bolton’s cadre of advisers say that arguably the most influential among them is a low-profile 64-year-old consultant named Matthew C. Freedman.

[...]

After his early foray in government, Mr. Freedman went on to become a foreign lobbyist working with Paul Manafort in the 1980s and 1990s for sometimes unsavory but well-paying foreign leaders, including Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine strongman.

A Manafort compatriot. In yer eye, America.

More recently, Mr. Freedman served on the Trump transition team, but he was fired in late 2016 for using an email address associated with his consulting firm to conduct government business, raising concerns that he was using the position to boost his business.

Isn't that what the whole Trump administration is about?  And so now it's okay for him to be involved?

Let me ask this question: Can any of these SOBs get a security clearance? Bolton himself maybe can't.

Max Stier, head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that studies the federal work force, said that changes in personnel and approach accompanying each new leadership circle at the N.S.C. “create real risk for our country because of the lack of continuity.”

Under previous presidents, he said “you see this happening at the beginning of an administration. You just don’t see this happening three times in the first 16 months.”

The world is different now. There's a new sheriff in town.