Trump Rejects Reports That His Top Diplomat is Departing
December 2, 2017 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Mr. Trump had also sidestepped questions on Thursday about Mr. Tillerson’s future. “He’s here. Rex is here,” Mr. Trump said then, in an underwhelming display of support that did not challenge the reports of Mr. Tillerson’s pending departure.
By Friday morning, Mr. Tillerson told reporters at the State Department during a brief appearance with Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj of Libya that the reports were “laughable.” He then headed to the White House for two meetings with Mr. Trump, including a lunch with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — one of Mr. Tillerson’s allies. The president tweeted after those meetings.
Despite his years as a reality-TV star who routinely issued the line, “You’re fired,” Mr. Trump has struggled with ousting his staff, even after he has chosen to do so. Two White House advisers said the president ultimately decided on Friday to bolster Mr. Tillerson with the tweet to avoid undermining his chief diplomat right before he heads overseas to work on a host of global crises.
Mr. Tillerson is leaving for Europe on Monday on a weeklong trip, when he will attend a NATO meeting in Brussels and then fly to Vienna for a discussion at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe about the yearslong unrest in Ukraine.
The two White House advisers insisted, however, that Mr. Tillerson is expected to leave sometime in January.
In the plan revealed on Thursday, Mr. Tillerson would be succeeded by Mike Pompeo, currently the C.I.A. director, who is more closely aligned with Mr. Trump on a series of important foreign policy matters. Mr. Tillerson’s refusal to resign despite his disagreements with Mr. Trump — and the president’s reported dislike for the diplomat — may have been the reason senior administration officials leaked Mr. Kelly’s plan this week to replace him.
Mr. Tillerson had previously and repeatedly denied reports of his impending departure, even going so far as to hold a news conference in October to say, “There’s never been a consideration in my mind to leave.”
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The debate over Mr. Tillerson’s status is the latest outgrowth of a White House that has been beset by internal battles, high-level departures, indictments of two top former campaign officials and guilty pleas from a former national security adviser and a campaign adviser. All have contributed to a generalized sense of chaos that shows few signs of abating, even as the administration nears the completion of its first year in power.
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Mr. Tillerson is a phlegmatic former chief executive of Exxon Mobil whose personal net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. His continued service to a White House that so obviously wants him gone has led to something of a cottage industry of speculation in Washington about his reasons for remaining.
One theory, frequently repeated at the State Department, is that an early departure would cost Mr. Tillerson millions of dollars in taxes for assets he sold to take the diplomatic post. Tax experts have dismissed this notion.
After being nominated, Mr. Tillerson was granted a so-called Certificate of Divestiture that allowed him to sell off Exxon stock without having to immediately pay capital gains taxes on those holdings. Two lawyers involved in issuing these documents said that the federal law creating this process — which is intended to eliminate a disincentive to qualified individuals joining the government — has no provision to withdraw this benefit, assuming that Mr. Tillerson completed the sale of his stocks before he left his government job.
The ethics agreement that Mr. Tillerson signed in January, after he was nominated, indicated that he planned to complete the sale of his Exxon stock and other potentially problematic stock assets within 90 days of his confirmation. As long as Mr. Tillerson followed that plan, the timing of his resignation would have no impact on his tax liability, the lawyers said.
It is also believed that Mr. Tillerson has become so wedded to a State Department reorganization that he launched earlier this year that he will not leave until it is in place. That is expected to occur early next year.
Mr. Tillerson has said the reorganization is his highest priority. He intends to slash the State Department’s personnel by 8 percent and its budget by 31 percent. The cuts are needed, he has said many times, because many of the world’s conflicts will soon be resolved. This view is dismissed as naïve both within the State Department and the broader foreign policy community.
Mr. Tillerson has made clear he has little use for much of the day-to-day diplomacy conducted by his work force. Diplomats across the State Department spent much of Thursday and Friday checking their phones for news announcing Mr. Tillerson’s departure.
His personal press aide, R.C. Hammond, is expected to leave his post this month, according to three people in the department with direct knowledge of the situation and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.
Mr. Hammond denied he would be leaving soon.
“You are not so lucky,” Mr. Hammond wrote in an email. “You still get to work with me.”
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