Officials reveal Trump admin has ordered substantial staff cuts to agency at center of whistleblower complaint
Late on Friday night, Bloomberg quietly announced that the Trump administration would be making “substantial” cuts to America’s 310-person National Security Council. Five officials familiar with the matter say that the request came from White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and new NSC chief Robert O’Brien, who replaced the outgoing John Bolton.
While some of the officials insisted that this was part of an effort to “increase efficiency” at the agency, the timing of the cuts so soon after a whistleblower complaint related to the NSC’s work led to the beginning of an impeachment inquiry is raising eyebrows across the nation.
That whistleblower revealed that the President and his lawyers had been hiding the transcripts of incriminating phone calls on classified NSC servers.
On Friday, Trump retweeted an unproven allegation that the whistleblower was a CIA official assigned to the NSC by President Obama, with the implication, of course, is that the whistleblower is part of a conspiracy by the Democrats and the “deep state” to sabotage the president.
BREAKING: The whistleblower is a registered Democrat & CIA analyst who was detailed before the 2016 election to the Obama White House,where he worked on the NSC's Ukraine desk & met w anti-Trump Ukrainian officials before being sent packing by the Trump NSC & becoming disgruntled
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) October 4, 2019
Once voters understand that Trump was set up and framed by intelligence ops like the whistleblower in 2016, falsely accused of being a Russian agent, then impeachment will be seen for what it is — a political putsch to cover their tracks.
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) October 4, 2019
That narrative, desperately being pushed by the Trump team, doesn’t really mesh with the fact that the most damning evidence of wrongdoing — the transcript of the now infamous call between President Trump and Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky — was released by the White House itself, but Trumpworld has never been too concerned with consistency.
But given the president’s demonstrated obsession with hunting and purging disloyal elements from his administration, it’s hard to see this surprising cut to NSC staff as anything but retaliatory pushback against the agency that ended up exposing even more of his corrupt and potentially illegal behavior for the whole world to see.
Original reporting by Jennifer Jacobs and Justin Sink at Bloomberg.
