This man's name arose recently from Q. He surely looks like a Mil Intell operative and part of the team handling planing and implementation of the PLAN.
We also have Senate control and a shift to senate oversight for the DOJ and the FBI. We also have Q noting that Gowdy, Goodlatte, and Sessions are all free agents and also central to the PLAN.
Please do not forget Gen Flynn who is surely in charge of the PLAN.
Do you feel the Noose tightening?Now read this.
The Man McMaster Couldn't Fire
Thirty-one-year-old
Ezra Cohen-Watnick holds the intelligence portfolio on the National
Security Council—but almost everything about him is a mystery.
Rosie Gray
Just 24 days into his tenure
as Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, Michael Flynn was forced
to resign, having reportedly misled Vice President Mike Pence about his
contacts with Russian officials. When Flynn departed, the men and women
he’d appointed to the National Security Council grew nervous about their
own jobs, and with good reason. The new national-security adviser,
General H.R. McMaster, promptly began clearing out Flynn’s people, among
them Dave Cattler, the deputy assistant to the president for regional
affairs, Adam Lovinger, a strategic affairs analyst on loan from the
Pentagon, and KT McFarland, Flynn’s deputy, who was eased out with the
ambassadorship to Singapore. Even Steve Bannon, among the most powerful
people in the White House, was removed from the meetings of the NSC
Principal’s Committee, where he had been installed early on in the
administration.
There
was one person, however, who McMaster couldn’t get rid of: Ezra
Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence programs. McMaster
tried to remove him in March, but President Trump, at the urging of
Bannon and Jared Kushner, told McMaster that Cohen-Watnick was staying,
as first reported by Politico.
According to a senior White House official, the two men had a sit-down
meeting the following week in which McMaster acknowledged that he hadn’t
been able to do what he wanted to do, and that they would keep things
as they are and “see how they go for a while.” That was over four months
ago. That Cohen-Watnick, 31 years old and largely unknown before
entering the administration, has become unfireable reveals how important
he has become to the Trump White House, where loyalty is prized.
The
senior in Cohen-Watnick’s title reflects the importance of his job, if
not the level of experience he brings to it. The senior director for
intelligence programs on the NSC is a powerful position, designed to
coordinate and liaise between the U.S. intelligence community and the
White House.
"If the incumbent has an effective working
relationship with the national-security adviser or even the president
directly, the senior director for intelligence has an opportunity to
exercise considerable influence on intelligence policy, covert actions,
and sensitive collection operations," said Stephen Slick, a former CIA
official who held the position during the Bush administration.
The
CIA has traditionally had control over who fills this position, and
normally the job is staffed by a more experienced official. McMaster,
assuming he’d be allowed to relieve or reassign Cohen-Watnick, had gone
so far as to interview Cohen-Watnick’s potential replacement, Linda Weissgold, a veteran CIA officer.Despite his prominent, and apparently quite secure, position in Trump’s NSC, little is known about Cohen-Watnick, who had spent much of his short career as a low-ranking official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Information about him in publicly available sources is scarce. Few higher-ups from the DIA remember him. Only one picture of him can be found online, a snapshot unearthed by Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen.
Unlike
other White House officials who have become public figures in their own
right, Cohen-Watnick never speaks for himself publicly, leaving others
to fill the void. Yet he hardly comes into sharper focus when you talk
to co-workers, friends, and former colleagues. Ask around about Ezra
Cohen-Watnick, and people get defensive. Some profess not to know him,
or ask why anyone would want to write about him. Others simply refuse to
discuss him.
“I won’t talk to any journalist about Ezra,” said Michael Ledeen, a Flynn confidant who knows Cohen-Watnick well.
“Is it one of your hit pieces?” asked Bannon, who didn’t respond to a further request for comment.
