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Bannon Loses National Security Council Role in Trump Shakeup (bloomberg.com)

Top presidential strategist Steve Bannon has been booted from the National Security Council amid a reshuffling of the key panel, Bloomberg reports Wednesday morning. President Donald Trump reorganized the council, removing Bannon and downgrading the role of his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, the report added, citing multiple sources. From the report: Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, was elevated to the National Security Council's principals committee at the beginning of Trump's presidency. The move drew criticism from some members of Congress and Washington's foreign policy establishment. A White House official said that Bannon was placed on the committee in part to monitor Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and never attended a meeting. He's no longer needed with McMaster in charge of the council, the official said. Trump fired Flynn on Feb. 13 for not disclosing to the president or to Vice President Mike Pence the extent of his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, before Trump's inauguration.

13 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well that's all interesting and good... by Mashiki · · Score: 2, Informative

    Name a media outlet that was silent on the Susan Rice story. I'll wait...

    CNN? MSNBC? They also have pulled a CNN.

    ... Unmasking isn't something she can do without asking permission from the relevant intelligence agency.

    Then I'm sure you can answer how she was able to unmask without the permission of those agencies then, since the order appears to have come directly from her. Or the fact that she ordered detailed spreadsheets on specific people in the Trump camp. This of course is also while she claimed she didn't do it. I'm going to note that DC isn't the only site that has made this claim either, so has the WSJ and Bloomberg.

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    Om, nomnomnom...
  2. Why is /dot reporting that story? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It used to be a site for the tech and science news

  3. Re:Remember kids... by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 2, Informative

    On a related note, Trump had played twice as much golf in two months than Obama did in eight years.

    Alternate facts? Obama played 333 rounds of golf in 8 years. Assuming 5 hours per round, that would be 70 days non-stop, 24/7 golfing. I don't think President Trump has golfed that much, yet...

    --
    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  4. Re:Well that's all interesting and good... by quantaman · · Score: 3, Informative

    But how come no story on Susan Rice having unmasked multiple people in the Trump camp.

    Because /. doesn't cover every non-story put out by the Trump camp.

    It should be noted that she stated "she didn't do it, and had no knowledge of it." And of course that was proven untrue.

    Citation? My hunch is the usage of this quote doesn't match the context.

    And now we're seeing the claims making the rounds of "It wasn't political" but why wasn't the FBI involved then?

    Because the US has multiple intelligence agencies.

    Why did she do something that was outside of the preview of her job(advise the President and consume intelligence summaries)? Why does this appear to have been a case of her setting a new precedent(the unmasking).

    That's not only within the realm of her job, it's a great example of actually doing your job.

    People affiliated with an incoming administration are having clandestine meetings with agents for foreign powers who helped decide the election? Some unmasking is warranted.

    Why were they unmasked by her, when all 3 letter agencies could do this on their own if they're conducting an investigation.

    For the same reason the NSA decided to approve her request, because the unmasking was warranted.

    And of course, why are so many of the media silent on this. When they were all over other major events similar to this and licking their chops like a dog seeing a steak. Well you can all have fun now.

    Because they recognize it's just another attempt by Trump and his defenders to distract from his completely made-up claims that he was wire-tapped. And to distract from the many, many, unsettling ties from his camp to Russia.

    Seriously, you think this was political shenanigans? Then why didn't it come out during the election? Tons of these links were being investigated during the election but it was only the media who actually uncovered anything. The closest thing we saw to a leak from the government was Democratic Legislators complaining that there were incriminating things not being released. Meanwhile, we heard non-stop about the investigation into Clinton and her emails, including leaks. One of the reasons Comey apparently announced the temporary re-opening of the investigation just before the election is that he didn't think he could stop his office from leaking!

    If the investigations into Trump were politically motivated you would have heard about them in October.

    --
    I stole this Sig
  5. Re:Well that's all interesting and good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The segments are on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/result...

  6. Re: Hitlery will not be running for office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Please for the love of god do not refer to Trump as a libertarian. He has as many anti-libertarian positions as pro-libertarian positions, and is better described as a fascist. I apologize for going all Godwin, but calling Trump libertarian is like calling Hitler a socialist because he was head of the national socialist party.

    Libertarians hate him as much as anyone else does, for many of the same reasons as anyone else.

    So sad to see the libertarian label co-opted by nutcases.

    As to the point of this thread, I think Trump winning can be attributed to the following:

    1. Unrepresentative elections in the form of the electoral college.
    2. Widespread distrust of establishment on both sides of the political aisle.
    4. Hillary in particular having a particular cultural-historical-political role in the US as a lightning rod for conservative-leaning individuals.

