Donald Trump Announces His Foreign Policy Advisors


Donald Trump — the enemy of many within the Republican Party — is beginning to form a powerful coalition of GOP supporters. Some have provided endorsements, and some are providing even more to help the billionaire businessman make it to the Oval Office. Now they’ve even got popular Senator Jeff Sessions on the team, and its in a major way.

Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is explaining the detailed role Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) will play as chairman of Trump’s Foreign Policy Advisory Committee.

“The news that I’m here to tell you about tonight,” Miller said on The Kelly File, “is that Senator Sessions is the Chairman of his Foreign Policy Committee. And that’s a major piece of news, I mean, who’s Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’s guy? Who’s John Kasich’s guy?”

For first time, Miller detailed the effort Sessions has poured into this new role. “Jeff Sessions has been meeting for hours now putting together a team of foreign policy advisers, military experts, [and] intelligence experts,” Miller said. “I had a chance to speak to Sen. Sessions today and his military advisers for about half an hour before coming here and we discussed some robust foreign policy ideas.”

Miller informed viewers that Trump has “sat down with Senator Jeff Sessions and has spoken about these [foreign policy] issues at length.”

Miller also discussed the expertise Sessions would be bringing to the role: “Sessions has been for twenty years on the Armed Services Committee” and “is one of the most respected members of the Senate,” Miller said. “Anyone who knows Jeff Sessions will tell you that he is the most straight-shooting, sincere, honest, [and] frankly apolitical person that you will ever meet in Washington.”

As Trump gets ever closer to the GOP nomination, it looks as if the conservative bloc of the party is willing to give him the chance and support the establishment never will. He is a strong politician on his own, but with the support of powerful, influential Republicans, his path may be unstoppable.

Here’s more on Trump’s

Trump began the hour-long meeting by pulling out a list of some of his foreign policy advisers.

‘‘Walid Phares, who you probably know. Ph.D., adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s a counter-terrorism expert,’’ Trump said. ‘‘Carter Page, Ph.D. George Papadopoulos. He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. The honorable Joe Schmitz, [was] inspector general at the Department of Defense. General Keith Kellogg. And I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that’s pretty representative group.’’

Trump said he plans to share more names in the coming days.

Kellogg, a former Army lieutenant general, is an executive vice president at Virginia-based CACI International, a Virginia-based intelligence and information technology consulting firm with clients around the world. He has experience in national defense and homeland security issues and worked as chief operating officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad following the invasion of Iraq.

Schmitz served as inspector general at the Department of Defense during the early years of George W. Bush’s administration and has worked for Blackwater Worldwide. In a brief phone call Monday, Schmitz confirmed that he is working for the Trump campaign and said that he has been involved for the past month. He said he frequently confers with Sam Clovis, one of Trump’s top policy advisers, and that there has been a series of conference calls and briefings in recent weeks.

Papadopoulos directs an international energy center at the London Centre of International Law Practice. He previously advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson and worked as a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Phares has an academic background, teaching at the National Defense University and Daniel Morgan Academy in Washington, and has advised members of Congress as well as appeared as a television analyst on terrorism and the Middle East.

Page, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and now the managing partner of Global Energy Capital, is a longtime energy-industry executive who rose through the ranks at Merrill Lynch around the world before founding his current firm. He previously was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he focused on the Caspian Sea region and the economic development in former Soviet states, according to his company biography and documents from his appearances at panels over the past decade.

Source: Brietbart, Boston Globe

Photo: Julia Hahn



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