Bannon
and Ledeen may be wary of talking about Cohen-Watnick after his first,
and thus far only, turn in the national spotlight. Washington got its
first real look at Cohen-Watnick when he was identified as one of two
White House sources who provided House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes
with evidence that former national security adviser Susan Rice
requested the “unmasking” of the names of Trump associates in
intelligence documents. In the intelligence world, incidental collection
refers to intelligence agencies obtaining, in the course of monitoring
foreigners, communications that either refer to or involve Americans,
whose names are typically “masked” unless officials request that they be
“unmasked.”
The incident, coming in the aftermath of
Trump baselessly accusing his predecessor of wiretapping Trump Tower,
became one of the first dust-ups related to the investigations into
possible Russian collusion during the 2016 campaign that have gripped
the White House. The president later accused Rice of having committed a
crime; for her part, Rice has denied that she ordered the unmasking for
political purposes.+
Despite
that early controversy, Cohen-Watnick retains one of the most
consequential intelligence jobs in the nation, and his influence is
rising. He is in the thick of some of the most important policy fights
at the White House; he is viewed as an Iran hawk and has been characterized,
for instance, as a main proponent of expanding U.S. efforts against
Iran-backed militias in Syria. And beyond policy specifics, he’s become a
flashpoint in the long-running tension between Trump and the
intelligence community, a part of the U.S. government that the president
has at times openly disdained.
Yet what we don’t know
about Cohen-Watnick far outstrips what we do. Was he a central player in
the Nunes scandal, or just a bystander? Has he retained his job due to
his talent, or is he being protected because he's advancing the agenda
of powerful West Wing patrons? What, besides loyalty to the president,
are his credentials? Is he Flynn's mole on the council, or does he not
even know the deposed national-security adviser all that well? Is he
brash and difficult to work with, or modest and brilliant? And perhaps
most important: Now that he has the president’s ear, what will he
whisper into it?
Cohen-Watnick was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland,
an affluent suburb of Washington. His father is a lawyer; his mother a
doctor; the couple is separated. Liberal, affluent Montgomery County is
not exactly a hotbed of right-wing sentiment. Hillary Clinton and Tim
Kaine won 74 percent of the vote there in 2016.
Cohen-Watnick
attended Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School, graduating in 2004. It was
in high school when Cohen-Watnick seems to have become politically
active. One person who knew him at the time said that, together with a
friend, Cohen-Watnick set up a table outside the Barnes and Noble in
downtown Bethesda in the summer of 2003 to “just sort of argue with
people about the Iraq War ... just to get into fights with Bethesda
liberals.” A White House official denied this anecdote, saying it was
“false.”
“Ezra’s politics are not at all normal for the
cultural milieu in which he grew up,” this person said. (Cohen-Watnick
did, however, intern for then-Senator Joe Biden in high school.)
Cohen-Watnick
entered the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2004. He struck
one classmate there at the time as a libertarian, but over the years
seemed to shift in a more hawkish direction, the classmate said.
Cohen-Watnick was involved in an on-campus Terrorism Awareness Week
connected to the controversial conservative writer David Horowitz’s
“Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events.
"We need people to be passionate about the problem of terrorism,” he’s quoted as saying in a Daily Pennsylvanian article about the event, advocating more courses devoted to the subject.
As a sophomore, Cohen-Watnick told The Daily Pennsylvanian
that from a young age he had wanted to serve in the Navy. “Cohen said
it was very important to him to be able to give back to something he has
benefitted from—in this case, the national security that has kept
generations of his family safe,” the paper reported.
But
in September 2007, he also told a friend that his main goal was working
for the CIA. Cohen-Watnick talked about his goal of becoming a spy “all
the time,” this person said. “He did talk about the DIA,” this person
said. “He always talked about it as the backup to his CIA goals.”
One
White House colleague who has known Cohen-Watnick for a long time
described 9/11 as a formative event for him, and remarked that members
of his age group were old enough to remember the attack vividly, but
young enough that it happened before they had embarked on careers. This
person pointed out that Cohen-Watnick’s career path was unusual for his
milieu: “Not many folks from our sort of sphere were making the decision
to go into public service.”
