Another Pentagon official is ousted
The Pentagon policy official overseeing the military’s efforts to combat the Islamic State was fired Monday after a White House appointee told him the United States had won that war and that his office had been disbanded, according to three people briefed on the matter.
The ouster of Christopher P. Maier, the head of the Pentagon’s Defeat ISIS Task Force since March 2017, came just three weeks after President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and three other Pentagon officials, and replaced them with loyalists.
In a statement late Monday, the Pentagon said that Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller had accepted Maier’s resignation and that his duties would be folded into two other offices that deal with special operations and regional policies. Those offices are led by Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Anthony J. Tata, two of the Trump appointees who have been promoted in the recent purge.
The Pentagon statement said the transition reflected the success of the U.S.-led effort to crush the terrorist state that ISIS created in large swaths of Iraq and Syria.
But Maier’s supporters say he was summarily forced out of an important but low-profile job that required navigating the shoals of Washington’s counterterrorism bureaucracy as well as flying off to combat zones, including northeast Syria and Iraq to work with precarious partners on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State group.
“Chris is a nonpartisan professional and carries years of institutional knowledge on an exceedingly complex set of issues,” Brett H. McGurk, Trump’s former special envoy to the coalition to defeat the Islamic State, said in an email. “It really makes no sense to force out someone like that 50 days before a transition to a new administration.”
Maier’s task force was responsible for overseeing policy and strategy development as well as international negotiations regarding the fight against ISIS. At least one member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team expressed concerns privately Monday night over Maier’s firing.
Maier’s team served as a clearinghouse for the government’s counterterrorism operations and policies. It was in the midst of answering dozens of questions from the incoming Biden team about the status of terrorist threats, relations with allies and counterterrorism missions when his team was disbanded. Now team members will be scattered across the Pentagon bureaucracy or returned to their home agencies.