Latest in National Security Council (NSC)
In a letter addressed to the Department of Defense Acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell, Sens. Mark Warner and Jack Reed have requested that the acting inspector general “investigate the process for the recent selection” of the newly selected General Counsel to the National Security Agency (NSA).
The Trump administration’s high turnover in leadership is unprecedented and severely limits the role of the NSC.
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As Jordan Brunner has explained, the new NSPM-4 memorandum reorganizing the National Security Council has far more in it than the
Jordan Brunner has already summarized the principal changes President Trump has made to his National Security Council and supporting committees. Overall, the changes—the removal of Steve Bannon and the subordination of the Homeland Security Advisor—appear to reflect an assertion of greater management authority by President Trump’s new National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster.
This morning, Bloomberg reported that President Donald Trump had filed a revised National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-4) reorganizing the National Security Council.
The White House has released a revised National Security Presidential Memorandum reorganizing the structure of the National Security Council. The memorandum lists the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as "regular attendees" of the Principals Committee and no longer includes the President's Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon.
Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sebastian Gorka, a former national security and terrorism editor at Breitbart who now serves as an advisor to Steve Bannon on the National Security Council, had been detained by TSA agents for trying to carry a gun onto a plane at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Gorka was charged last January in Virginia state court with carrying a weapon in an airport terminal, a misdemeanor offense.
In 2012, I witnessed a scene that has been on my mind this week: then-Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough reprimanded a less experienced staffer for merely referencing the ongoing reelection campaign during a mid-level NSC policy meeting. Why? Because, he said, “politics have no place in the Situation Room.”
In response to outcry over President Trump’s reorganization of the National Security Council—and particularly Steve Bannon’s elevation to the NSC and his permanent invite to the NSC’s Principals Committee—Senator Mark