And that reminds me of the interview Renato Mariotti did with a former Office of Legal Counsel employee who quit because the process was thrown out the window at the Trump OLC.The day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, White House national security adviser Susan Rice gathered her staff for a pep talk.
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Most who joined Rice that day worked for the National Security Council, the White House’s elite group of foreign policy experts. Some were political appointees of President Barack Obama, and there was little question they’d be out of jobs by Inauguration Day. But most were career government staffers, typically detailed to the NSC from other agencies and sworn to serve under any presidential administration in a nonpartisan way.
[...]
Rice said the NSC staffers should give Trump a chance, that he and his team deserved the benefit of the doubt. Their duty was to the country, she reminded them, and they should do whatever it took to help America — and Trump — succeed. What Rice didn’t — couldn’t — tell these government employees was that the dawn of the Trump administration would be a time of extraordinary personal and professional torment for them; that they’d be asked to make ethically, and legally, dubious decisions while ignoring facts and evidence on basic issues to fit the president’s whims; that they would be vilified as “Obama holdovers” and treated like an enemy within, to the point where some of their lives were threatened; that they’d grow so paranoid they would seek “safe spaces” to speak to each other, use encrypted apps to talk to their mothers, and go on documentation sprees to protect themselves and inform history; that at least one career staffer would cry on the way home from work every night; and that another would call Trump a “dumpster fire” in a farewell message.
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“It was so shocking to see this team come in a blur of chaos, disregarding legality and ethics and showing a deep hostility to the career professionals,” said Jeffrey Prescott, a former senior NSC aide to Obama who kept in touch with staffers who stayed. “Whenever I run into somebody who was there during that period, they still seem shaken and appalled by the experience. And it turned out to be a blueprint for the way the Trump administration planned to govern.”
Traditional NSC staffers believe deeply in what they call the “policy process,” a time-tested way of conducting the foreign and national security policy of the world’s most powerful country. It involves a proper set of meetings, a chance for every agency to weigh in, and a rigorous legal review before the president makes a major decision. The early Trump days had virtually none of that, and the subject matter experts who make up much of the NSC career staff were largely ignored, even shunned. It was a bewildering, even terrifying turn for a group of deeply serious men and women whose work can affect billions of lives.
Politico
Not to mention, without proper security clearances.Some were relieved after Trump’s first national security adviser, Mike Flynn, was fired; he’s still due for sentencing after getting caught up in the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. And they were heartened that Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, reinstituted traditional processes during his year at the helm, even if Trump disliked them. But because Trump’s current national security adviser, John Bolton, has largely scuttled those procedures, the fears have resurfaced over the past year.
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In those early weeks, [career staffers] said, their every move was viewed with suspicion from a new leadership prone to believing a “deep state” was out to undermine Trump.
In a particularly telling example, one former NSC staffer recalled informing a Trump political appointee that the administration should re-think a proposed executive order because it could undercut efforts to protect human rights. “I said, 'This could make the president look really bad,’” the former staffer told POLITICO. The political appointee replied: “The president doesn’t care about the things you care about, and the sooner that you know about it, the better.”
Long before the election, NSC staffers invested huge amounts of time into ensuring a smooth transition between administrations. They prepared binders full of information, from the implications of a change of government in a particular country to when reports on, say, human trafficking must be submitted to Congress. The goal was to help the incoming political appointees, and the president, be ready to go on Day 1.
So they got the material ready and waited. And waited.
With few exceptions, it was several weeks before Trump transition officials showed up to talk. Some didn’t arrive until late December or early January, often holding just one, maybe two meetings with the serving staffers. In several cases, the Trump transition officials who met with NSC staffers never joined the NSC. That meant many NSC staffers had no idea who their immediate bosses would be until a few days before Trump took office.
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[A]s Trump appointees trickled in, something else became clear: The staffers’ transition work had been for nothing.
“We’d done extensive preparation for them. There was absolutely no evidence that any of them had read any of it,” one former staffer said. It was a refrain POLITICO heard repeatedly.
Another former NSC official said that, unlike many of his colleagues, he spent a decent amount of time with Trump transition representatives. Something stood out. “There was more focus on people, management and organizational structure than substantive policy issues,” the former official said. “They were not interested in the material we had prepared. It was more like, ‘Why is this staff organized this way? Who are the personalities? Who are the senior staff? Who are the directors?’” It was unusual and concerning, the former official said.
