Inside Trump's White House
Page 30
When the Trump team moved into the White House, the newly appointed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, invited some of the president’s staff over for lunch. They met with the agency’s top five staff members.
Someone from the White House asked about the major differences between the Trump administration and that of its predecessor. Was there something the Trump folks could be doing better?
One answer given was that in the last administration, everything was being run from the White House. The president’s staff was very operationally involved. If the CIA wanted to buy furniture in one of its foreign stations, it might require the White House to sign off on the purchase.
“What the president did and what Mike did, as well,” my White House source told me, “was to decentralize a lot of the control. Giving it back to the experts in the field, who are now tasked to make these decisions. The most important decisions are still passed up [through the chain of command]. A lot of the others can be made closer to the action. We’ve got all of these great people throughout the government. The new Trump theory was to let them make choices. If they’re not making those decisions themselves, then we can always pull it back up. So that was the first thing.
“Next thing they said was that, in the previous administration, they spent a lot of time in the White House doing nonstop PC [political correctness] meetings. They would have a meeting every week, and at the conclusion of the meeting there was always the suggestion, ‘Let’s meet again in two weeks.’
“Nothing was ever resolved. Nothing was ever good enough.
“They said that one thing about this White House is that there are a lot of decisions being made. They sensed that the president was not afraid to make decisions. They wouldn’t always agree with every decision he made, but they appreciated the fact that he was willing to ingest the information, get briefed on it, and then decide one way or the other.”30
NO EASY CHOICES
My source taught me that one of the challenges from the beginning was for the president’s team to get him all the information he needed on a wide variety of issues, from domestic policy to foreign policy. He had to be properly briefed. But when he had enough information, he made decisions quickly.
“That was where some of the conflicts with some of the campaign people came in,” I was told by my key White House source. “They just wanted him to do what they wanted him to do. The big conflict that people like General McMaster had was that now we were in the White House, we were in government, we were playing with live ammunition. This was different than being in a campaign. If the president wants to change his mind on something, and he’s a very fluid thinker, he ought to be able to do it.”
Some people in the White House told me they saw the president as more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. Just because he had said during the campaign that he was going to do something, once he was in the White House, he did not have to make it happen. First, he needed to revisit the issue to make sure he had the most current, pertinent information.
The wiser heads on senior staff wanted to present him with all the facts. They wanted to present him with all the arguments in favor of or against any given decision. After looking at all sides, then they would offer him a range of ways to accomplish the same goal.
“We had a lot of people here initially who just wanted him to take quick decisions that weren’t properly thought through,” my source told me. “We paid a price for that. There were some instances where they were able to get decisions through that later backfired.”
The national media was overwrought by the turnover of personnel in the Trump White House, sometimes faulting him for letting Obama Justice Department officials go. A high administration source expressed frustration over that. “Imagine your predecessor, from a different political party, gets to pick your staff for you,” the source said. “Why have elections if the new president can’t pick his own people?”
During my time on senior staff at the White House, back in the eighties, I was told that the average length of stay was 1.5 years. It hasn’t really changed. Turnover remains common.
Ronald Reagan had four chiefs of staff. So did Bill Clinton. Barack Obama had five. George W. Bush had five secretaries of the treasury. Jimmy Carter had six secretaries of state, confirmed or acting, during his four years in office.31
As a businessman, Donald Trump had always been quick to hire and fire, depending on the job he wanted done. He has continued this practice as president, and it has paid off.
“I admire the way that the president has developed his team and the process for decision making,” my source told me. “He has run up the learning curve so quickly, on so many topics. He’s done a good job of shuffling staff, in and out, and really getting the right team around him. At least for the most part.
“He’s now in a position where he’s not afraid to take tough decisions. That’s where we are today. He’s normally very, very well briefed before he takes a decision. He understands the magnitude of the decisions he’s taking, but he’s not afraid to do it. He’s amazing.
“Look, there’s very few situations that come to the desk of the president that are clear cut. No one can just say, ‘This is the right answer, and this is the wrong answer. This is the good option, and this is the bad option.’”
“If there are easy decisions, they are already made before they get to the president’s desk. He gets the hard ones.”
