President Trump has ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and plans to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him as the nation’s top diplomat, orchestrating a major change to his national security team amid delicate negotiations with North Korea, White House officials said Tuesday.
Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled diplomat cut short his trip to Africa on Monday to return to Washington.
Pompeo will replace him at the State Department, and Gina Haspel — the deputy director at the CIA — will succeed him at the CIA, becoming the first woman to run the spy agency, if confirmed.
In a statement issued to The Washington Post, Trump praised both Pompeo and Haspel.
“I am proud to nominate the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, to be our new Secretary of State,” Trump said. “Mike graduated first in his class at West Point, served with distinction in the U.S. Army, and graduated with Honors from Harvard Law School. He went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives with a proven record of working across the aisle.”
The president continued, “Gina Haspel, the Deputy Director of the CIA, will be nominated to replace Director Pompeo and she will be the CIA’s first-ever female director, a historic milestone. Mike and Gina have worked together for more than a year, and have developed a great mutual respect.”
Trump also had words of praise for Tillerson: “Finally, I want to thank Rex Tillerson for his service. A great deal has been accomplished over the last fourteen months, and I wish him and his family well.”
The president — who has long clashed will Tillerson, who he believes is “too establishment” in his thinking — felt it was important to make the change now, as he prepares for talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as well as upcoming trade negotiations, three White House officials said.
Two things: Trump definitely now feels he is unfettered and can do whatever the hell he wants to right now. He's not wrong, nobody's going to try to stop him. House Republicans surely proved that yesterday. Trump says he told Rex on Friday that his services would no longer be required, Tillerson says that he was never told, but this announcement came just hours after Tillerson remarked that the State Department believed Russia was "clearly" behind the chemical weapon attack in Britain last week that put ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the hospital.
The second is that the odds of US military action against Syria and North Korea just went skyward. Bringing in the CIA head as your new chief diplomat is not even pretending peace was ever on the table. The only question now is the timeframe.
War is definitely coming. In his own thoroughly corrupt but predictable way, Tillerson was the last holdout for diplomacy. It's all swamp monsters now, and they're packing thermite and Everclear.
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