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In the days immediately following the inauguration, a former Marine intelligence officer named Robin Townley showed up in the offices of the Africa directorate, having been let on the White House grounds by someone in the administration. Townley was expecting to take over the Africa division as a senior director. NSC staffers welcomed him, and soon he was reading their top-secret material. But within days, Townley vanished. A person from the NSC’s resource management section soon arrived to inform career staffers that Townley had lacked a proper security clearance. If they saw Townley again and shared anything remotely sensitive with him, this person warned, they could lose their own security clearances.
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The hundreds of NSC staffers who now worked for [National Seucirty Advisor Mike] Flynn kept waiting for him to issue a broad greeting of some kind, even just an email to introduce himself. They heard nothing. It was almost two weeks before Flynn called an all-staff meeting, and only after clamor grew for some institutional facetime. The tone of the gathering was oddly political, several attendees said, with Flynn praising Trump and boasting about the president’s smarts and savvy. Flynn also said the U.S. needed to take a different approach to Russia, viewing it more as a partner than an adversary.
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At its core, the NSC-led policy process involves a series of meetings, often starting at the NSC director level, going up to a meeting of deputies from relevant agencies and often ending with a “Principals Committee” meeting. Principals are Cabinet heads and other top officials. The meetings offer players across the government a chance to weigh in and stay in synch. Ultimately, the president makes decisions based on recommendations that emerge from the sessions.
That’s how the NSC has largely worked in the modern era, anyway.
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One morning during the first full week of the Trump presidency, an NSC staffer says he received a call from a friend who dealt with military issues, asking him if he knew that the president had given the Pentagon the go-ahead to pursue more raids against terrorists in Yemen. The staffer was confused — the topic was under discussion at the NSC, having been passed on from the Obama administration. But when had the idea of raids in Yemen reached the president? Soon, he found out: Flynn, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and a handful of other officials had raised the subject directly with Trump over a dinner that week and the president had green-lit their plans.
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But later that week, NSC staffers and U.S. officials from other agencies were surprised when they were summoned to a deputies committee meeting on the same topic. “I wondered to myself, ‘Why exactly are we meeting? What are we doing here?’” one attendee recalled. “The decision was kind of made and at the same time these meetings were being had.”
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Then there were the wild-card roles played by people such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, and chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, who early on was granted the privilege, unusual for a political adviser, of participating in Principals Committee meetings. Kushner, for his part, seemed to run his own show; he would, for instance, negotiate directly with Mexican officials without telling even senior NSC staff.
I guess that plan failed, but WTF? Two "associates of Donald Trump Jr" are waltzing in with foreign policy plans? Un-fucking-believable. No less unbelievable was their plan:One Trump appointee, conservative commentator Sebastian Gorka, would show up at random meetings, even though it was never clear whether he had the proper security clearance, and he would often raise unrelated points. One former White House official recalled Gorka saying such things as, “‘If you look at what Napoleon did ...’ and we’d all be like, ‘I don’t even know how to respond to that.’” (Asked for comment, Gorka told a POLITICO reporter, “Take a long run off a short pier, you utter hack.”)
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During the brief Flynn era, NSC staffers were shocked when two men who said they were associates of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, showed up at NSC offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, wearing badges that indicated someone in the West Wing had let them on the White House grounds. They came with a 10-point plan for how the United States could turn Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolas Maduro, into a U.S. stooge.
I'm sure it was. But as I give it a second thought, it might have worked better than what the Trump admin has come up with: foment a coup.The basics, according to people familiar with the incident, were as follows: The U.S. would release two nephews of Venezuela’s first lady who were in prison on drug charges; in exchange, Venezuela would free a young American man it had imprisoned on dubious weapons charges; then, Trump would meet with Maduro and the two would hash out some sort of arrangement where the U.S. would lift sanctions on the country’s kleptocratic government in exchange for unfettered access by American companies to the oil-rich Venezuelan market.
The entire pitch appeared to be “a pretext for this great business opportunity for them,” one person familiar with the incident said.
Hysterical.To prove their bona fides, the men — Gentry Beach and Wadie Habboush — called Venezuela’s foreign minister in front of the NSC staffers, leaving a voicemail, and showed a picture of themselves with Maduro, another person familiar with the episode said.