NOTES
1. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-says-he-has-a-secret-plan-to-beat-the-islamic-state
2. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140809-iraq-yazidis-minority-isil-religion-history/
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzNeadAezJ4
4. https://www.catholic.org/news/international/middle_east/story.php?id=58827
5. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-31533391
6. PBS was an exception. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/boko-haram
7. https://www.newsweek.com/isis-release-2015-budget-projections-2bn-250m-surplus-296577
8. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/world/africa/boko-haram-and-isis-are-collaborating-more-us-military-says.html
9. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/terrorism-security/2015/0206/Nigerian-military-recovers-weapons-stolen-by-Boko-Haram
10. https://www.wired.com/story/terror-industrial-complex-isis-munitions-supply-chain/
11. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html
12. https://www.ajc.com/news/world-govt--politics/obama-compares-isis-the-crusades-receives-heavy-backlash/GXNEQVOrHuYoqqMZxRaSUL/
13. https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-bomb-isis-2015-11
14. https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/did-trump-really-beat-isis
15. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/26/clintons-debate-take-on-trump-only-secret-is-he-doesnt-have-a-plan/
16. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/23/isis-finished-experts-warn-the-terror-group-is-still-a-serious-global-threat.html
17. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/has-isis-been-defeated-in-syria-as-trump-claims
18. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/video/damon-trump-naive-to-think-isis-is-defeated/vi-BBRjh5Z
19. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-trump-betrayed-the-general-who-defeated-isis
20. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/06/hoda-muthana-married-isis-fighters-so-trump-wont-let-her-back-usa/3350233002/
21. https://hotair.com/archives/2019/03/04/hoda-muthana-trump-study-legal-system/
22. https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/The%20Unsustainability%20of%20ISIS%20Detentions%20in%20Syria_reduced.pdf
23. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/01/25/obamas-isis-policy-is-working-for-trump/
24. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/435438-trump-isis-members-are-losers-and-will-always-be-losers
25. Interview with an anonymous White House source.
26. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/preside
ntial-memorandum-plan-defeat-islamic-state-iraq-syria/
27. https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/did-trump-really-beat-isis
28. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-isis-lost-raqqa-capital-2017-10#the-syrian-democratic-forces-that-led-the-raqqa-campaign-is-a-coalition-of-various-militias-however-it-has-always-been-led-by-the-kurds-2
29. Conversation with Donald Trump Jr., 2019.
30. Interview with a high-level administration source who was present at the key meetings.
31. https://www.dailycaller.com/2018/11/15/donald-trump-white-house-turnover-fox-news/
15
AMERICA’S SHAMEFUL SECRET
“We do not pay ransom in this country, at least, not any longer!”
—PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
Soon after becoming president, Donald Trump stumbled onto one of America’s most shameful secrets. More than one hundred Americans were being held hostage around the world. They were in addition to the three thousand Americans imprisoned outside the United States, many of them charged with violating drug laws or involvement in human trafficking.1 Some of these convicted prisoners were innocent or facing exaggerated sentences simply because they were from the United States and were thus targets of monetary or diplomatic blackmail. In the face of this crisis, America, with all of its wealth and power, sometimes appeared as a weak, stumbling giant, unable to defend its children.
In 2015, President Barack Obama actually apologized to families of hostages, telling them, “We will do better.”2 This shame was being handled in the shadows, far from the glare of media attention and with little public negotiation by the government.
That process was informed by the hostage crisis of 1979, when Iran seized fifty-two US diplomats and citizens at their embassy in Tehran and held them for 444 days, making the United States look helpless.
In researching my book The Iran Crisis, I had met with former president Jimmy Carter. He had a brilliant mind and was deeply troubled by the plight of the hostages. But the president’s critics believed that the more attention given the story, the harder it was to get the Americans released. For many policy makers, this was the lesson learned. The more celebrated the hostages, the greater their value to the hostage takers.
It was a valid point for the American government to make, but within time it morphed into something more high-handed. Families of hostages were told that their chances of seeing their loved ones return home would increase if they kept quiet and let the US government negotiate unseen. In addition, government officials encouraged news agencies to ignore hostage stories and, when they did surface, withheld information reporters needed to keep the stories in the news or on TV.
This prevailing practice hardened under recent Republican and Democratic administrations. This was the protocol adopted by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and it was one that families of victims tended to accept.
The rise of Islamic terrorism, which led to dramatic kidnappings and beheadings forced the issue from the shadows. Desperate families, perhaps feeling that they no longer had anything to lose, began to openly plead the case for their loved ones. During the last two years of the Obama administration, some hostage families began to suspect that the American government wanted such tight secrecy to cover for their own inaction. Government investigators were unseen and unaccountable; no one could measure their progress—or lack thereof.
Relatives of the journalist James Foley, who was kidnapped in northern Syria in 2012, were frustrated by officials of the Obama White House. “I was surprised there was so little compassion,” his mother, Diane Foley, told reporters. “We were told we could do nothing … meanwhile our son was being beaten and tortured every day.”3
Diane Foley was told to trust the government, “that the way they were handling things would bring our son home.”4 The Foley family had to beg the Obama White House for information. “We were an annoyance, it felt, at some level. They didn’t have time for us.”5
James Foley was beheaded by ISIS terrorists on August 19, 2014, in Syria.
