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McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers. "In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right....

How did this happen?The House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday released the much-anticipated “Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report.”The Democrats accused President Trump of abusing his power, obstruction and witness intimidation.  Schiff also obtained his own committee’s ranking member GOP Rep. Devin Nunes and Nunes’s aide Derek Harvey’s phone records as part of the “impeachment inquiry.”“It is deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Schiff said on...

The departure of national security adviser H.R. McMaster and his replacement by former U.N. ambassador John Bolton are both significant and welcome. Bolton will be a team player on Team Trump and not someone with his own agenda who seeks the advice and counsel of those trying to undermine the Trump administration. Leaks such as the one of the memo warning President Trump not to congratulate Vladimir Putin on Putin's re-election will undoubtedly stop, as McMaster and his staff were viewed as the source for many of them.

Monday, August 07, 2017 Understanding the McMaster NSC Purge Posted by Daniel Greenfield Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it. The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from. It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser...

National security adviser H.R. McMaster has started to clean house at the National Security Council, firing two staffers originally hired by Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser shown the door for lying about his communications with Russia, and loyal to Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Last week, McMaster fired Derek Harvey, the National Security Council's top official for the Middle East, The Atlantic reports. And this week, McMaster lowered the boom on Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence. The White House said of Cohen-Watnick's firing that McMaster "has determined that, at this time, a different...

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda. His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking. Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in...

Derek Harvey, a top adviser on the Middle East to President Donald Trump, was fired from the National Security Council on Thursday. Harvey's departure comes amid speculation about major shake-ups at the White House, the Weekly Standard reports. These shake-ups include possible conflicts between Trump and both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Two sources told the Standard that Harvey's departure was not a direct product of staff fighting, but that several top administration members saw Harvey as too close to White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon. Harvey was apparently a strong advocate of Trump's decision...

National security adviser H.R. McMaster continues to purge conservatives from the ranks of the National Security Council.On Thursday, McMaster fired Col. Derek Harvey, a renowned Middle East expert who served under Gen. David Petraeus. Neither the White House nor the National Security Council gave a reason for Harvey’s firing.Harvey is recognized in national security circles as a brilliant Middle East strategist. The Weekly Standard (which first reported Harvey’s firing) describes him as an “out-of-the-box thinker who has shown a keen knack for identifying threats before they’ve matured.” The report then cites a passage from Bob Woodward’s 2008 book “The War...

Derek Harvey was the key figure when it came to the Middle East. He was against the Iran Deal and the funding of Palestinian Authority terror. He called out Islamic Jihad. He tried to force out the Obama holdovers running our foreign policy. And now he's gone. McMaster's purge at the NSC continues. Flynn's people get forced out and replaced with establishment zombies. The Obama holdovers continue to run foreign policy. The swamp is now in full control of the NSC. This one is a really big win for McMaster. And a great loss for America. It will set back...