The Tillerson file... by Bob Nelson ... Green Rules apply

Rollercoaster!

Short reminder: Tillerson is the guy who called his present boss a "moron"...

A week ago, I seeded an article about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's reductions in personnel at the State Department.

A couple days later, I came across another article kinda sorta on the same subject, that I never found time to seed. (Hey! Limit of five per day!):

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Rex Tillerson hired a CEO to overhaul the State Department. She quit 3 months into the job.

The secretary of state is struggling to deliver on his vision for a new agency.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The woman who Secretary of State Rex Tillerson chose to help him streamline the State Department just quit after only three months on the job. It’s the latest in a string of high-profile resignations that highlights growing chaos and declining morale at the top agency in charge of carrying out US foreign policy.

Tillerson recruited Maliz Beams, a former CEO of a major retirement services firm, back in August to lead the effort to dramatically reduce the personnel and spending of what Tillerson — and his boss, President Donald Trump — believe is an overly bloated government agency. Tillerson said in September that making the State Department more efficient is “the most important thing” he can do during his time in office, and has proposed cutting thousands of jobs to achieve that end.

But it appears that Beams did not share Tillerson’s vision for the agency’s future. Their relationship was “strained by strong differences over the redesign plan itself and the parameters for implementing it,” according to BuzzFeed News, which first broke the news of Beams’s resignation.

According to a State Department official, Beams isn’t taking on a new job or moving to another agency but simply “returning to her home in Boston.” Beams is at least the third person Tillerson named to this position who has dropped the responsibility before finishing the job.

It’s a particularly troubling sign for Tillerson given that his power as a diplomat has been waning for months. President Trump has undermined Tillerson’s remarks on negotiating with North Korea and sidelined him in discussions on how to unravel the Iran deal. Tillerson’s credibility as a messenger on behalf of the president is shot.

The redesign is one of the few things that he can still take pride in as the head of the State Department — and he’s failing at it.

The State Department has a huge staffing problem

Tillerson’s vision of austerity for the State Department has alarmed not just the diplomatic community, but some members of Congress as well.

Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to Tillerson earlier in November expressing concern over “the intentional hollowing-out of our senior diplomatic ranks and the entire State Department with no clear goal.” Since January, the letter states, more than 100 senior foreign service officers have left the agency and the number of career ambassadors has decreased by 60 percent.

Tillerson pushed back against the statistics cited in the letter during a speech in Washington on Tuesday, claiming that they’re misleading because of their sample size or don’t accurately reflect the exceptions he’s made to his department-wide hiring freeze.

Tillerson is offering $25,000 buyouts to encourage around 2,000 diplomats to leave the department by October of next year.

Tillerson has also made other changes that have also irked employees. Consider what happened with Bill Miller, Tillerson’s former security chief at the State Department.

Following the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans and accusations that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had not taken the security of American diplomats seriously enough, Congress passed a law requiring that the security chief have unrestricted access to the secretary of state in order to brief the secretary on the security of diplomatic personnel worldwide.

But according to a New York Times report, Tillerson repeatedly turned down urgent State Department security staff requests to brief him. Only after Miller invoked that law was he finally given face-time with Tillerson — and even then it was just a meager five minutes. Miller’s insistence on seeing Tillerson is what led to his ouster in July, administration sources told the Times. (The State Department said at the time that he was not forced out.)

Tillerson’s floundering at State has led to some rather humiliating scenarios for him. Reporters have asked him point blank if he thinks he will soon be fired and replaced by Nikki Haley, who currently serves as the US ambassador to the United Nations. And the White House apparently even briefly considered the idea of moving Ivanka Trump to the UN position based on the assumption that Haley could take over Tillerson’s job.

During his Tuesday speech, Tillerson said his personnel cuts are justified in part "based on expectation of getting these [global] conflicts resolved." In other words, the State Department should be able to make do with a leaner staff because they plan to sort out the country’s big foreign policy challenges fairly soon.

But most experts believe the opposite is true: that Tillerson’s hollowing out of the State Department has weakened the agency’s ability to address America’s big foreign policy challenges. And they worry that a major foreign policy crisis, such as a war with North Korea or conflict with Iran over its nuclear program, could overwhelm the existing staff.

Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at George Washington University who studies US foreign policy, has compared the US under Tillerson’s emaciated State Department to a person who doesn’t have health insurance. “Your life is probably fine — up until the point you get sick,” she says.

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Original article

by Zeeshan Aleem

Vox

There may be links in the Original Article that have not been reproduced here.

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Well... I'm fairly naïve and trusting but even I could smell the gas-leaks from Foggy Bottom. The denizens of State felt safe in chatting with reporters... which probably meant trouble for Big Boss Tillerson.

But Tillerson struck back:

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Tillerson Takes Offense at Claims of Hollowing Out State Department

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said Tuesday that he was offended that anyone would suggest he was hollowing out the State Department, but he also suggested that the department’s budget should be cut by about a third.

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson spoke Tuesday at a Woodrow Wilson Center event in Washington
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Tillerson also delivered an unusually tough rebuke to Russia, pledged enduring fealty to the security of Europe, needled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and asked Britain and the European Union to settle their differences over “Brexit” soon.

The remarks came at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington just as Mr. Tillerson was preparing to leave on a four-country swing through Europe next week.

Mr. Tillerson’s tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat has been widely criticized in the news media and on Capitol Hill, with his own top diplomats fleeing the department with little precedent.

The criticism has clearly stung. In previous interviews, Mr. Tillerson said that he was bewildered by reports of plunging morale, saying everyone he saw in the department’s hallways appeared cheerful. On Tuesday, he went a step further.

“When I read these stories that there’s this hollowing out, I take offense to that,” Mr. Tillerson said.

Mr. Tillerson denied that there was any large wave of departures, claiming that the number of foreign service officers in the department has remained largely unchanged.

He has made no secret of his intention to cut his department’s staffing levels by 8 percent by next year — a $25,000 buyout offer was recently made public — and its spending by about a third.

And the numbers Mr. Tillerson and his aides have been using to dispute claims of high-level departures come from Sept. 30, the day before many diplomats left.

“While the confirmation process has been excruciatingly slow for many of our nominees, I have been so proud of the acting assistant secretaries and people who’ve stepped into acting roles,” Mr. Tillerson said Tuesday, adding, “I’m offended on their behalf when people say somehow we don’t have a State Department that functions.”

The biggest holdup in Mr. Tillerson’s efforts to get a leadership team in place has not been a slow Senate confirmation process, but his own failure to select candidates for both the White House and the Senate to consider.

And while expressing pride about the work his acting assistant secretaries are doing, Mr. Tillerson has ignored much of that, refusing to sit with many of his acting assistant secretaries for the routine briefings they have requested to provide him, officials said. After his security chief insisted on having five minutes with Mr. Tillerson to relate time-sensitive classified information, Mr. Tillerson fired him.

Mr. Tillerson said that the department could not spend effectively anywhere close to its peak budget of almost $55 billion.

“It’s just not sustainable,” he said. “It is very difficult to execute a $55 billion budget and execute it well.”

Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have insisted on keeping the department’s budget in the range of $50 billion, saying that now is not the time to retreat on diplomacy. But Mr. Tillerson said that a budget “in the mid-$30 billion level” was more appropriate.

Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have insisted on keeping the department’s budget in the range of $50 billion, saying that now is not the time to retreat on diplomacy. But Mr. Tillerson said that a budget “in the mid-$30 billion level” was more appropriate.

Much of the growth in the State Department’s budget over the past 15 years has been in diplomatic security and information technology. Mr. Tillerson made clear on Tuesday that he wants to increase spending on computers, saying the department’s computers are woeful. And Republicans on Capitol Hill, after the 2012 Benghazi attacks, have placed increasing importance on increased spending for security.

In his prepared remarks, Mr. Tillerson sought to reassure European allies who have been rattled by President Trump’s repeated criticism of NATO, the security alliance linking the United States and much of Europe.

“Our security commitments to European allies are ironclad,” Mr. Tillerson said.

Mr. Tillerson was also critical of Russia.

“Russia can continue to isolate and impoverish itself by sowing disorder abroad and impeding liberty at home, or it can become a force that will advance the freedom of Russians and the stability of Eurasia,” he said.