The case of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student on tour in North Korea, marked a change in strategy, not by the American government, but by the family of a victim. The Warmbier case became a highly visible story.
The young man was arrested in January 2016 at the Pyongyang International Airport, as he was about to leave the country. He was accused of stealing a propaganda poster off a wall of his hotel in North Korea. He was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.
When Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January 2017, he was confronted with the Warmbier case and ninety-nine others. Trump was horrified by what he learned and determined to try something different.6
In April 2017, Trump secured the release of Aya Hijazi, and Egyptian-American humanitarian worker, from an Egyptian prison.7 “We called the president of Egypt,” Trump said, “and he released her. She was there for a long time—three years. And the previous administration was unable to get her out. A fantastic young woman. And she was released.”8
In June 2017, after Trump opened a dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Warmbier was finally released from a North Korean prison, where he had apparently been tortured. Otto was unable to see or speak when he arrived in the United States; he died days later.9
In November 2017, three members of the UCLA basketball team were arrested and detained in Hangzhou, China. Charged with shoplifting from a Louis Vuitton store, each man faced ten years in prison. Trump intervened and secured their release and return to the United States.10
In May 2018, Pyongyang released three US citizens. President Trump and the first lady journeyed to Joint Base Andrews, in Maryland, to meet them upon their arrival at three a.m.11
During the ceremony, Trump offered “warmest respects to the parents of Otto Warmbier, who was a great young man who really suffered.”12
Two weeks later, Trump helped secure the release of Joshua Holt, who had been arrested in Venezuela, and imprisoned there for nearly two years without trial.13
By this time, Trump was beginning to develop quite a track record of releases. “You were a tough one, I have to tell you,” he told Holt. “That was a tough situation. But we’ve had 17 released, and we’re very proud of that record. Very proud. And we have others coming.”14
By June 2019, other countries were asking Trump for help in getting citizens of their countries released from foreign prisons. Even the once condescending Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was seeking the American president’s help.15 Trump’s reputation as a negotiator, once a source of amusement among diplomats, was now becoming an accepted reality. If you want something done, go to the Donald. But you may have to be willing to offer something to America in return.
Was Trump succeeding in ways that previous presidents had not? Were the circumstances different? What was he saying and doing to get hostages released?
SEIZING ANDREW BRUNSON
One of the more intriguing examples of a Trump rescue involved the safe return of Andrew Craig Brunson from a prison in Turkey. Brunson was the pastor of the Resurrection Church in Izmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Thanks to a green light from the president, access from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and a phone call from the president’s friend Paula White, I was able to talk to Brunson at length and get his story firsthand.
An American citizen, Andrew Brunson was arrested in October 2016, just before the presidential election. In July of that year, an attempted coup against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan failed, and the reaction was a massive roundup of military personnel, academics, educators, and any other public figures that authorities deemed suspicious.
In all, more than 100,000 people were deported or arrested. Some languished in prisons without charges or explanation. Erdoğan was using the occasion to rid the country of political opposition.
Just how Brunson ended up on Erdoğan’s list was not known to US officials for several years. Requests from the American government for informat
ion were ignored. In violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Turkey denied Pastor Brunson a meeting with a US consulate representative and refused to allow members of his church to provide him with food, water, or clothing. Brunson didn’t gain access to an attorney until two months after his arrest. Meanwhile, the Turkish government labeled him “an armed member of a terrorist organization.”
Pastor Brunson was accused of crimes that included links to the Fethullahist terrorist organization. The leader of this group, Fethullah Gulen, was living in exile in the United States. Gulen was Erdoğan’s public enemy number one.
Brunson was also accused of aiding the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). He was accused of political or military espionage, attempting to overthrow the government, attempting to overthrow the Turkish Grand National Assembly, and attempting to overthrow the constitutional order.
It was impossible for Brunson to refute any of the charges, since the Turkish government offered no evidence. Brunson himself was not even interrogated, which was alarming to some at the American embassy in Ankara. It appeared obvious that the Turkish government was looking not for facts, but for a guilty verdict.
Years later, when the case finally came to trial, the American authorities were able to fully understand what the Turkish government was doing. An unidentified witness testified that Brunson was guilty because a light had been on for four hours in a room on the second floor of the Resurrection Church. This was part of the Turkish government’s proof.
There was no window on the second floor of the church.
Another unidentified witness testified that a contact named “Jacqueline” had sent a video of a popular food dish composed of meat, rice, and vegetables and named maklube to Pastor Brunson’s phone. Maklube was served at religious gatherings of the Fethullahist terrorist cells. It turned out that Jacqueline was Brunson’s own daughter. And, yes, she was indeed guilty of liking maklube.