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A retired brigadier general who called former President Barack Obama a terrorist. A former staff member of Republican Representative Devin Nunes, who wrote a memo accusing federal investigators of anti-Trump biases. And a close ally of former national security adviser Michael Flynn whom a former intelligence official described to me as “dubious” and “inherently untrustworthy.”
These are the three men replacing top civilian Pentagon officials this week, a rapid set of personnel changes that have critics fearful of the president’s plans for the military and applauding White House allies that he has finally put the “deep state” is routed.
After President Donald Trump sacked Mark Esper as Defense Secretary on November 9, it seemed likely that further changes in senior civilian leadership in the Pentagon would follow. After all, Trump had long since empowered John McEntee, his 30-year-old former personal assistant he hired to head the Presidential Office of Personnel in February, to identify any federal officials suspected of working against the agenda. the White House and replace them with loyal members of the administration. .
The Department of Defense has always been a prime target due to its numerous clashes with the President and other senior White House officials like National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, administrative sources have told me. , namely on troop withdrawals and the use of active military activity to suppress demonstrations against racism and police brutality.
“I have a feeling this layoff has been going on for months, but the election gave Trump an opportunity to act,” said Jim Golby, a retired army officer who now teaches at the ‘University of Texas at Austin.
And that’s what Trump did.
Who is and who is missing from Trump’s Pentagon
The first to fall was James Anderson, the acting director of policy planning, who tendered his resignation on Tuesday (it’s unclear if he was asked to do so). Anderson has often meddled in the White House over appointing Trump’s loyalists to the Pentagon, which is why many suspect he was forced to step down.
And this position was important. The director of policy planning is widely regarded as the third highest civilian position in the Department of Defense. Whoever holds the post must advise the secretary on high-level policy issues ranging from deterring China and Russia to determining what types of ships, planes and weapons the military needs.
That’s why it’s troubling to learn that Anthony Tata will take on the role. Trump had previously nominated him for the post confirmed by the Senate, but his nomination fell through this summer after CNN revealed Tata called Obama a “terrorist leader” and Islam “the most oppressive violent religion I know of ” on Twitter. Republicans and Democrats then declined to confirm the general to a retired military star, even after Tata apologized for his previous comments.
The White House instead placed Tata in an unconfirmable role in the Pentagon that effectively made him Anderson’s No.2. Now that Anderson is gone, Tata has a job that even Republican senators didn’t want him to do.
On the same day, Anderson submitted his resignation letter, as did Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart, paving the way for his replacement, Kash Patel. Stewart’s departure was always likely with Esper’s departure.
It is also not surprising to see Patel placed at the highest echelons of the Pentagon, as he has appeared almost everywhere in the Trump administration. As Assistant to Representative Nunes, Patel was the lead author of a 2018 memo released by House Republicans suggesting that federal law enforcement was spying on Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Trump responded that the report Patel wrote had left him “totally justified. “
After that, Patel worked in the office of the Director of National Intelligence as a senior adviser to then-interim chief Richard Grenell before returning to the White House to lead the Council’s counterterrorism team. national security. It was in this role that he visited Syria earlier this year, becoming the first senior U.S. official to meet with the Syrian government in a decade, to negotiate the release of two U.S. hostages.
Now Patel will be in charge of managing the day-to-day affairs of the Secretary of Defense while advising him on key political issues. It’s important work, of course, but it’s really more about administration and management than anything else. That’s why some experts say having Patel in his new role probably won’t change too much.
“It could be a sign of incompetence in the administration because the chief of staff is not the place I would put someone if I was really trying to scramble harmful things across the Pentagon,” I said. said Golby of the University of Texas.
A third senior civilian official – Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Joseph Kernan – also tendered his resignation on November 10. The retired Navy and SEAL Vice Admiral had served in the Department of Defense since 2017; a Pentagon statement said his decision to resign was “scheduled for several months.”
In his place, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, one of the most controversial figures of the Trump era.
In 2017, as a senior intelligence official at the National Security Council, Cohen-Watnick combed through past intelligence interceptions, apparently in an attempt to support Trump’s baseless claim that Obama put wiretapping Trump Tower. He even leaked some of them to a sympathetic Republican in Congress: Nunes. After HR McMaster took over as National Security Advisor in February 2017, he attempted to fire Cohen-Watnick, but was prevented from doing so after Trump’s personal intervention (apparently at the invitation of Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner).
People who know Cohen-Watnick say he is a staunch Trump loyalist who stays true to his belief that a “deep state” is thwarting the president at every moment. “It’s disturbing that he has been appointed to his new post,” a former US intelligence official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely. “It should not be used anywhere by government.”
“I have never met anyone as shady or inherently untrustworthy as Ezra,” the official added.
The three new members will join Christopher Miller, the new acting Secretary of Defense, at the Pentagon. The former special forces officer recently headed the National Counterterrorism Center until he took over from Esper on November 9. Experts say he is politically aligned with Trump but is not a loyalist or a pawn, perhaps allaying some fears that he will give in to any demand. from the President over the next two months.
Why is Trump now making these controversial staff changes? No one knows for sure, but it’s probably not as sinister as fear.
When the resignations and appointments were announced, some feared that a sinister plot was underway – that Trump loyalists would “sink” into the Department of Defense so that they could not be removed when Biden takes office. functions, or that there is some sort of cover-up going on. , or even that Trump was prepare the ground for a coup.
But the experts I spoke to doubt these explanations, and suspect that what is really going on is that Trump has finally had an opening to clean up the Pentagon house with the election now over, and that he makes people more receptive to his wishes in order to finally accomplish some of the policies that the Esper-led Pentagon had pushed back – such as withdrawing all remaining US troops from Afghanistan before Christmas.
Trump promised in October that those troops would be home before the holidays. But while the White House has pushed the Pentagon hard to make this wish come true, Defense Department leaders have resisted, saying instead that any withdrawal must be “conditionally based” – in other words, when the violence in Afghanistan was not increasing.
This sparked a months-long back and forth that ended in the White House’s anger against the Pentagon. A White House official told me that O’Brien, the national security adviser, had a bad relationship with Esper and wanted him out, recommending to Trump that Miller take his place. Trump seems to have listened, and now the way is open for the troop withdrawal the president wants.
On Wednesday, Axios reported that Douglas Macgregor, a Fox News contributor and veteran who has long advocated for the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, had just joined the Pentagon as Miller’s advisor. This reinforces the claim that the movements are really about an accelerated troop withdrawal more than anything else.
This explanation should allay concerns that the real goal here is for these staff members to “dig” themselves into the Pentagon, meaning that a Biden administration could not remove them from their posts. But such fears are unfounded, according to Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior researcher at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, DC.
She told me that all the new civilian leaders in the Pentagon are political appointments. Biden, then, can easily have them removed once he takes office in January. “Political appointments are used at the will of the president,” Schulman said.
Together, the vigilance and skepticism of the movements are quite right and justified. But there’s no evidence that anything bad is brewing, at least not yet.
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