McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers.
"In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right. Months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvey wrote an intelligence paper declaring that al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan posed a strategic threat to the United States."
And why was Harvey fired?
That dispute was followed by a bigger one. Bannon and Trump, according to White House officials, pressed McMaster to fire a list of Obama holdovers at the National Security Council who were suspected of leaking to the press. The list of names was compiled by Derek Harvey, a former Defense Intelligence Agency colonel who was initially hired by Flynn. McMaster balked. He refused to fire anyone on the list and asserted that he had the authority to fire and hire National Security Council staff.
And McMaster keeps using that authority to purge patriots from the NSC.
Rich Higgins, a top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda.
“Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed,” the memo warns. It argues that this has led “Islamists [to] ally with cultural Marxists,” but that in the long run, “Islamists will co-opt the movement in its entirety.”
“Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives … These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum, and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”
Higgins, seen as an ally of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had only served on the council for a couple months.
Higgins had also “pushed for declassification of documents having to do with radical Islam and Iran,” according to a source close to the White House. A source close to Higgins said that specifically, Higgins had been pushing for the declassification of Presidential Study Directive 11, a classified report produced in 2010 by the Obama administration which presaged the Arab Spring, outlining unrest throughout the Middle East. The directive has become a shibboleth of activists such as Frank Gaffney, who see it as evidence of the Obama administration’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.
Higgins, according to another source with direct knowledge of the incident, was called into the White House Counsel’s office the week before last and asked about the memo. On July 21, the Friday of that week, he was informed by McMaster’s deputy Ricky Waddell that he was losing his job.
And so McMaster purges another challenge to the Obama order. And you have to wonder whether he isn't emerging as a national security threat.
Here's a 2016 interview with Higgins.
Political warfare includes both non-violent and violent actions working in synthesis, Higgins says. The left, with enemy-friendly Muslim Brotherhood allies, is able to control the dominant cultural narrative with the media and the government, blinding us in the war on terror and impacting how Americans think, he argues.
Higgins calls for a “strategic and operational pause” in America’s misguided battle to stop the terror. He would, instead, ask new leadership to develop a comprehensive political warfare plan, while removing the subversive policies and personnel causing America to lose this paramount battle.
He cites the “purges” carried out by law enforcement and intelligence officials throughout government, which Phil Haney, Sebastian Gorka and Steve Coughlinhave made public.
Obama is out. But the purges continue. At the NSC and across much of the foreign policy sector, Obama's people are still in charge.