Mr. Tillerson urged European allies to stop being so focused on whether the Trump administration would walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, something Mr. Trump has threatened repeatedly to do.

“We ask our European partners to join us in standing up to all of Iran’s malign behavior,” he said.

Mr. Tillerson tweaked Mr. Erdogan for his recent outreach to Russia and Iran.

“But we ask Turkey as a NATO ally to prioritize the common defense of its treaty allies,” Mr. Tillerson said. “Iran and Russia cannot offer Turkish people the economic and political benefits that membership in the Western community of nations can provide.”

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Original article

by GARDINER HARRIS

NYT Politics

There may be links in the Original Article that have not been reproduced here.

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Washington infighting at its best! And finally of course:

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White House Plans Tillerson Ouster From State Dept., to Be Replaced by Pompeo

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, perhaps within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday.

Getty

Mr. Pompeo would probably be succeeded at the C.I.A. by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and key ally of the president on national security matters, according to the White House plan. Mr. Cotton has signaled that he would accept the job if offered, said the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations before decisions are announced.

Mr. Trump has not signed off on the plan developed by John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, officials said, but the president is said to have soured on Mr. Tillerson and is ready to make a change at the State Department. Mr. Trump spoke harshly about Mr. Tillerson in front of White House aides as recently as Thursday but did not seem ready yet to replace him, according to one person close to the president.

For all his public combativeness and his “you’re fired” reputation from reality television, Mr. Trump is often reluctant to dismiss advisers. The disclosure of Mr. Kelly’s transition plan may have been a way to nudge him into making a decision, according to that person. It may also have been meant as a not-too-subtle message to Mr. Tillerson that it is time to go.

The ouster of Mr. Tillerson would end a turbulent reign at the State Department for the former Exxon Mobil chief executive, who has been largely marginalized over the last year. Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson have been at odds over a host of major issues, including the Iran nuclear deal, the confrontation with North Korea and a clash between Arab allies. The secretary was reported to have privately called Mr. Trump a “moron” and the president publicly criticized Mr. Tillerson for “wasting his time” with a diplomatic outreach to North Korea.

Replacing him with Mr. Pompeo could presage a dramatic change. While many veteran diplomats have expressed disappointment in Mr. Tillerson for the way he has run the State Department, they see him as a pragmatic figure in the Situation Room. Mr. Pompeo, a former congressman from the Tea Party wing of the party, would be more hawkish on Iran, North Korea and other key issues.

But his appointment could produce a more consistent public message on foreign policy for an administration that has spoken in multiple voices. Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson have often seemed to describe contradictory policies, a confusion only exacerbated by the presence of other voices like Nikki R. Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and conduit to certain foreign countries.

The White House did little on Thursday to discourage the impression that Mr. Tillerson was on the way out. The secretary was in the West Wing twice for meetings during the day, but neither the president nor his team gave a public reaffirmation of his position in the administration.

As he hosted the visiting crown prince of Bahrain, Mr. Trump was asked by reporters if he wanted Mr. Tillerson to stay on the job. “He’s here,” Mr. Trump said simply. “Rex is here.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, later issued a statement saying that “there are no personnel announcements at this time,” not denying that there was a transition plan in mind.

“When the president loses confidence in someone, they will no longer serve in the capacity that they’re in,” Ms. Sanders told reporters at a briefing later in the day. “The president was here today with the secretary of state. They engaged in a foreign leader visit and are continuing to work together to close out what we’ve seen to be an incredible year.”

Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, sought to portray Mr. Tillerson as having a routine day, noting that in addition to two trips to the White House, he had breakfast with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, met with Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel of Germany and spoke with the United Nations secretary general.

“He remains, as I have been told, committed to doing this job,” Ms. Nauert said. “He does serve at the pleasure of the president. This is a job that he enjoys.”

She said Mr. Kelly called Margaret Peterlin, Mr. Tillerson’s chief of staff, to tell her that reports that the secretary was being pushed out were false.

Mr. Tillerson is scheduled to leave Monday on a trip to Europe, stopping in Brussels for talks with his NATO counterparts and then heading to Stockholm, Vienna and Paris. Asked how he could continue to conduct diplomacy when his standing within the administration was so uncertain, Ms. Nauert said that Mr. Tillerson “is someone whose feathers don’t get ruffled very easily.”

