Trump White House firings, resignations, and ousters

Attorney General Bill Barr is resigning, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Monday evening. His last day will be December 23.

Barr has been one of Trump’s most loyal allies, most notably for his outspoken criticism of the 2016 Russia investigation and for going as far as launching an investigation into the origins of that probe.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has been fired, mere days after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Trump made the Monday afternoon announcement, as he often does, on Twitter. “Mark Esper has been terminated,” the president wrote. “I would like to thank him for his service.” He added that Christopher Miller, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, would take over as the acting Pentagon boss.

President Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats will soon be replaced because he kept doing the one thing Trump couldn’t stand: telling the truth.

In a Sunday tweet, Trump wished Coats well after serving two years in his position and said that Coats will resign officially on August 15. Trump added that he will nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), a staunch Congressional ally who fiercely sided with the president during the Mueller probe, as the nation’s next top spy.

US Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta announced on Friday that he would resign after facing heavy criticism for his role in granting a light sentence to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein, a money manager whose source of wealth is mysterious, was indicted in 2007 in connection with allegations that he sexually abused dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach, Florida, mansion. But prosecutors under Acosta, then the US attorney for Miami, cut a deal with Epstein allowing him to serve just 13 months in a county jail.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to lead the Russia investigation, is now, finally and officially, stepping down.

Rosenstein submitted his not exactly subtle resignation letter to the president on April 29, indicating that his last day in office will be May 11.

A day after Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen abruptly resigned, the director of the Secret Service is out, too.

On Monday, the White House confirmed that Randolph “Tex” Alles, whom President Donald Trump appointed as director of the Secret Service in April 2017, would be leaving his post, after multiple media outlets reported that he had been ousted. The announcement comes amid a broader shake-up at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and follows the arrest of a Chinese woman who allegedly breached security at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort carrying multiple electronic devices.

Sunday night, President Trump announced his intention to designate Kevin McAleenan, the current head of US Customs and Border Protection, as the acting secretary of homeland security after Kirstjen Nielsen’s resignation.

But legal experts question whether he has the authority to do that.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned Sunday night after a relatively short tenure as arguably the most aggressive secretary in the department’s short history — a stint that will most likely be remembered for the “zero tolerance” prosecution policy of late spring and early summer 2018 that resulted in the separation of thousands of families attempting to cross at the US-Mexico border.

But having the most hawkish DHS secretary in memory appears to not have been enough for Trump, who is enraged over the number of Central American families and asylum seekers coming into the United States.

Tobacco stocks jumped on Tuesday when news broke that Scott Gottlieb, head of the Food and Drug Administration, would resign at the end of the month.

Gottlieb, a doctor and former venture capitalist, came into the Trump administration in 2017, with strong ties to the industries he was supposed to steer and a history of writing anti-regulatory screeds in conservative journals. Critics wondered if he was right for the job.

It looks like President Donald Trump is going to have a harder time than expected replacing John Kelly as chief of staff.

Nick Ayers, who is currently Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, was reportedly whom Trump had in mind for the job, but the 36-year-old operative is apparently out of the running. He tweeted on Sunday that he would be leaving the White House at the end of the year.

No person’s entire career can be summed up in a single quote. But ousted White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s defense to the charge that the Trump administration’s child separation policy at the border was cruel deserves to be etched into his tombstone.

“The children,” he said, “will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”

The departure of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly at the end of 2018, announced Saturday, is just the latest confirmation that President Donald Trump burns through senior staff much faster than other presidents.

Trump hasn’t yet been in office for two years, but many of his original picks for top White House positions (and sometimes even their first replacements) have been fired, been bullied into resigning, or quit in protest.

John Kelly will depart as White House chief of staff near the end of this year, President Donald Trump told reporters Saturday. The president said he would announce Kelly’s replacement in the next few days.

Kelly’s exit comes after several months of relative personnel stability in an infamously tumultuous White House. But with the midterm elections now over, resulting in Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, Trump concluded that now was the time for a shake-up he’s long wanted.

A spokesperson for first lady Melania Trump took an extraordinary step on Tuesday afternoon: publicly calling for the job of National Security Council staffer Mira Ricardel.

