Conflict between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Trump administration has finally reached a breaking point, as chief of staff John Kelly has created a plan to get the former oil executive out of the picture.
The idea is to replace Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, whose position at the intelligence agency would go to Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton.
The relationship between President Donald Trump and Tillerson has been tense. In July, for example, Tillerson called Trump a moron after a meeting where the president said he wanted to exponentially increase the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
If the plan does go through, Tillerson will have had the shortest secretary of state tenure in more than a century, except for those who left the job during an administration change. He is also the first secretary of state in history with no previous government, political or military experience.
NBC News announced yesterday that it had fired Matt Lauer, and the details of his behavior are expectedly gross.
Yesterday, NBC announced the termination and NBC News Chairman Andy Lack said that the network had received its first complaint about Lauer. However, Variety reported that several women had complained to NBC executives about Lauer with no reaction from the network. A former reporter also told Variety that “Today” executives “protected the shit out of Matt Lauer.”
Here’s a particularly gross detail: “His office was in a secluded space, and he had a button under his desk that allowed him to lock his door from the inside without getting up. This afforded him the assurance of privacy. It allowed him to welcome female employees and initiate inappropriate contact while knowing nobody could walk in on him, according to two women who were sexually harassed by Lauer.”
Valuable news for the journalists in your life who also love networking: Apparently you can just randomly show up at going-away parties for members of The Washington Post staff. At least, that’s the kind of thing so-called undercover journalists from Project Veritas have been doing for months.
Project Veritas, which attempted to lure The Washington Post into a false news story on Roy Moore, has been trying to mess around with media organizations since the summer, according to the Post.
Their story focuses on Jaime Phillips, the same woman who approached the Post with false allegations against Roy Moore. While appearing to work for Project Veritas as a so-called undercover journalist, Phillips used three different names and phone numbers in interactions with Post reporters after networking events and other gatherings. Her online presence made an about-face from Trump supporter to liberal bleeding heart, and she even rented an apartment in the home of a former Democratic National Committee communications director, Brad Woodhouse.
Last month, Project Veritas released video of a New York Times employee, Nicholas Dudich, who claimed James Comey was his godfather, among other things. A Times statement said that Dudich had violated the paper’s ethics standards and misrepresented his role at the news organization.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.