While some administration officials initially expected him to be replaced by Ms. Haley, Mr. Pompeo has become the favorite. A former three-term member of the House, he has impressed Mr. Trump during daily intelligence briefings and become a trusted policy adviser on issues far beyond the C.I.A.’s mandate, like health care. But he has been criticized by intelligence officers for being too political in his job.

Mr. Cotton has been perhaps Mr. Trump’s most important supporter in the Senate on national security and immigration and a valued outside adviser. Officials cautioned that there was still a debate about whether Mr. Cotton was more valuable to the president in the Senate than in taking over the spy agency in Langley, Va.

Under Arkansas state law, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, would appoint a replacement who could serve until the 2018 election. That could put another seat in play during a midterm election when Republicans, with 52 of 100 seats in the Senate, cannot afford to take too many chances. If Mr. Cotton stayed in the Senate, his seat would not be up for election again until 2020.

Asked on Fox News about a possible move, Mr. Cotton ducked the question. “I’m very proud to be representing the people of Arkansas,” he said.

Another candidate in the mix in recent weeks is Robert S. Harward, a retired Navy vice admiral who interviewed for and then declined the position of national security adviser after Michael T. Flynn was pushed out in February.

The decline in Mr. Tillerson’s fortunes was evident in Mr. Kelly’s role in developing the transition plan. Although Mr. Kelly sought over the summer to keep Mr. Tillerson from leaving for the sake of continuity, the chief of staff has since grown weary of the constant fighting over personnel between the State Department and the White House, according to White House officials. White House aides have made it clear to a number of presidential appointees that Mr. Tillerson’s days were numbered, and the only question was how long he would remain.

Mr. Tillerson’s appointment was something of an experiment from the start. Never before had a president named a secretary of state with no prior experience in government, politics or the military. Mr. Trump, who himself had no government or military experience before this year, gambled that Mr. Tillerson would be able to translate his formidable skills in the corporate world to international diplomacy after 41 years at Exxon Mobil.

But Mr. Tillerson has often been on a different page than Mr. Trump, and he has spent much of his time reorganizing the State Department, slashing its budget and pushing out more than 2,000 career diplomats. Even on that he ran into serious troubles. Just this week, the counselor he brought in to execute his plan quit after just three months.

The disconnect on foreign policy was clear this week, too. On Wednesday, Ms. Haley said in a speech that all nations should suspend diplomatic relations with North Korea. But Ms. Nauert declined in a briefing on Thursday to endorse Ms. Haley’s call, saying only that if foreign governments “would be willing to close their missions in North Korea altogether I think that that is something that we would be supportive of.”

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Original article

by Peter Baker
Maggie Haberman
Gardiner Harris

NYT Politics

There may be links in the Original Article that have not been reproduced here.

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So... after all this... Trump says it ain't true:  

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Trump Rejects Reports That His Top Diplomat is Departing

President Trump on Friday rejected reports that he would soon fire Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson as “fake news,” but declared that “I call the final shots” as he acknowledged his disagreements with his top diplomat.

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson spoke during a meeting with the
prime minister of Libya, Fayez al-Sarraj, on Friday.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

The president’s tweet was posted a few hours after Mr. Tillerson described reports this week that the White House wanted him to resign as “laughable.”

“He’s not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again!” Mr. Trump wrote in a midafternoon tweet defending Mr. Tillerson.

It marked an operatic turn in Mr. Tillerson’s tenure after months of reports that he would soon leave the Trump administration. The latest round was fueled by a plan to force out Mr. Tillerson that was conceived by John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, and unveiled by senior administration officials on Thursday.

The State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, denied on Thursday that Mr. Tillerson was leaving. But the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, notably did not, saying only that “there are no personnel announcements at this time” when asked whether Mr. Tillerson was on his way out.

Mr. Trump had also sidestepped questions on Thursday about Mr. Tillerson’s future. “He’s here. Rex is here,” Mr. Trump said then, in an underwhelming display of support that did not challenge the reports of Mr. Tillerson’s pending departure.

