Seedy Trump Loyalist Punted From Key National Security Post
Reprinted with permission from Alternet
The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima reports that long-time Trump loyalist Michael Ellis had resigned from his position as top lawyer for the National Security Agency after almost three months of being "sidelined" during Joe Biden's presidency. Journalist Steve Benen, in an op-ed for MSNBC's website, lays out some reasons why Ellis' departure from the NSA is an important development and a positive thing.
"Last fall, the day after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential race, Team Trump tapped Ellis to serve as general counsel of the National Security Agency, but the news wasn't well received," Benen explains. "Gen. Paul Nakasone, the NSA's director, didn't want Ellis for that post. In response, Christopher Miller, Trump's acting defense secretary, ordered the NSA director to install the Trump loyalist as the agency's top lawyer, whether Nakasone wanted him or not."
Benen notes that after Biden was sworn into office almost three months ago, "a gradual process began in which the new administration cleaned house, at least to the extent possible" — and Nakasone placed Ellis on administration leave.
"NSA general counsel is an important job, and not a position for partisan operatives," Benen points out. "With this in mind, it didn't come as too big of a surprise when Nakasone put Ellis on administrative leave literally the same afternoon as Biden's inauguration — at which point, the NSA director no longer had to worry about Team Trump's directives."
To understand just how Trumpian Ellis' history is, one should take a look at his activities during Trump's presidency. Ellis is a major ally of GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, and he was a counsel to the House Intelligence Committee when it was still being chaired by the far-right California congressman. During the Trump era, Ellis and fellow Trump loyalist Ezra Cohen-Watnick were the two White House officials who gave Nunes intelligence reports claiming to show that former officials in ex-President Barack Obama's administration had improperly "unmasked" members of the Trump transition team in late 2016 -- early 2017. Sen. Richard Burr, chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the "unmasking" narrative was "all created by Devin Nunes."
Ellis' name was also heard in connection with the Ukraine scandal. Trump's first of two impeachments stemmed from a July 25, 2019 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump tried to pressure into helping him dig up dirt on now-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. And Ellis was the White House lawyer who ordered NSC officials to move the transcript of that conversation to a classified server.
Ellis is the lawyer who told officials in the NSC to move the Ukraine call transcript to a highly classified server. https://t.co/0sVZZ6CPSW— Jim Sciutto (@Jim Sciutto)1583249941.0
Biden was the Democratic presidential hopeful Trump feared the most in 2019, and it isn't hard to understand why he dreaded the possibility of Biden receiving his party's nomination. Biden, in November 2020, defeated Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote.
Trump was hardly the first politician to pursue opposition research on a political rival, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — when she called for Trump's impeachment in 2019 — stressed that it was wildly inappropriate for Trump to make that request from a foreign leader. And to make matters worse, Pelosi said, Trump made that opposition research a prerequisite for military aid to Ukraine.
In March 2020, Politico's Kyle Griffin reported that Ellis had been named senior intelligence director on the NSA.
Benen wraps up his op-ed by making it clear that he is glad to see Ellis resigning from his NSA position.
"There are still plenty of Trump appointees who've 'burrowed' into career civil-service positions," Benen observes, "but as of now, they won't be in the NSA's general counsel's office."
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Trump Denies Secret Service Meeting Over 2A Comments: Another Lie?
Yesterday, after an onslaught of criticism directed towards GOP nominee Donald Trump for his comments that “Second Amendment people” might be able to “do” something about Hillary Clinton, CNN began reporting that the Secret Service had met with the Trump campaign. According to the CNN website, a “U.S Secret Service official confirm[ed] to CNN that the the USSS has spoken to the Trump campaign regarding his Second Amendment comments.”
CNN claimed the official stated that there had been “more than one conversation” about the comments and that the campaign had responded that Trump had not intended to incite violence.
This came a day after the Secret Service itself Tweeted about its knowledge of the Trump comments:
Shortly after CNN’s piece was published, Trump himself jumped back into the controversy and Tweeted out the following:
CNN, for its part, did state, “the Secret Service’s communications director Cathy Milhoan has not confirmed the conversations between the campaign and the Secret Service, but said in a statement Tuesday that ‘the U.S. Secret Service is aware of Mr. Trump’s comments.'”
Shortly after Trump’s comment, Reuters released a report which seemed to contradict CNN: “A federal official on Wednesday said the U.S. Secret Service had not formally spoken with Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign regarding his suggestion a day earlier that gun rights activists could stop Democratic rival Hillary Clinton from curtailing their access to firearms.”
Trump then hit back at CNN again on Twitter, but mis-characterized the text of the Reuters article:
However, the Reuters article does not directly contradict CNN, nor was it written as characterized by Trump: It doesn’t state that no conversations ever happened, just that there had not been “formal” talks.
Interestingly, CNN added a clarifying line to their initial article about the events. An archive.org shot of the CNN piece shows it as it was first written. The current version of the article, however, includes the line, “But it’s unclear at what level in the campaign structure the conversations occurred.”
So did the Secret Service discuss the violent comments with Trump’s campaign? By all accounts, except Trump’s own, it seems likely that they did. Reuters only indicated that no formal discussions had taken place, not that no discussions had taken place at all. Further, CNN appears to be standing by their story with only a clarification that the structure of the communications and campaign was unclear.
This is also not the first time the GOP nominee would have lied about something critical to his public persona. Trump recently lied to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Despite acknowledging on numerous occasions they knew each other and had spoken, Trump claimed he had “no relationship” with the Russian leader, except that Putin had “said very nice things” about him. Politifact rated the claim to Stephanopoulos a “full flop.”
Trump also claimed at one time that he received a letter from the NFL complaining about the presidential debate schedule. The NFL completely denied Trump’s claim.
Trump’s lies are so famous that they have even been exhaustively cataloged, so it does not seem unlikely that he is lying about this, as well.
Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to the media during a news conference at the construction site of the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office Building in Washington, March 21, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Bourg