  7. Re:Remember kids... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Oh for fuck's sake - the damage, deaths and increasing risk from terrorist attacks (You might've heard of one in St. Petersberg this week?) is far more provable and factual than ANYTHING theoretically caused by AGW.

    Want to make people safe? Why don't we put them all in safety cribs from womb to the tomb, feed them and drug them and keep them compliant to the state. Oh wait - that's what YOU want!

    Because everyone knows that the provably lowest crime and "safest" states are the socialist dictatorships.

    You have no claim to reason or rationale in your posts - just puerile, jingoistic, superstitious ideologies based on no factual information WHATSOEVER.

  8. Re:Remember kids... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't think President Trump has golfed that much, yet...

    I found a different article (see below) that described the situation more precisely. Obama golfed every nine days in eight years. Trump golfed every five days for the first two months. Trump's golfing is twice the rate of Obama's golfing.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-trump-playing-golf-is-just-another-day-at-the-office-2017-03-31

  9. Re:Well that's all interesting and good... by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Informative

    Zero? Under "Everything", it's the first 3 links. Under "Stories", it's the first 4 links.

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    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  10. Re: This is relevant, how? by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Informative

    So you're one of those fake 'progressive libertarians.' This is what happened to the term 'liberal.' You're just more of the same really. If you were truly for small government you would not buy into the idea of class warfare that today's social justice requires as a basis. Regardless of what you claim to be, such ideas most definitely have a basis in marxism (eg: "we have nothing to lose but our chains").

    I found today's "No True Scotsman" comment.

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    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  11. Re:The Cooker by denzacar · · Score: 4, Informative

    Got any water left in that mud of yours?

    President Trump's wild charge that Susan Rice committed a crime, explained

    What we're seeing now, in short, is not a legitimate debate about the threat posed to civil liberties by improper unmasking.
    We are seeing a toxic combination of Trump's penchant for wild speculation, a right-wing media echo chamber, and the legacy of the Benghazi controversy coming together to produce an absurd pile-on - one that seems to have brought the Republican Party together around their remaining hatred for Rice and the Obama administration.

    What the article fails to mention though, is that all this water-muddying is taking place at the same time as Trump's "foreign policy adviser" Carter Page admitted, publicly, that he was "unmasked" by the FBI - as being recruited by the Russian spies.
    Russian Spies Tried to Recruit Carter Page Before He Advised Trump

    Two years before joining the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser, New York business consultant Carter Page was targeted for recruitment as an intelligence source by Russian spies promising favors for business opportunities in Russia, according to a sealed FBI complaint.

    Page confirmed to ABC News that he is the individual identified as "Male-1" in a 2015 court document submitted in a case involving the Russian spies.

    Unmasking people recruited by foreign spies is BAD, mkay? Just trust in Trump and look the other way.

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    Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
  12. Re:Well that's all interesting and good... by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1, Informative

    18 USC 798 and 50 USC 1809. Yes. The same laws that the Democrats were so worked up when Dick Armitage leaked Valerie Plame. Leaking classified information - something the Obama/Clinton crime syndicates love to do - appears to be a standard modus operandi for the Democrats.

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    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  13. Much ado about nothing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    People need to go back to the beginning of the admin to see (not headlines, actual atricle CONTENT) that there was never any "there" there on the whole Bannon/NSC issue.

    Before Trump had a reasonably full cabinet (which he still does not have, thanks to Senate Democrats) his people listed Banon as attending NSC meetings and the anti-Trumpers on both the left and right went insane with faux outrage. "Such a thing has NEVER been done!" was the general theme. It was then pointed out that actually both Bush43 and Obama had allowed/invited political advisors equivalent to Bannon to sit in on those meetings, but without officially listing them and telling the press corps, thus making this listing of Bannon an act of transparency. The story suddnly dissappeared - nothing - crickets... Bannon's attendance went from world-ending nightmare to not even worthy of discussion on all the mainstream news outlets. Now that a near-full cabinet is in place, including a full national security team, Bannon (who is a former US Navy intelligence officer, and thus was not so out-of-place as formerly presumed) will no longer be in those meetings (but he retains his clearances and ability to sit-in). Net change? Not much..... but now it's SHOCKING news that he's not going to be in ALL the meetings going forward that it used to be SHOCKING that he would be in [facepalm].

    Bannon is despised by the Left, so there will be all sorts of glee by idiots who do not pay attention to details and who think this is a sign of a rift and impending departure. People forget that Bannon joined Trump's campaign team to help him win the election, and succeeded rather spectacularly at that in an environment where everybody on Earth seemed convinced Trump could not win. There was never any public commitment that Bannon would even stay-on for any permanent admin role. He'll stay with Trump for as long as both agree the arrangement is agreeable - it's rather typical.