By Friday morning, Mr. Tillerson told reporters at the State Department during a brief appearance with Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj of Libya that the reports were “laughable.” He then headed to the White House for two meetings with Mr. Trump, including a lunch with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — one of Mr. Tillerson’s allies. The president tweeted after those meetings.

Despite his years as a reality-TV star who routinely issued the line, “You’re fired,” Mr. Trump has struggled with ousting his staff, even after he has chosen to do so. Two White House advisers said the president ultimately decided on Friday to bolster Mr. Tillerson with the tweet to avoid undermining his chief diplomat right before he heads overseas to work on a host of global crises.

Mr. Tillerson is leaving for Europe on Monday on a weeklong trip, when he will attend a NATO meeting in Brussels and then fly to Vienna for a discussion at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe about the yearslong unrest in Ukraine.

The two White House advisers insisted, however, that Mr. Tillerson is expected to leave sometime in January.

In the plan revealed on Thursday, Mr. Tillerson would be succeeded by Mike Pompeo, currently the C.I.A. director, who is more closely aligned with Mr. Trump on a series of important foreign policy matters. Mr. Tillerson’s refusal to resign despite his disagreements with Mr. Trump — and the president’s reported dislike for the diplomat — may have been the reason senior administration officials leaked Mr. Kelly’s plan this week to replace him.

Mr. Tillerson had previously and repeatedly denied reports of his impending departure, even going so far as to hold a news conference in October to say, “There’s never been a consideration in my mind to leave.”

The debate over Mr. Tillerson’s status is the latest outgrowth of a White House that has been beset by internal battles, high-level departures, indictments of two top former campaign officials and guilty pleas from a former national security adviser and a campaign adviser. All have contributed to a generalized sense of chaos that shows few signs of abating, even as the administration nears the completion of its first year in power.

Mr. Tillerson is a phlegmatic former chief executive of Exxon Mobil whose personal net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. His continued service to a White House that so obviously wants him gone has led to something of a cottage industry of speculation in Washington about his reasons for remaining.

One theory, frequently repeated at the State Department, is that an early departure would cost Mr. Tillerson millions of dollars in taxes for assets he sold to take the diplomatic post. Tax experts have dismissed this notion.

After being nominated, Mr. Tillerson was granted a so-called Certificate of Divestiture that allowed him to sell off Exxon stock without having to immediately pay capital gains taxes on those holdings. Two lawyers involved in issuing these documents said that the federal law creating this process — which is intended to eliminate a disincentive to qualified individuals joining the government — has no provision to withdraw this benefit, assuming that Mr. Tillerson completed the sale of his stocks before he left his government job.

The ethics agreement that Mr. Tillerson signed in January, after he was nominated, indicated that he planned to complete the sale of his Exxon stock and other potentially problematic stock assets within 90 days of his confirmation. As long as Mr. Tillerson followed that plan, the timing of his resignation would have no impact on his tax liability, the lawyers said.

It is also believed that Mr. Tillerson has become so wedded to a State Department reorganization that he launched earlier this year that he will not leave until it is in place. That is expected to occur early next year.

Mr. Tillerson has said the reorganization is his highest priority. He intends to slash the State Department’s personnel by 8 percent and its budget by 31 percent. The cuts are needed, he has said many times, because many of the world’s conflicts will soon be resolved. This view is dismissed as naïve both within the State Department and the broader foreign policy community.

Mr. Tillerson has made clear he has little use for much of the day-to-day diplomacy conducted by his work force. Diplomats across the State Department spent much of Thursday and Friday checking their phones for news announcing Mr. Tillerson’s departure.

His personal press aide, R.C. Hammond, is expected to leave his post this month, according to three people in the department with direct knowledge of the situation and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

Mr. Hammond denied he would be leaving soon.

“You are not so lucky,” Mr. Hammond wrote in an email. “You still get to work with me.”

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Original article

by Gardiner Harris

NYT Politics

There may be links in the Original Article that have not been reproduced here.

It's a pity that this fun story (in the way that any soap-opera is fun) went down at the same time that the Republican Party was removing the fig-leaf that hid the fact that the United States is now officially a banana republic.

The Tillerson story deserved more coverage, and the other... should never have existed...