So...maybe we should have gone with that!“They pulled out a picture of them hugging Maduro. They were like, ‘Yeah, we were in Venezuela two weeks ago.’ And they were all doing the Trump thumbs-up sign,” the person said.
Five pages were too many for Trump. And even fewer than five would be too many without graphics.A former staffer recalls being in an informal meeting in Flynn’s office when the president burst into the room. Trump apologized for interrupting but said he wanted to show them something. An aide came in with a framed photo of the 16th president. “Abraham Lincoln. President Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said, according to the ex-staffer. “They’ve got all kinds of cool stuff here.”
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According to two former NSC staffers, immediately after Trump took office, the NSC staff sent Flynn and his top deputies a detailed memo around 10 pages long that laid out the pros and cons of arming the Kurdsv[in Syria], along with every document Trump needed to sign off on a decision. A few weeks passed, and a Flynn deputy told the staffers that what they’d sent up was too long and complicated — could they shorten it? So the staffers cut the memo in half. Days later, a new instruction: Could they cut it down further and turn much of it into graphics? The president preferred pictures. So the NSC staffers, with aid from intelligence officials, devised a graphical version. The issue dragged on anyway; it wasn’t until May that Trump decided to arm the Kurdish fighters.
Obviously, then, Trump hadn't read it before signing it.The former NSC staffers speak of that episode with both disbelief and anger. After all, in early February 2017, after they’d sent up the initial memo, a senior Trump administration official was quoted by The Washington Post as saying the decision on arming the Kurds was delayed because the plan presented had gaps and was the result of “poor staff work.”
“All of us were like, ‘We have no idea where the fuck this is coming from,’” one former NSC staffer said. “If I had to guess, I now wonder if Flynn and his people wanted to buy time. It may have been lengthy staff work, but it wasn’t shoddy staff work.”
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On Monday evening, Jan. 23, 2017, the first full business day of the Trump administration, a batch of draft executive orders landed in the inboxes of several NSC career staffers. They included the infamous travel ban, which, among other things, barred from U.S. soil the citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries and temporarily stopped the United States from accepting refugees. That order was a lengthy document, around 3,000 words, with many national security implications.
Yet.Typically, an executive order of such immense impact would have undergone weeks, if not months, of NSC-coordinated interagency review. Instead, on that Monday night, former NSC staffers say they were asked to review the travel ban and about half a dozen other draft executive orders in less than a day.
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The executive order episode badly rattled career staffers on several levels. For one thing, they — the nonpartisan experts — had not been consulted before the orders were drafted, and when they finally were, their advice was ignored. It also was the first real indication that some of Trump’s most fiery campaign rhetoric, which many hoped he’d abandon when in office, would translate into policy.
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“I’ll never forget the morning I fell apart,” one former staffer said. “I was reading a New York Times article about a refugee named Mustafa. ... I just lost it. I was bawling. A few days later, I confessed I’d given a bunch of money to some refugee agency. And everyone around me said, ‘I did, too!’ We just wondered how many thousands of dollars had come from the NSC staff.” The former staffer continued, head shaking in wonder: “These [executive orders] were, like, written in crayon, like The Heritage Foundation intern just came up with them. They just weren’t very good. … It wasn’t just bad policy. It was bad policy poorly executed. I could have done it better.”
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Other career staffers say they became objects of suspicion because of language they used, such as saying “undocumented immigrants” instead of “illegals.” One former U.S. official who frequently dealt with the NSC says he stopped taking his print edition of The New York Times to the White House because Trump appointees gave him dirty looks.
The career staffers in the NSC’s Middle East directorate were treated exceptionally badly, numerous current and former government officials said. Their senior director at the time, Derek Harvey, was a Trump appointee who openly mused that the career staffers were closet Democrats and might not be loyal to the new president. He would mention that he’d looked at their Facebook pages to gauge their political leanings; he’d even introduce those staffers to officials from other countries as “Obama holdovers,” thus undermining them with their foreign counterparts.
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The NSC office tasked with writing the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy [...] sent out a survey to the other directorates. One question asked the directorates to list the biggest obstacles they faced in achieving their goals. Career staffers in the Middle East section were shocked to see that one item listed as an obstacle facing their directorate was, to paraphrase, “Obama holdovers.”
