Trump Defends McMaster as Conservatives Seek His Dismissal
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McMaster the top Kremlin target since he knows the threat Putin represents. He's also the target of the Bannon right—not a coincidence. https://t.co/4RsqQPDIAe
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) August 4, 2017
President Trump defended Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, his embattled national security adviser, on Friday in the face of a full-bore campaign by the nationalist wing of his political coalition accusing him of undermining the president’s agenda and calling for his dismissal.
General McMaster has angered the political right by pushing out several conservatives on the national security staff and cautioning against ripping up the nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated by President Barack Obamawithout a strategy for what comes next. His future has been in doubt amid speculation that Mr. Trump might send him to Afghanistan.
But after two days of unrelenting attacks on General McMaster by conservative activists and news sites, complete with the Twitter hashtag #FireMcMaster, the president weighed in to quash such talk. “General McMaster and I are working very well together,” he said in a statement emailed to The New York Times. “He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”
A senior White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the president’s views, added that Mr. Trump has “total confidence” in his national security adviser....
Conservatives have been dubious about General McMaster since the start, but opened up a concerted assault on him this week after he pushed out Ezra Cohen-Watnick, his senior director for intelligence, the latest of at least four hard-liners to leave the National Security Council staff in recent weeks.
They seized on a conservative website’s report that General McMaster had renewed the security clearance of Mr. Obama’s last national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, amid questions about her handling of intelligence eavesdropping on Russians that overheard Trump associates. And they blamed him when The Washington Post obtained leaked transcripts of phone conversations between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia.