Trump May Have Demoted NSCs Military and Intelligence Leaders by Accident

[muriel_volestrangler]

Apparently even a “fine-tuned machine” like the Trump administration is susceptible to copy-and-paste errors.
...
A previous leaky dispatch suggested that President Trump was angry that he wasn’t fully briefed on the order that put Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, on the National Security Council Principals Committee. Despite the huge backlash to politicizing the foreign policy team, it doesn’t look like Bannon is going anywhere. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said McMaster has free rein to organize his staff how he likes — though changes to Bannon’s position would have to be approved by the president.

However, the Trump administration may elevate other top officials to equal standing with the former head of Breitbart. The Times reports that while giving Bannon a role on the committee was intentional, the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were only demoted to occasional appearances at committee meetings because staffers got confused when they were cribbing from previous administrations’ organizational charts:

In crafting their organization order, the officials said, Mr. Trump’s aides essentially cut and pasted language from Mr. Bush’s organization chart, substituting the national intelligence director for the C.I.A. director, who back then was the head of the nation’s spy agencies.

What Mr. Trump’s team did not realize, officials said, was that Mr. Obama’s organization chart made those two positions full members of the committee.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/nsc-military-intel-demotion-may-have-been-an-accident.html

Basically, the average DUer takes more care composing a post than the Trump regime does the make-up of the NSC.

[herding cats]

1. It explains this.

Holding up papers with highlighted text, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said little has changed as it relates to the National Security Council between the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations.

He thundered of "identical language" between (parts of the) 2017 and 2009 memos organizing the NSC. And he went further when it came to George W. Bush's administration.

I think if you give somebody with no experience and a political agenda, and a dubious one at that, a permanency ... it's saying, 'We are not prioritizing professional expertise; we're prioritizing political agenda.'
David Rothkopf, CEO and editor of FP group, which publishes Foreign Policy magazine
"The makeup of the Principals Committee from 2017 is exactly as it was in both 2017 as it was in 2001," Spicer boasted, brandishing the texts in both hands. "100 percent identical, except we add the word also."

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/30/512489785/fact-check-spin-aside-trumps-national-security-council-has-a-very-big-change