‘You’re wrong,’ Tillerson says about reports he’ll soon be fired
In Brussels, secretary of state says no NATO normalization with Russia
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said there was no truth in reports that the White House had a plan to fire him and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Directly addressing the issue at a news conference at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Tillerson dismissed last week’s reports that have overshadowed his weeklong trip to Europe, as allies yearn for stability in US foreign policy.
“This is a narrative that keeps coming up about every six weeks and I would say you need to get some new sources because your story keeps being wrong,” he told reporters when asked whether the White House was pushing him out.
While Trump said last week he was not leaving and Tillerson said the reports were “laughable,” Trump has also said he alone determines US foreign policy, saying in a tweet on Friday: “I call the final shots.”
In Brussels on Tuesday, Tillerson said the US State Department, which still has top positions unmanned, was “in a much better position to advance America’s interests around the world than we were 10 months ago.”
Under the White House plan reported by Reuters and other media last week, Tillerson would be replaced within weeks by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a Trump loyalist and foreign policy hard-liner, under a plan to carry out the most significant staff shake-up so far of the Trump administration.
US Republican Senator Tom Cotton, one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress, would be tapped to replace Pompeo at the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said.
Tillerson, 65, has spent much of his tenure trying to smooth the rough edges of the “America First” foreign policy that has alarmed Trump’s allies, but the president has publicly undercut the secretary of state’s diplomatic initiatives.
At the EU and NATO this week, Tillerson espoused a more traditional US foreign policy, defending the Iran nuclear deal agreed by world powers in 2015, warning of a more assertive Russia and saying he had become “quite close” with Germany’s foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel.
On Wednesday, he told a NATO meeting of foreign ministers’ in Brussels that the Western allies agreed there was “no normalization” of ties with Russia.
“We had a lot of discussion at this NATO meeting... over what is the proper engagement with Russia and I think there is broad consensus among all the NATO members that there is no normalization of dialog with Russia today,” he told reporters.