Cohen-Watnick’s
history becomes murkier around 2008, his final year at Penn. His friend
from school says the last time they saw him or heard from him was
before the spring semester that year. Cohen-Watnick is listed on an
online roster among a group that attended the Penn in D.C. internship
program in Washington in 2008, in his case interning with the Office of
Naval Intelligence. Cohen-Watnick took a civilian job with the Navy
after college.
A DIA spokesperson confirmed that
Cohen-Watnick had joined the DIA in 2010, and left it in January of
2017, but would otherwise not confirm or comment on the details of his
service. One colleague of Cohen-Watnick’s said that his last job was
three or four ranks higher than the one in which he began.
Newsweek reported
that Cohen-Watnick entered the Defense Clandestine Service in 2012 and
was sent to “The Farm,” the CIA training facility in Virginia, in 2013. Al-Monitor’s
Laura Rozen reported on Twitter that Cohen-Watnick had done work on
Haiti while based out of the Department of Defense’s Miami office.
Records show he registered to vote in 2012 with a Miami address, as a
Republican and as a Hispanic male (his mother is Colombian).
According
to a former senior intelligence official, Cohen-Watnick later served
overseas in Afghanistan at a CIA base. “He was embedded with the Agency
guys,” said a person familiar with Cohen-Watnick’s career. “But the
Agency guys were all like ‘Fuck this guy, he’s just here to spy on us
for Flynn and the DIA.’”
A White House official said
that Cohen-Watnick did not know Flynn at the time he was in Afghanistan
but did not dispute that there were “rivalries between CIA and DIA.”
It
was Cohen-Watnick’s connection with Michael Flynn that would catapult
him into the top ranks of America’s intelligence officials. But even the
seemingly straightforward question of how and when they met yields
contradictory and conflicting accounts. One person familiar with his
career asserted that Cohen-Watnick had met Matt Flynn, Michael Flynn’s
son, at “The Farm.” Another, a former senior intelligence official, said
he had briefed Flynn at the DIA.
According
to a third person familiar with the matter, the real story is that
Cohen-Watnick actually met Flynn much later, in 2016, at a coffee
arranged by Michael Ledeen’s wife Barbara, who Cohen-Watnick knows from
growing up outside of Washington. Ledeen is a friend of Flynn’s and
co-authored the book Field of Fight with him. Barbara introduced him to
Cohen-Watnick; the couple connected the young officer with Flynn, and
the two kept in touch over the course of the year. Flynn became a
prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign, famously leading a “lock her
up” chant at the Republican National Convention, and was even
considered as the running mate.
Flynn’s
time at the helm of the DIA was notoriously troubled. The general came
in with a brash approach that rubbed his colleagues the wrong way and
eventually led to his being forced out in 2014 by then-Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper and Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence Mike Vickers.
This appears to have been a
time at which Cohen-Watnick was at a crossroads. In the summer of 2016,
Cohen, unhappy at the DIA, began applying for positions on Capitol Hill,
interviewing with the House Armed Services Committee, a congressional
staffer said. He was notified on August 16, 2016, that he wouldn’t be
getting the job. Later that year, in November, Cohen-Watnick married
Rebecca Miller, according to a notice on his family’s synagogue’s
website.
Trump’s election changed everything for
Cohen-Watnick, as it did for many people in Washington. He was chosen
for the NSC job during the transition, surprising his new colleagues.
“I
didn’t know Ezra from Adam,” said one former intelligence officer who
is a member of the NSC. “I didn’t know what job he was going to have in
the transition. I met him a few times. I didn’t realize he was running
it at first.”
“It’s
a very important position and essentially it’s a deep cull,” said a
White House colleague who has known Cohen-Watnick for years. “It’s an
early pick.” This official described Cohen-Watnick as someone who would
seem like a natural choice for the job in five or 10 years’ time, but
not now.
