John bolton

So Lev Parnas is now swanning about with Rachel Maddow? It seems that Maddow scored an exclusive interview with Parnas that will air this evening. She’s going to #letlevspeak, as he seeks to complete his transformation from Trump accomplice to aggrieved accuser. Is this finally the bombshell that Trump detractors have been waiting for lo these many years, the interview of interviews, the revelation that can prompt even the recalcitrant see-no-evil, hear-no-evil Republican senators to blanch?For all its claims that the Senate impeachment trial is supposed to vindicate Trump, the administration seems to be practicing an oath of omerta at the moment. The State Department canceled two scheduled appearances on Capitol Hill today, one featuring Brian Hook, its point man on Iran.

President Trump may be pulling out of Syria, but it’s bombs away in Washington. John Bolton’s likening Rudy Giuliani to a 'hand grenade' has now prompted America’s mayor to fire back that his old chum is an 'atomic bomb'. Both may be right.As the president complains about a lack of transparency in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, enough information is surfacing to make it clear that the testimony of former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill administered another body blow to Trump’s claim that his July telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fine and dandy. Hill apparently testified that Bolton wanted nothing to do with a Ukrainian scheme that he likened to a 'drug deal' and told her to speak with White House lawyers.

President Trump proudly unveiled a new national security adviser on Wednesday who looks the part: Robert C. O’Brien, the State Department’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. A tanned Californian, with a successful law career based in Los Angeles, O’Brien has spent time in mid-level State Department roles when not making his living in international arbitration. He is a comparatively unknown figure and so the question hangs in the air: is Trump’s new NSA a sober diplomat, 'Bolton Lite', or something else? O’Brien was not an immediate public contender for the job. But DC insider speculation proved fruitless. Purported favorites like belligerent ambassador Ric Grenell, realist Ret. Col.

With the appointment of Robert C. O’Brien to serve as national security adviser, Donald Trump will once more disappoint his America First backers. They were hoping that Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor would get the nod. Instead, Trump has gone with a Republican establishment figure who views China as the biggest threat to American national security. As always, Trump was bullish on his new hire: 'I have worked long & hard with Robert. He will do a great job!' As Trump national security adviser number 4, O’Brien is expected to bring some calm to the roiling waters of the NSC, where its heads have repeatedly capsized, whether it's Michael Flynn, H.R. McMaster, or John Bolton.

John Bolton has left the White House and those of us who desire some modicum of peace in this world can breathe a sigh of relief. Bolton was appointed to serve as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser barely a year and a half ago, succeeding H.R. McMaster. It was always a strange choice: Trump’s foreign policy is premised largely on hard-nosed (and often hard-of-luck) deal brokering, while Bolton’s preferred method is to bomb other countries. This is the man who has no regrets about the calamitous occupation of Iraq, who wanted to assassinate Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who seemed to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and who lamented that we didn’t destroy the Syrian regime all the way back in 2003.

Donald Trump is declaring that he has fired John Bolton as national security adviser. Bolton is saying he offered to resign. It’s par for the course for the Trump administration where no one really gets to leave on their own terms. How long before Bolton writes his own tell-all? Or did he sign an NDA?Trump, who views staffing his administration as a kind of casting call, was never comfortable with Bolton’s 'I am the Walrus' mustache but after tiring of H.R. McMaster, he tapped him for the job of national security adviser. Now, Trump is declaring that he 'strongly disagreed with many of his suggestions.' This is probably the precursor to a future tweet declaring how Bolton was a loser and bum whom Trump never wanted on the premises in the first place but begged for a post.

When Politico reported Wednesday that President Donald Trump was considering having Sen. Rand Paul, meet diplomatically with Iranian officials, conservative talk show host Mark Levin wasn’t having it. Levin asked sarcastically on Twitter, 'Would Rand Paul be representing us or Iran?' Then Levin tore into Paul further, as reported by the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon. The talk host’s criticisms of the senator are so ideologically twisted, only decipherable through a dated Bush-Cheney-era foreign policy lens, that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s break his hysteria down sentence by sentence. 'I don't trust Rand Paul when it comes to foreign policy,' Levin said, 'because he's an ideologue.

Peter Thiel. Tucker Carlson. John Bolton. What’s most striking about the trio headlining the National Conservatism Conference is that none of the three has ever been elected to anything.Bolton may be national security adviser, but judging by his recent exile to Outer Mongolia and his stymied efforts to force regime change in Iran, his influence is ebbing. He may be rejoining the civilian corps soon enough.So why is a major new conference so honoring these folks? The question could be inverted. Why aren’t we hearing from over 200 Republican members of Congress? Sen. Josh Hawley, a freshman, will close Tuesday night at the NCC, but his address seems to have been a late addition.

Fred Fleitz doesn’t like me. When I last saw national security adviser John Bolton’s former chief of staff, in January, he told me my journalism was ‘crap,’ that I was ‘crap,’ and that he ‘didn’t have anything to say’ to me. Fair enough. This was the second time I’d tangled with Fleitz, a career conservative, civil servant and intelligence officer. Our first interaction came before he became Bolton’s chief of staff in 2018. Fleitz had publicly condemned my profile of his ally and mentor, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, controversial in his own right, has since been entirely decent to me. But Fleitz is both Gaffney and Bolton’s pitbull, and seems to have no time for less than obsequious journalists.

Will President Trump switch up his ticket in 2020? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, bastion of the establishment right, certainly hopes so. A little over a week ago, it called for former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to replace the dutiful Mike Pence as vice president. But there’s well-placed chatter in Washington that suggests the president will take a different route. Trump does indeed feel he needs VP change, but it is not Nikki Haley he is considering. It is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.The Trump 2020 campaign needs panache, not more cash. If Trump wants to make a switch – as both his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, flirted with doing – why would he lean further into the establishment?

The president of the United States weighed retaliatory airstrikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran before pulling back at the eleventh hour, he confirmed Friday morning. 'We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it,' Donald Trump tweeted. He said the planned response was not 'proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone,' referring to the recent malign activity from the regime. 'I am in no hurry,' he caveated. 'He just tweeted it out,' Alex Ward, defense reporter at Vox, joked. Ward refers to a swirl of chatter that engulfed Washington Thursday night.