TPM (Marshall) - important read - "Who Is the Hidden Hand at the NSC?"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/who-is-the-hidden-hand-at-the-nsc

By JOSH MARSHALL Published JUNE 19, 2017 12:53 PM

Mike Flynn has been out at the White House for more than four months. He is, we are told, in the most serious kind of legal trouble. Yet the political ghost of Mike Flynn still seems to be a hidden hand driving outcomes in the Trump White House. Maybe it’s even Flynn himself.

Allow me to explain.

On Friday, Foreign Policy published an article explaining that the White House is pushing for widening the war in Syria over Pentagon objections. Look into the details and you see it’s more specific than ‘widening the war’. It’s moving from a near exclusive focus on defeating ISIS to pushing a broader confrontation with Iran, which is of course heavily involved in Syria.

Not only does this run the risk of a major and damaging military confrontation with Iran. It almost certainly complicates or hurts the campaign against ISIS since Iran is itself extremely hostile to ISIS and fighting it on the ground in Iraq and Syria.

So who exactly is “the White House” here?

According to the Foreign Policy piece, it’s principally two people. Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Derek Harvey, respectively the chief intelligence adviser at the NSC and the chief Middle East advisor. If that first name rings a bell, it should: Cohen-Watnick is the Flynn protege who was behind the Devin Nunes, Susan Rice “un-masking” nonsense caper. While Cohen-Watnick was up to that mischief, McMaster, as one of his first orders of business was trying to can him.

snip - more at the link....important read.

[Achilleaze]

1. republicans mucking up the world

with death and destruction. Sad.

[canetoad]

2. The mysterious Ezra Cohen-Watnick

Has his own Russian connection.

http://www.newsweek.com/ezra-cohen-watnick-donald-trump-devin-nunes-russia-barack-obama-wiretap-susan-583904

/snip
"Meanwhile, Cohen-Watnick was getting married to a woman who, like Flynn and several other Trump aides, had ties to Russia. Rebecca Miller, four years younger than Cohen-Watnick, had worked on the Russian account in the D.C. office of Ketchum, the global powerhouse lobbying and public relations firm, according to her mother, Victoria Fraser, head of Washington University's Department of Medicine in St. Louis. During a 2014 event at the State Historical Society of Missouri, Fraser said her daughter’s “big challenges right now are, Ketchum is responsible for providing PR and marketing to try to make Russia look better, which is particularly difficult when they’re invading other countries and when Putin is somewhat out of control.”

[NewJeffCT]

3. wow, I'm shocked that he has Russian connections

shocked!