President Trump announced Thursday that Ambassador John Bolton will replace Gen. H.R. McMaster as his National Security Adviser effective April 9.

“I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9,” Trump tweeted.

The president’s announcement comes after months of speculation over whether McMaster would resign, or be fired from his post.

But on Thursday evening, a White House official said that the president and McMaster “mutually agreed” that he would resign from his post. The two have been discussing this for some time, the official said, noting that the timeline was expedited as they both felt it was important to have a new team in place, instead of constant speculation.

A White House official said the decision was not related to any one moment or incident, but rather the result of ongoing conversations between the two.

“After thirty-four years of service to our nation, I am requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer after which I will leave public service. Throughout my career it has been my greatest privilege top serve alongside extraordinary servicemembers and dedicated civilians,” McMaster said in a statement.

He added: “I am thankful to President Donald J. Trump for the opportunity to serve him and our nation as national security adviser. I am grateful for the friendship and support of the members of the National Security Council who worked together to provide the President with the best options to protect and advance our national interests.”

McMaster said he was “especially proud” to have served with National Security Council staff, who he said “established a strong foundation for protecting the American people, promoting American prosperity, achieving peace through strength, and advancing American influence.

“I know that these patriots will continue to serve our President and our nation with distinction,” McMaster said.

White House chief of staff John Kelly said McMaster is “a fine American and Military officer.”

“He has served with distinction and honor throughout his career in the U.S> Army and as the National Security Advisor,” Kelly said Thursday. “He brought and maintained discipline and energy to our vital interagency processes. He helped develop options for the president and ensured that those options were presented fully and fairly. A true solider-scholar, his impact on his country and this government will be felt for years to come.”

Bolton, who served as U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from 2001 to 2005, will take over for McMaster next month.

A White House official said Bolton is one of the strongest voices and experts on the full range of national security issues and challenges facing the U.S.

McMaster’s retirement comes just one week after the president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Twitter, and after other high profile administration departures. Earlier this month, Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn resigned.</s>John Bolton turned up on Fox about an hour before I did last night, and professed to be surprised by the sudden Tweeting of his appointment as US National Security Advisor. The Beltway insiders allege that it was rushed out to distract from Trump's cave-in on the 2,232-page Schumer-Pelosi Early-Christmas-For-Big-Bloated-Budget-Busting-Bureaucracy Bill that not a single person on this planet has actually read. Oh, and don't give me that "increased funding for our troops" straw-clutching: every sentient creature from the earthworm up knows that the extra dough's just going to go to diversity programs and gender reassignment surgery as opposed to anything that might increase the odds of actually winning the next 17-year war.

At this stage the Gullible Old Pussies of the Republican Party are pretty much openly advertising that giving them control of the House, the Senate and the White House is the equivalent of giving Yosemite Sam three sticks of dynamite to shove down his pants - with the additional nicety that this time round they're actively flipping the finger at their president's bedrock issue. I reiterate the point I first made on the radio a year ago: On January 20th 2017 Trump should have taken all those showboating showbiz no-shows at face value and held a businesslike inauguration at the southern border while laying the first brick. The brick remains unlaid - not because Vicente Fox refuses to "pay for Trump's f**kin' wall" but because Paul Ryan does.

As for the Bolton distraction, it seems to be working. I've given up trying to discern ideological themes in Trump's firings and hirings: as far as I can tell, it's mostly about people he likes to hang out with. In the case of John Bolton, I first met the new National Security Advisor a decade and a half or so back, in a roomful of European prime ministers and foreign ministers. He delivered a line that stunned the joint:

I was standing next to the Finnish Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen, who had a genuinely puzzled looked on his face and eventually inquired of me: "He is making a joke, no?"

No. Since then, I've interviewed him at Fox a couple of times and passed him in the green room on many others. Once, when I was guest-hosting, he talked very amusingly about "the European Unionization of the world", and I got a laugh out of him with a couple of Herman van Rompuy cracks. Off-air on on another occasion, during a break in "Fox & Friends" and after the Perth Declaration on proposed changes to the Succession to the Throne in Commonwealth realms, he asked me, seriously, what the governments of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands made of the end of male primogeniture: it surprised me - not because he was interested in the topic so much as that most commentators would be so entirely unaware of the topic as to not even know they were entirely uninterested in it.

Still, I can see why Princess Charlotte's chances of becoming Queen of Belize might not be a priority issue with Trump voters - although, to be honest, I doubt it has much less appeal to the base than "doing something for the Dreamers". Bolton is viewed with suspicion as a "neocon", which is not a term of much practical use these days. But then so was his predecessor - H R McMaster. So the substitution might be of no more significance than a neocon whom Trump likes the company of taking the job of a neocon whom Trump finds a bit of a cold fish. There may be a little more to it than that: McMaster was complacent, and conventional to a fault; Bolton is a realist, and harder-headed about the illusions of mankind. Beyond that, McMaster belonged to the group of foreign-policy panjandrums who expected Trump to move towards them; Bolton has moved towards Trump.

~Then again, who knows? Fortunately, becoming National Security Advisor does not require confirmation by the Senate, where John Bolton has many enemies. I wrote about him thirteen years ago, after Bush nominated him as UN Ambassador. This is from The Spectator of March 19th 2005 - and my remarks about "the code-speak consensus of the global elite" are relevant, I think, to what drove Trump's rise - as presumably Mr Bolton is aware:

If you're going to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, you might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America's new ambassador to the UN, is the sheer volume of 'damaging' material. Usually, the Democrats and media have to riffle through decades of dreary platitudes to come up with one potentially exploitable infelicitous soundbite. But with Bolton the damaging quotes are hanging off the trees and dropping straight into your bucket. Five minutes' casual trawling through the back catalogue and your cup runneth over:

'If you lost ten storeys, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.'

'If I were redoing the Security Council, I'd have one permanent member ...the United States.'

'Fuzzy-minded romanticism ...not just naive but dangerous.'

'It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.'

But he does do shtick. I happen to agree with all the above statements, but I can see why the international community might be minded to throw its hands up and shriek, 'Quelle horreur!' It's not just the rest of the world. Most of the American media are equally stunned. The New York Times wondered what Mr Bush's next appointment would be:

'Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?'

Okay, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like ...putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq regime serve as chair of the UN conference on disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man UN operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.

All of which happened without the UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN's expense?

In recent years, I've had the pleasure of watching John Bolton in action on a couple of occasions at semi-private gatherings comprised mainly of — what's the word? — foreigners. They were remarkable performances. Most of the Americans who hit the international cocktail circuit are eager to please. In Davos the other week, for example, CNN honcho Eason Jordan declared that US troops in Iraq were deliberately targeting journalists. