Trump Turns to His Right Flank to Fill National Security Posts

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump moved quickly on Friday to begin filling national security posts at the top echelons of his administration, announcing that he had tapped a group of hawks and conservative loyalists who reflect the hard-line views that defined his presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump selected Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who has made cracking down on undocumented immigrants a signature issue, to be his attorney general, while installing Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant general who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat, as his national security adviser. And as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Trump selected Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who harshly criticized Hillary Clinton during the House investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

The flurry of decisions indicated that Mr. Trump is gaining some control over a transition operation that has been marked during its first week by chaos and infighting, and moving quickly to put his stamp on an administration-in-waiting that will break starkly with President Obama’s.

 

Transition officials said he would meet over the weekend with a broad array of potential cabinet members and other advisers. Among them are former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, among the harshest Republican critics of his campaign, and Michelle Rhee, a Democrat who is the former chancellor of schools in the District of Columbia, as a signal that he wanted to build a “broad and diverse team” without regard to political affiliation or support for his presidential bid.

But there was no evidence in Friday’s selections that Mr. Trump, who has hinted that he might pursue a more centrist agenda once he sits in the Oval Office, is inclined to moderate his approach on key questions of national security and civil rights.

In a statement on Friday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Sessions a “world-class legal mind,” and said Mr. Pompeo would be “a brilliant and unrelenting leader for our intelligence community.”

Read More (...)