Trump’s tweet that fired his Secretary of State
DONALD Trump sacked US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Twitter yesterday, hours after Mr Tillerson insisted Russia was ‘clearly’ behind the Salisbury attack.
His forceful criticism of the Kremlin contrasted with the White House’s lukewarm response, which didn’t mention Russia.
Mr Tillerson said he only discovered he had been fired after the President announced on Twitter that he was being replaced as the chief US diplomat by CIA director Mike Pompeo.
Mr Pompeo, a Trump loyalist and former Right-wing congressman, has played down the danger from Russia. On Sunday, he insisted the US was ‘ safe’ from Vladimir Putin’s threats. Mr Tillerson, former boss of the oil giant ExxonMobil has a rocky relationship with Mr Trump, once describing him as a ‘****ing moron’. His departure had been rumoured for so long that it was nicknamed ‘Rexit’ in Washington.
Aides said Mr Tillerson, who returned to the US capital from Africa ahead of schedule yesterday after being warned that changes were afoot, did not speak to the President before his sacking. He insisted he was unaware of the reason for his abrupt downfall.
But Mr Trump said yesterday: ‘We were not
really thinking the same. really, it was a different mindset, a different thinking.’
The President selected Mr Pompeo’s deputy, gina Haspel, as the first female director of the CiA. She has been linked to the agency’s controversial use of waterboarding and other torture tactics on terror suspects.
Mr Trump said he had considered firing Mr Tillerson for ‘a long time’ because they disagreed over US strategy in foreign policy areas such as the iran nuclear deal, how to handle North Korea and the tone of US diplomacy.
Critics said that, with Mr Pompeo and Miss Haspel’s appointments needing Senate confirmation, Mr Trump will have no chief diplomat during preparations for nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
in farewell remarks last night, Mr Tillerson said the US had to tackle russian aggression, adding: ‘Much work remains to respond to the troubling behaviour and actions on the part of the russian government.’
He said he would remain at the State Department until March 31, but that Deputy Secretary John Sullivan would take charge.
Democrats said Mr Tillerson’s sacking was further evidence that Mr Trump only wanted ‘Yes-men’ who wouldn’t argue with him.
On Monday, Mr Tillerson issued a strongly worded statement expressing ‘full confidence’ in the UK’s assessment that russia was most likely to be behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
He said: ‘There is never a justification for... the attempted murder of a private citizen on the soil of a sovereign nation – and we are outraged that russia appears to have again engaged in such behaviour.’
Mr Tillerson called russia ‘an irresponsible force of instability in the world’, and said the attack ‘clearly came from russia’ and would ‘certainly trigger a response’ from the US.
But the White House simply called the attack ‘reckless, indiscriminate and irresponsible’, stopping short of blaming russia.