“It is noteworthy that someone with very
limited experience (a very junior GG-12 in DIA) is appointed to such a
senior and critical position,” said Doug Wise, who was for a time
Flynn’s top deputy at the DIA . (GG-12 is the equivalent of an Army
captain in the DIA; Cohen-Watnick’s rank before he left was actually
GS-13, equivalent to a major, according to a source familiar with his
career). “This is especially noteworthy when you compare Cohen to some
of the individuals who have served in that position, George Tenet, David
Shedd, Mary Sturtevant, Stephen Slick, and other very experienced
officers were already members of the Senior Intelligence Service when
they were appointed. These and the other officers who served in that
position were career intelligence officials with serious credentials,
demonstrated maturity, and a wealth of experience."
One way or another,
Michael Flynn seems to have elevated Cohen-Watnick to his high station
in the Trump administration. What remains a mystery is who exactly has
protected him since Flynn went down, and why.
Cohen-Watnick’s
ability to hang on despite the direct attempt by his superior to remove
him raised eyebrows across Washington, and especially in the
intelligence world.
“It is very unusual that when H.R.
McMaster tried to move Cohen to another position within the NSC, his
decision was publicly overturned by the president,” Wise said. “This
says much more about Cohen’s political connections than his experience
in the intelligence business."
Here, again, multiple
officials directly familiar with the events offer contrasting versions
of what took place. Some insist that Kushner and Bannon were willing to
expend capital on behalf of Cohen-Watnick. According to one person with
direct knowledge of the meeting, the roots of their loyalty to
Cohen-Watnick stem from a briefing he delivered during Trump’s first
visit to the White House situation room in February, at which Kushner
was present as well as Pence. Kushner and the president were apparently
impressed with the young briefer and took an interest in him.
“Ezra
is deeply thoughtful, hard working, and committed to serving the
president,” Kushner said, offering a rare on-the-record comment, which
is itself a testament to Cohen-Watnick’s importance.
But
a favorable first impression doesn’t quite explain the president
intervening to prevent his boss from removing him. Others stressed his
commitment to Trump’s worldview, such as it is Trump’s foreign policy
statements have been long on rhetoric, but short on specifics—prompting
leading figures within the White House to contend for influence, seeking
to persuade the president to back their preferred approaches. Those
drawn from the ranks of the Republican foreign-policy establishment tend
to favor its traditional views: committed to longstanding alliances
like NATO, skeptical of Russia, and supportive of nation-building in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Others, who supported Trump’s insurgent campaign
early on, tend to favor the ideas he advocated on the stump: concern
that allies are freeloading, interest in strengthening ties with Russia,
and a focus on the threat posed Islamic extremism in nations like Iran.
This
split has created a decision-making process in which the responses to
each unfolding event can point in a different policy direction than the
last. After the Assad regime used chemical weapons against civilians in
April, for example, Trump ordered strikes against one of their airbases,
angering Syria's ally Russia. But the Trump administration recently
announced a ceasefire agreement for southwest Syria negotiated with
Russia.
In this context, a staffer who personally
briefs the president on his options can be an invaluable ally to other
senior officials. And in an administration that has struggled to fill
senior national-security roles with appointees sympathetic to Trump’s
ideas, a staffer whose views are closer to the president’s than to the
think-tanks that line Massachusetts Avenue may be too valuable to lose.
This
may be why several White House staffers used the same word to describe
Cohen-Watnick: loyal. One White House official praised Cohen-Watnick as a
"true professional and most importantly he is incredibly loyal to the
president and this administration.”
“He’s loyal to the
president and he’s made a super impression on everyone that deals with
him, me included,” said the former intelligence officer who is now a
senior NSC official.
The Nunes scandal cemented
Cohen-Watnick's reputation as a loyalist and as someone who could
withstand the heat of public controversy. But once more, different
officials offer flatly contradictory versions of what transpired.
