Saturday, October 14, 2017

Eliana Johnson — Nikki Haley was Trump’s Iran whisperer


This is pretty incendiary in that UN Ambassador Haley apparently went around US Secretary of State Tillerson. The question is who is running US foreign policy, the secretary of state or an ambassador?

If this is true and Tillerson has any cojones, he will resign and let Trump appoint Haley, to whom he initially offered the position of secretary of state.

At this point, Tillerson is not only damaging his reputation but he is also looking like a fool. He should bow out.

Oh, and it gets worse.
Haley wasn’t alone. The fingerprints of former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, whose access to Trump was recently limited by chief of staff John Kelly, were also on Trump’s Friday address in the form of a warning that Trump, who opted not to push for steps that could undo the nuclear agreement, could still cancel the deal “at any time."

The line was added to Trump’s speech after Bolton, despite Kelly’s recent edict, reached the president by phone on Thursday afternoon from Las Vegas, where Bolton was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Bolton urged Trump to include a line in his remarks noting that he reserved the right to scrap the agreement entirely, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.
Trump wound up saying that the agreement “is under continuous review, and our participation can be canceled by me, as president, at any time.” Bolton declined to comment on any conversation with the president....
The former U.N. ambassador supports a full U.S. withdrawal from the deal, something he told Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during a meeting earlier this week.

At the behest of former White House strategist Steve Bannon, Bolton had prepared a plan for that approach that he never had the chance to present to Trump once Bannon was fired and Kelly cracked down on Oval Office visits.
But Bolton’s authorship of a key line in Trump’s speech makes clear that his influence at the White House endures.
Haley never explicitly called for withdrawal.
John Kerry ended up looking like a fool when President Obama let then Defense Secretary Ashton Carer and the Pentagon blow up the agreement that Kerry and Russian FM Sergei Lavrov had worked out.

Now Tillerson is looking like a jerk, and the US is appearing before the world  as even more a country that can't keep its word.

Politico
Nikki Haley was Trump’s Iran whisperer
Eliana Johnson

1 comment:

Matt Franko said...

Tillerson is probably only there for the capital gains tax exemption he got to roll out of Exxon-Mobil into the cabinet... never made any other sense...