You can't drain the swamp, if the swamp is in charge.
The various defenses of McMaster justify his purge of good people like Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and others. Meanwhile McMaster is keeping the NSC a swamp by maintaining Obama holdovers in place. Not only are many of them leaking and undermining President Trump. But they also represent Obama's way of doiing things. They represent the things that Obama ran against.
At the Daily Caller, Richard Pollock and Ethan Barton take a deep dive into the swamp creatures still floating in the turgid waters of McMaster's National Security Council.
About 40 of the National Security Council’s (NSC) 250 officials — nearly one in six — are Obama administration holdovers, according to TheDCNF’s analysis. The holdovers include NSC directors for Korea, China, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Eastern Europe, Israel-Palestine, South America, North Africa and sub-Sahara Africa.
Especially...
Among the NSC holdovers is Allison Hooker, an architect of former President Barack Obama’s Korean policy. She remains NSC director for Korea as Trump grapples with the worst crisis between the U.S. and North Korea since the 1953 truce that stopped the Korean War.
Hooker joined the NSC as the director for Korea in 2014 after previously working at the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She visited South Korea in September and December 2014 in a failed effort to restart the “six-party talks” North Korea canceled in April 2009, only three months after Obama took office. Hooker returned to South Korea earlier this year in advance of Trump’s fall visit to Asia.
Trump sternly denounced Obama’s Korean policy in April. “The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime has failed. … Frankly, that patience is over,” he said in a Rose Garden press news conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
It won't be over until Obama's people go. And until their sponsors and protectors who agree with them more than they do with Trump follow them out the door.
Another holdover is Fernando Cutz, McMaster’s director for South America who previously reported to former deputy NSC advisor Ben Rhodes, according to administration sources. Cutz enthusiastically endorsed Obama’s Cuba policy throughout his tenure as an NSC staffer.
Cutz received his master’s degree in international relations from the Clinton School of Public Service, which operates on the grounds of the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark.
If President Trump truly wants to roll back Obama's Cuba policy, change needs to come to the NSC.
Andrea Hall, another top Obama holdover and former “direct report” to Rhodes, now serves as NSC’s senior director for weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and threat reduction.
Sources say that Andrea Hall is a source of at least some of the NSC leaks.
There have been plenty of blank check defenses of McMaster. Most of those insist that he's a good man without actually trying to defend his actions. Maybe it's time that some hard questions were asked.