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Trump political appointees were believed to frequently talk to journalists who worked for conservative media outlets. For months, those outlets published names of career Civil and Foreign Service officers in the NSC and other government agencies whose loyalties they deemed suspect. [...] The people targeted included a State Department civil servant of Iranian descent who’d joined government under the George W. Bush administration; a highly respected Foreign Service officer who dealt with Israeli issues; and an NSC staffer who dealt with European and Russian issues. The latter, Eric Ciaramella, reportedly left the NSC after receiving death threats. Another staffer targeted by conservative outlets was Fernando Cutz, a Latin America expert and top aide to McMaster; at one point he had to temporarily get police protection. (Cutz was maligned by conservative websites in part because he earned a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service, thus supposedly linking him to another Democratic president.)
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The mood was especially tough for women and minorities. For the most part, the Trump political appointees were white men, a disproportionate number with military backgrounds.
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When McMaster took over from Flynn, a female staffer sent him an email, which she circulated to others, that urged him to stamp out the sexism. “I hope you would agree,” she wrote to McMaster, “this culture of misogyny threatens the credibility of an organization meant to serve all Americans and further minimizes the already weakened influence of women on the staff.”
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Because the policy process was largely broken, officials sought ways to quietly share information with colleagues in other agencies and among themselves just so that the relevant officials would know what was happening. Many downloaded encrypted apps such as Signal and WhatsApp to communicate in what they believed to be an untraceable way — “My mother got on Signal,” one ex-staffer recalled. Some gathered to talk in places deemed “safe spaces,” such as directorates with few or no political appointees. People from across the NSC would head to one of those directorates to use the secured phone lines to call counterparts either to get or share what little information they could.
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Numerous career staffers decided to document everything they could, what became known as “putting it in the record.” That often meant putting certain ideas and opinions in emails or copying other agencies on communications. Many staffers knew that by including the agencies, the information would more likely be subject to the Freedom of Information Act and could one day see the light of day or even land in history books. [...] Many printed reams of material they could put in their “box” — the package of NSC staffers’ work material that is archived and eventually made available to the public. One person said that although he spent three times longer at the NSC under Obama than under Trump, he had only one “box” for Obama and three for Trump.
The former staffers insist they were right to be paranoid. There were rumors that political appointees had launched an “insider threat” program complete with phone surveillance to ferret out leakers and other allegedly disloyal members of a “deep state.” There also were reports of blacklists of career staffers whom political appointees wanted to fire. Career staffers grew antsy about whether their cellphones were being used to spy on them; some left the devices at home.
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In the days ahead of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first visit to the White House during the Trump presidency, in March 2017, NSC career staffers were told the president wanted to tell Merkel that other NATO countries owed the U.S. money. Could they prepare a report on the topic? Career NSC staffers got to work and returned with the basics: that NATO countries don’t owe the United States money because that’s not how the military alliance works; that every NATO country is supposed to spend at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and that while many had fallen short of that commitment, others met it or were on track to do so. In short, no one “owed” the United States anything.
NSC career staffers presented this information to a senior administration official in the West Wing. According to one of them, the official replied: “The president is going to say it anyway, so we need to help him. I mean, it’s not a legal document.”
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A Bolton spokesman dismissed the concerns, saying in a statement: “As Ambassador Bolton has mentioned repeatedly, streamlining the structure of the National Security Council to efficiently keep America safe will continue to be a priority for this administration.” When asked to clarify if he meant “process” instead of “structure,” the spokesman replied via email, “Structure helps define process.”
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One recent example of [the] high stakes [involved], noted Tom Donilon, Rice's predecessor as national security adviser under Obama: Trump’s meeting this week with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which ended in failure. “A summit with these stakes (the president flying halfway around the world to address one of the most difficult security questions) would be subject to scenario planning in the interagency process,” wrote Donilon in an email, observing that more generally, “the summit was clearly not adequately prepared.”
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“If you don’t have process, then when a crisis happens you’re not going to be able to pull the right people together for a coherent response,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who now leads the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “And in this administration, all the crises that we’ve had so far have been self-inflicted. We haven’t had one from the outside.”
Don't even mention it Charlie. We're not out of harm's way yet.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
