tyb
Trump Installs Lawyer Who Worked for Rep. Nunes and Don McGahn in Key NSC Role
President Donald Trump has continued to shuffle the deck at the National Security Council (NSC), where he installed a White House ally as senior director for intelligence. Attorney Michael Ellis started his new job on Monday and his immediate superior is White House lawyer John Eisenberg, according to Politico. The development was described as latest instance of the Trump administration putting loyalists in key roles. Ellis will be privy to extremely sensitive information. Indeed, the reassignment of the brothers Vindman now seems a distant memory, but Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s testimony about Ellis and Eisenberg is worth singling out here. Per Politico:
In short: a person involved in limiting access to President Trump’s July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky was promoted. This is the call that sparked a whistleblower complaint and got the dominoes toppling toward impeachment. The people who testified about that call were reassigned. What else do we know about Ellis? The White House included Ellis’s résumé when announcing his addition to the White House Counsel’s Office, when Don McGahn was running the show as of March 7, 2017: Some things to point out about this: 1) Ellis has intelligence experience; 2) he has experience working for Trump; 3) he was General Counsel for the House Intelligence Committee when it was chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
On that last point, the New York Times once identified Ellis as one of two White House officials who provided Nunes with “the intelligence reports that showed that President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.” That was reported on March 30, 2017. Notably, these Nunes sources were described as “whistleblowers”:
Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) repeated the “whistleblower” description during an interview.
“[Nunes] had told me that like a whistle blower-type person had given him some information that was new that spoke to the last administration and part of this investigation,” Ryan said. During his time at Dartmouth, Ellis was the editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth Review. After graduating, he actually appeared on Jeopardy! as a contestant. Several years ago, Ellis spoke about that experience during an interview with the publication he used to run. He also discussed how he came to advance Republican causes. Ellis said that when he was a college freshman, he volunteered for the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney campaign, ascended pretty quickly and ended up getting a job in the Bush White House after he graduated.
“My experience working on the Bush campaign in ’04 led to a position at the White House right after my graduation from Dartmouth. From March 2006 to February 2007, I worked in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, an office that actually no longer exists,” he said. “Obama shut it down once he took office, perhaps because he thought it was closely associated with Karl Rove. While I was working at the White House, I was involved in polling. It wasn’t the best year of President Bush’s administration, and especially since I was tracking public opinion, it was certainly a very humbling experience. But nonetheless, it was a great opportunity, especially for someone straight out of college, and I’m thankful that I was able to serve.”
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-installs-lawyer-who-worked-for-rep-nunes-and-don-mcgahn-in-key-nsc-role/
>t