If there’s a shakeup for the West Wing staff coming, no one has much to say about it. Former campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie reportedly met with President Trump Monday at the White House, though whether either will be tapped to official positions in the administration—as opposed to advocating for Trump more aggressively as outside “crisis managers”—remains to be seen.
As one White House aide puts it, such a shakeup could be imminent, or nothing could come of it at all. That’s the confused state of things in Donald Trump’s White House, where a relatively successful first foreign trip segues seamlessly into a chaotic situation back in the West Wing. While there had been plenty of speculation about who might be getting the boot (press secretary Sean Spicer and senior adviser Jared Kushner are among those potentially on thin ice), there’s been no indication from the president that anyone is going.
Before the foreign trip, for instance, there had been talk that Spicer would be scaling back his on-camera briefings once Trump returned home—a supposed sign the president was losing confidence in his chief spokesman. News that the devoutly Catholic Spicer had not been invited to meet with Pope Francis during Trump’s visit with the pontiff in the Vatican last week further fueled speculation he was on the outs. But Spicer will hold an on-camera briefing at the White House Tuesday afternoon, his first since May 15.
Things could be more serious for Kushner, the son-in-law of the president whose stock has supposedly fallen in recent days. Kushner came back to Washington a few days earlier than Trump, just before news dropped that at an early December meeting with the Russian ambassador, which the administration only acknowledged in March, he had proposed setting up a backchannel of communication between the Russians and the Trump transition team.
“Ambassador Sergey Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials,” reported the Washington Post on Friday. “Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.”
The Post reported Michael Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, was also at the meeting with Kushner and Kislyak. Flynn was later fired from his position just a few weeks after Trump took office, ostensibly for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his communications with Kislyak during the transition.
The administration has defended Kushner’s meeting a couple of ways, without actually confirming the Post‘s report about what Kislyak told the Kremlin about the meeting. The idea of backchannel communications with Russia, said Homeland Security secretary John Kelly on Sunday, would be “both normal…and acceptable” and even a “good thing.” Administration officials have also pointed to a line in the Post‘s report that “Russia at times feeds false information into communication streams it suspects are monitored as a way of sowing misinformation and confusion among U.S. analysts.”
And despite rumors that the president was angry or frustrated with his son-in-law, Trump told the New York Times Sunday that Kushner is “doing a great job for the country.”
“I have total confidence in him. He is respected by virtually everyone and is working on programs that will save our country billions of dollars. In addition to that, and perhaps more importantly, he is a very good person,” Trump said.