“It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that [Mira Ricardel] no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House,” said spokesperson Stephanie Grisham in a statement sent to a number of media outlets.

Nikki Haley’s resignation from her post as US ambassador to the United Nations didn’t follow the past Trump administration playbook — there were no early rumors that someone was about to get ousted, or even a surprise tweet from President Trump announcing a firing.

Instead, Haley managed to keep quiet her plans to leave by the end of the year, reportedly surprising her close counterparts Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton with her decision.

When Nikki Haley’s time as America’s ambassador to the United Nations ends later this year, her defining legacy will be both as a staunch enforcer of Trumpism and as someone who simultaneously executed traditional Republican foreign policy.

Haley showed over her two years on the job that she could toe President Donald Trump’s line when needed, which was most evident when it came to Middle East issues. She openly vowed to punish countries that wouldn’t support the move of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and berated Iran for its aggressive behavior in the region.

Departures from the Trump administration tend to be pretty acrimonious. But US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s resignation, announced in a surprise Tuesday morning sit-down with President Trump, was a striking break with the past.

Trump went out of his way to praise Haley’s work, saying that “she’s done a fantastic job” and that “we’ll be in constant touch” even after she leaves at the end of the year. Haley returned the favor, calling her time working for Trump “the honor of a lifetime.”

Nikki Haley, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, has just announced that she will officially resign at the end of the year — leaving the US administration devoid of one of its more hawkish and mainstream Republican voices.

The move came as quite a surprise to many both in the administration and outside it, and it’s still unclear why exactly she decided to resign.

White House counsel Don McGahn will depart the administration later this year amid tensions over his role in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

McGahn’s intentions to leave this year have been reported for months, but after Axios reported it with more certainty Wednesday, President Donald Trump removed any ambiguity on the matter with a tweet:

White House counsel Don McGahn was rumored to be on his way out for months, but President Donald Trump finally made it official Wednesday on Twitter.

Trump announced that McGahn would be departing the White House this fall, following the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Jennifer Arangio, a top National Security Council official, is out. She reportedly clashed with other Trump administration officials, including Stephen Miller, over the White House’s hardline immigration policies and attitude towards refugees.

Arangio isn’t the only high-profile figure to be shown the exit in recent weeks. At the start of the month, President Donald Trump announced the resignation of scandal-plagued EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. And Politico reported on Thursday that legislative affairs director Marc Short is planning to step down before the end of the month, just as Trump gears up for a fight on Capitol Hill over his Supreme Court nominee.

Scott Pruitt, administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has resigned after his alleged ethical breaches — among them a $43,000 phone booth, a Trump mattress, and exclusive moisturizer — and violations of the law became too much for President Trump to bear.

The highest-ranking environmental official in the Trump administration submitted his resignation letter Thursday afternoon. President Trump said that Pruitt’s deputy, former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, will take over the agency on Monday.

An April 5 Associated Press story followed by a similar April 7 Washington Post story both asserted that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was suffering from diminished clout in the White House, as a more confident President Trump feels comfortable taking matters directly to new hires like John Bolton and Larry Kudlow, chatting on the phone with outside advisers, and firing Cabinet secretaries over Kelly’s objections.

I wasn’t really sure I believed it until I saw this tweet from Trump today with four photos, including one of Kelly looking like a very unhappy camper.

President Donald Trump defended embattled Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on Twitter over the weekend, saying he is doing a fine job in spite of mounting ethics concerns surrounding the former Oklahoma state attorney general. It makes it seem like as long as you’re rolling back environmental protections aggressively enough, Trump will stick by you.

The list of Pruitt’s ethics scandals is long, though. They include spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a full-time, 20-person security detail, renting a condo from a powerful lobbyist for just $50 a night, opting for extra-expensive travel options, bypassing the White House to get raises for his closest aides, and demoting officials who raised concerns about his spending and management. He also once asked his security team to turn on the lights and sirens in his motorcade to get to a Washington, DC, restaurant faster.

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted a thing:

The president’s tweet alludes to a rumor that has been going around Washington for months now — the rumor being that Trump wants to oust Jeff Sessions from the Justice Department and replace him with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.