Coup Plotters in a Panic over Trump’s Personnel Changes at the Pentagon

Nov. 12, 2020 (EIRNS)—The whirlwind of personnel changes at the Pentagon continued on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, with the report that Christopher C. Miller, the new Acting Secretary of Defense, has brought in retired Col. Douglas Macgregor as a senior policy adviser. News media speculation is that Macgregor, who has long been known as a military dissident inside the Washington Beltway and a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, has been brought in to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and possibly also Syria.

However, it’s not an early U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that is causing panic within the corporate media but rather the potential that the personnel changes that Trump has made at the Pentagon may sabotage Joe Biden’s fantasy of using the U.S. military to remove Trump from the White House. The New York Times, in its coverage of the personnel changes, reveals the fear that the moves could finally finish off the Russiagate operation.

“The hires come as Mr. Trump and some of his aides have been pressing to declassify documents that would describe sources of information inside the Kremlin. The President’s advocates have long argued that these could prove that four years of allegations about the 2016 actions by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in support of Mr. Trump’s candidacy were a hoax, despite the fact that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has indicted Russian military intelligence officers,” the Times reports. “Administration officials said that Gina Haspel, the director of the CIA, could be next on Mr. Trump’s list of dismissals because of her long-running effort to keep classified a series of documents on the agency’s information inside the Kremlin.”

Underlying the panic is what appears to be an effort by the White House to exert presidential control over the Defense Department. The Nov. 10 exodus represents a major shake-up that has been planned for months, according to one Trump Administration official briefed on the effort, with more firings to come across the department, The Intercept’s Lee Fang reported. “The President is taking back control of DOD. It’s a rebirth of foreign policy. This is Trump foreign policy,” said the official, who spoke anonymously and without authorization. The personnel changes, the official claimed, would help clear the way for a more loyal Pentagon apparatus to carry out Trump’s goals, including the last-minute withdrawal of troops from foreign conflicts.

In response to criticism of the firings by Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, the official said that, “This is happening because the President feels that neoconservatism has failed the American people.”

RT takes all this up to counter the notion, embedded in the news media reporting that Trump is actually setting up for a coup. RT correspondent Nebojsa Malic points out that it was actually the Democrats—Joe Biden himself—who first brought up the proposal of using the U.S. military to forcibly remove Trump from the White House, should he lose but refuse to concede. “That was in June, long before the election and its controversies,” Malic writes. “What did Biden know at the time to make him say that, nobody knows—because nobody in the mainstream U.S. media has bothered to ask, preferring to entertain partisan fantasies based on conjecture instead.”