Bannon out of NSC as ‘grown-ups’ tighten grip
UNITED STATES: President Donald Trump abruptly reorganised his top team of security advisers yesterday, removing Steve Bannon, his maverick chief strategist.
The instigator of the reshuffle appears to have been LieutenantGeneral HR McMaster, the national security adviser. The move was welcomed by analysts, who said that it would return the national security council to the control of professionals.
The council is responsible for formulating security policy for the president and has traditionally drawn staff from the defence department, state department and intelligence agencies.
The decision to give Bannon, who ran the alt-right Breitbart news website before joining Trump’s presidential campaign last August, a place on the socalled principals committee had been widely criticised.
Bannon served in the US Navy as a young man but his role in the White House is predominantly political.
After a career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs he moved to Hollywood to make films.
During the presidential campaign he urged Trump to run as an unabashed nationalist.
Critics said that he had no relevant security experience.
Trump restored a number of senior military and intelligence chiefs yesterday, including the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the director of national intel- ligence, the CIA director and the UN ambassador.
White House aides insisted that Bannon had not been demoted, but his removal offered fresh evidence that Trump’s experienced national security team, including General James Mattis, the defence secretary - known in Washington as the grown-ups - continued to assert themselves over the president’s less seasoned aides.
McMaster, a plain-speaking army officer, was appointed when Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign for misleading White House staff about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington.
Amid allegations linking the Trump team to Russia before the elections, Trump hit out yesterday at Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, claiming that she may have committed a crime.
Rice has been accused by the Republicans of improperly requesting the identification of American members of the Trump presidential campaign whose communications were swept up in US intelligence gathering.
She is said to have made the requests while working at the White House.
No evidence has emerged to suggest that Rice breached the rules, and she denies any wrongdoing, but Trump told The New York Times that he believed it was ‘‘one of the big stories of our time’’.
- The Times