E or Ezra Cohen Watnek has an interesting past according to the Atlantic circa 2017 in an article titled "The man McMaster couldn't fire".
Here is a snippet. He interned for Biden.
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.”