The story was first reported by The New York Times,
and then expanded by other outlets. On the night of March 21, House
Intelligence chairman Nunes got a call from a source, jumped into
another car, and didn’t tell his staff where he was going. He was going,
it turned out, to the White House. The next day, Nunes gave a
now-infamous press conference at the Capitol in which he described how
“the intelligence community incidentally collected information about
U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.” Though the phrase
“incidental collection” by definition refers to the communications
individuals who are not targets of surveillance, Nunes’s statement was
taken by Trump supporters as vindication of the president’s tweet
accusing Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, an incident intelligence
chiefs have told Congress never happened.
Nunes claimed at one point that his source had been an intelligence official, not White House. Citing four U.S. officials, the Times later reported
that his sources on the intelligence reports were Cohen-Watnick and
Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office focused on
national security. But the question of who cleared Nunes onto White
House grounds, and why Cohen-Watnick was looking into the material, have
never been fully answered. The strong implication of the stories about
the incident has been that either Cohen-Watnick, Ellis, or both cleared
Nunes onto the campus.
But one official with knowledge
of the incident offered a sharply different account. Cohen-Watnick was
asked to look at unmasking procedures by a civil servant working in the
Situation Room as part of a review, this official claimed, weeks before
the Nunes visit to the White House. In a tweet on March 4, Trump had
accused the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower during the
election. Cohen-Watnick asked to see examples of unmasking and was given
a block-calendar year to review. In those, he saw “something that made
him concerned” and informed John Eisenberg, the NSC legal adviser.
Weeks
later, according to this official, Cohen-Watnick went over to
Eisenberg’s office on a different matter and found the door closed; he
was told that another White House staffer was inside the office with
Nunes. He did not enter the office. According to the official, this was
the extent of Cohen-Watnick’s involvement in the Nunes affair.
The
incident snowballed quickly. On March 27, Representative Adam Schiff,
the ranking member on HPSCI, called for Nunes to recuse himself. Nunes
eventually bowed to pressure—and an ethics complaint—and announced his
recusal on April 6. In doing so, he blamed “leftwing activist groups”
and said the charges against him were “entirely false and politically
motivated.”
(Nunes has gone on to claim that he never
recused himself from the investigation, and has issued subpoenas
relating to the probe. His spokesman did not respond to requests for an
interview for this story.)
Whether or not Cohen-Watnick
was actually one of Nunes's sources, the public reports tied him to the
controversy. They also left the impression that, to defend the president
against claims he had leveled unsubstantiated charges of wiretapping
against his predecessor, Cohen-Watnick had been prepared to attack the
actions of NSC officials and of other elements of the intelligence
community. The reports about the Nunes episode suggested to career
staffers, perhaps unfairly, that the NSC’s senior director for
intelligence was less interested in presenting their views to the
president than in imposing the president’s views on them.
Since
then, the conflicts within the NSC have settled down, at least
publicly. But this is the Trump White House, a hotbed of resentments
even when they're not spilling over into public view. Cohen-Watnick
survived, but he's remained a topic of gossip and a target of leaks—a
flashpoint in the ongoing fight over the administration’s foreign
policy.
The Washington Post reported in April that days after McMaster’s effort to remove Cohen-Watnick, the CIA’s liaison to the White House was fired. The Guardian’s story
on the firing cited sources describing it as an “act of retaliation”
against the CIA for encouraging McMaster to sack Cohen-Watnick, a report
unlikely to endear him to his colleagues.
But then,
McMaster himself became the target of unflattering leaks. In May,
Bloomberg reported that Trump had “screamed” at McMaster in a phone call
and had become “disillusioned” with him, and that Flynn loyalists on
the NSC perceived McMaster as trying to “trick” the president into
supporting nation-building efforts. Also in May, Foreign Policy
reported that “the knives are out” for McMaster over internal conflicts
on Afghanistan policy, with him on one side and Bannon on the other. Foreign Policy
noted that McMaster has become the target of online critics, most
notably Mike Cernovich, the pro-Trump activist and blogger. Cernovich
has also targeted other McMaster allies in the NSC such as Dina Powell.
Cernovich
has cited White House sources repeatedly in his reports, though he has
told me that he doesn’t know who his sources are and relies on burner
phones to keep in touch with them.
One of the most
recent McMaster-related leaks was to the AP last week; sources said
McMaster had told foreign officials he disapproves of Trump’s closeness
with Russia. The story made West Wing senior staff “furious,” according
to a senior White House official, who added “if true, a man of honor
would resign.”
The leaks have created an atmosphere of
suspicion on the NSC, where morale has never been particularly high
since the start of the administration. But they’re not always
unflattering; some leaks have suggested a prominent policy role for the
young staffer. Cohen-Watnick has developed a reputation as one of the
primary proponents of an aggressive, Flynn-style stance towards Iran
within the NSC. A recent story in The New York Times said that Cohen-Watnick was pushing for regime change in Iran from within the administration. And another recent story in Foreign Policy
tagged him and Derek Harvey, the NSC’s top official on Middle East
issues, as pushing for increased action against Iranian-backed forces in
Syria.
“I don’t think it was accurate at all,” said the former intelligence official on the NSC of the Foreign Policy
piece, calling it “fake news recycling other fake news.” This official
argued that Cohen-Watnick, in his role as the liaison between the White
House and intelligence agencies, has no purview over Iran policy: “I’ve
never heard Ezra talk about; it’s not in his lane and he’s not involved
in those regional policy discussions.”
Furthermore, this
official said, those who think NSC officials are exerting broad
influence over policy are misreading the current NSC by comparing it to
the Obama-era one, where “they were micromanagers who had a long
screwdriver and were fundamentally calling the shots even on tactical-
level operations in places like Syria and Iraq.”
“I’ve
never seen the media [more] united about a topic than around Ezra and
that’s a cause of curiosity amongst anyone with some sense of
skepticism,” said the White House official who is close to
Cohen-Watnick.
Cohen-Watnick’s allies see the leaks
about him as evidence of a concerted campaign backed by his detractors
in the intelligence community. They suggest that this is motivated by
his conflict with the CIA. And they have a different theory as to why he
has retained his job, and why he’s drawn attacks: It’s because, they
insist, he’s good at what he does.
“He’s a genuinely
funny, sardonic, very intelligent, interesting human. He’s not a robot
or the way he’s been portrayed,” said one of the senior White House
officials. “That human element has been I think completely lost in all
of the coverage of him.”
“He’s
very engaging, very personable, he tries to connect with people,” said
the former intelligence officer on the NSC. But he is “able to parse and
probe in a way that makes some of his interlocutors very
uncomfortable.” Plus, “the fact that he’s younger than many of these
people creates a natural backlash.”
This official
described a recent interagency meeting in which Cohen-Watnick was asking
about the reasons for covert programs in a country that “on the surface
seemed to make sense,” but Cohen “identified a waste of resources and
ineffective application,” a duplication of efforts costing an extra $30
million.
Cohen-Watnick’s intense approach, this person
said, “causes some people to respond negatively rather than saying a-ha,
this is a good thing, now we can reprogram.” CIA representatives pushed
back on Cohen-Watnick, and the atmosphere was “frustrated.”
Like
most people in this kind of job, Cohen-Watnick is a workaholic,
sometimes sleeping on his couch in case he has to respond to something
or go somewhere in the middle of the night, the White House colleague
who knows him well said. Asked what he does for fun, the colleague said
Cohen-Watnick works out and reads military history and philosophy.
It’s
an appealing account. The trouble is, like most everything else about
Cohen-Watnick, it’s all but impossible to verify, or to reconcile with
other versions. Perhaps it’s because he’s emerged so swiftly from the
murky world of intelligence. Or maybe it’s because he sits on the fault
line of a fractured administration. But now that he’s in the spotlight,
he may find further scrutiny hard to avoid.
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