Top National Security Aide Fingered as Mole in Trump Admin, The Rumsfeld Protege Denies Report
Jose Nino
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Axios reported that top Trump administration officials are currently discussing a potential reassignment of deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates to the Department of Energy from the National Security Council.
According to some reports, Coates’ working relationship with National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien has soured during a time when some people inside the administration tagged her as the “Anonymous” author behind a tell-all book on the Trump administration titled “A Warning.”
Coates has firmly denied these allegations.
O’Brien promoted her to the deputy role a few months ago.
Should this move occur, Coates is expected to take a senior role under the supervision of Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette.
No decision has been finalized at the moment, and the entire decision could still fall apart.
“We do not comment on personnel matters,” National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot informed Axios. Coates declined comment.
Politico recently reported that Coates is rumored to be the person behind an op-ed in the New York Times and bestselling book highlighting a resistance movement against President Donald Trump coming from within his administration.
One of the literary agents connected to the book made a statement denying Coates’s involvement with the book. The agent said she is not the author, did not edit the book, did not see it advance, or have any knowledge of its existence.
After being acquitted from his impeachment trial, Trump is making personnel changes and purging staff that he believes to be disloyal.
Given Coates’s neoconservative background, Trump should remain skeptical of keeping her within his administration.
Coates doesn’t even have a foreign policy background, she received a PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania. During the early 2000s, Coates wrote for conservative website Red State and was a reliable booster for the Bush administration’s foreign excursions in Afghanistan and Iraq. She posted under the pen name “AcademicElephant.”
Her posts caught the attention of aides of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld eventually recruited Coates to work as an advisor for his book Known and Unknown: A Memoir, which was published in 2011.
Coates later became an advisor to former Texas governor Rick Perry during his 2012 presidential campaign. She then became an advisor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz in 2013 and eventually moved up the ranks to become his top national security advisor during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Coates is a neocon, establishment Republican team player, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that she was behind these “Anonymous” leaks.
After all, many neocons have misgivings about Trump’s America First foreign policy.
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