Patrick Shanahan withdrew his nomination to become the next secretary of defense, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Tuesday, leaving the Pentagon without a permanent head for the foreseeable future.
The withdrawal of the former Boeing executive’s nomination came on the heels of multiple media reports Tuesday chronicling a history of domestic violence and assault in the Shanahan family. According to the Washington Post, Shanahan’s son William assaulted his mother, Kimberley, with a baseball bat in 2011. In 2010, police in Seattle arrested Kimberley after a violent confrontation between her and Shanahan, her then-husband, according to USA Today. They subsequently divorced.
The FBI has been investigating the domestic violence issues as part of its background investigation into the nominee, and that has delayed Shanahan’s nomination process. Shanahan was originally supposed to go before the Senate for his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. It is not clear why these issues did not come up during his confirmation process to be deputy secretary of defense in 2017.
In a statement on Tuesday, Shanahan said he decided to withdraw his name from consideration for the top Pentagon job because “my continuing in the confirmation process would force my three children to relive a traumatic chapter in our family’s life and reopen wounds we have worked years to heal. Ultimately, their safety and well-being is my highest priority.”
“After having been confirmed for Deputy Secretary less than two years ago, it is unfortunate that a painful and deeply personal family situation from long ago is being dredged up and painted in an incomplete and therefore misleading way in the course of this process,” Shanahan said. “I would welcome the opportunity to be Secretary of Defense, but not at the expense of being a good father.”
Shanahan has served as acting defense secretary since his predecessor, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, resigned in December 2018. Shanahan’s nearly six months in office is the longest period in U.S. history in which the Pentagon has gone without a permanent chief.
The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry, urged the president to fill the top post at the Pentagon “in a matter of weeks, not months.”
“The uncertainty surrounding this vacant office encourages our enemies and unsettles our allies,” he said in a statement.
But it does not look like the top Pentagon job will be filled anytime soon. Trump left Shanahan hanging for months before he announced his intent to name him to the permanent position; any new nominee will still have to be subjected to an extensive background check, noted Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha. Meanwhile, the Senate will break for recess in August. A new nominee will likely have to wait until the fall for confirmation, at the earliest, Callan said.
If Esper is the nominee, Callan speculated, he will likely be confirmed. But under the Vacancies Act, once nominated, Esper would have to step aside as acting until confirmed, noted Arnold Punaro, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Vacancies Act did not apply to Shanahan, as he was already the deputy secretary of defense.
The withdrawal of Shanahan’s nomination leaves the Pentagon without Senate-confirmed leadership at a time when the Defense Department is confronting a serious crisis. This week, the Pentagon announced it would deploy an additional 1,000 troops to the Middle East amid escalating tensions with Iran after Trump administration officials accused Tehran of masterminding an attack on two oil tankers.
With Shanahan out, Army Secretary Mark Esper, a former Army infantry officer and lobbyist for the defense firm Raytheon, will take over as acting secretary of defense, Trump wrote on Twitter.
The domestic violence story is the official reason for his complete departure from the Pentagon. By itself, it is breathtaking malfeasance. This is a man who should not be in government at all, but again, nobody cared about the family's staggering history until Tuesday morning.
But he already had gotten Senate confirmation as Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2017, meaning he had already been through a background check, meaning this was all known to the White House. He was the nominee and the process was going forward anyway. Shanahan was all set for his Senate confirmation hearings this week.
And then something went horribly wrong. The plug was pulled. Shanahan went to the press Monday and the story came out Tuesday.
My theory is that the unofficial reason this is happening is that Shanahan, like Mattis before him, wouldn't carry water for military action against Iran. Certainly the generals and admirals and intelligence agencies laid out what a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities or against the Iranian navy would entail, and it would be nothing short of disaster.
Understand that John Bolton's mustache is now running our military as well as our foreign intel apparatus. Shanahan was the last major holdout. 2019 so far has been a huge purge of Trump cabinet members that weren't with the new autocracy. The same day Shanahan goes, Bolton makes his move.
Staff changes are coming to the National Security Council this summer as national security adviser John Bolton elevates some of the senior officials he brought on and bids farewell to some of the people he inherited from his predecessor.
The NSC’s top official dealing with Russia, Fiona Hill, will return to the Brookings Institution, two administration officials told me. She will be replaced by Tim Morrison, who currently serves as NSC senior director for weapons of mass destruction and nonproliferation-related issues. Anthony Ruggiero, who joined the NSC last year to work on Asia, will take the helm of the WMD bureau as senior director.
Rear Adm. Doug Fears, homeland security and counter-terrorism adviser on the NSC staff, will leave the White House soon as well and return to the Coast Guard. His successor will be Coast Guard Rear Adm. Peter Brown, who currently commands the Seventh Coast Guard in Miami. This is the job once held by Tom Bossert, but the post was downgraded and folded into the NSC when Bolton came on.
The NSC’s senior director for Africa, Cyril Sartor, will also leave the White House and return to his home agency, which has been publicly identified as the CIA. Elizabeth Erin Walsh, the current NSC senior director for international organizations and alliances, will move over to lead the NSC’s Africa team. Walsh served during the presidential transition in charge of State Department personnel appointments, where she worked closely with Bolton’s former deputy Mira Ricardel. Ricardel later was pushed out by Melania Trump’s press secretary. Jason Chao will be acting senior director of the international organizations and alliances at the NSC.
Bolton has slowly but surely changed the makeup of the NSC staff and tightened its structure since assuming office. He has replaced senior staff gradually as their details expire, and he now wants his senior team in place to establish stability in the run-up to the 2020 election, officials said.
“This is part of Bolton’s effort to bring his own people on and promote them up,” said one administration official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. "He’s putting his people in places where they can execute the president’s agenda.”
This is happening as Shanahan is being dismissed from the Pentagon, as Trump is kicking off his 2020 reelection campaign, as tensions with Iran are ripe for a catastrophic scenario, and as Trump is purging his internal pollsters for the crime of revealing that Trump is well underwater right now is almost every battleground state.
When we look back on this week in history and the reporting is written and published, I am nearly certain that we will find out (much too late of course) that this was the week where Trump and Bolton's facial hair made the decision to attack Iran.
What that means for America and the world, I can only speculate. It will not be good. It will most likely be a disaster of epic proportions. Between this and Trump's threat of mass deportations starting next week, we know what his 2020 reelection platform is.
War and ethnic cleansing.
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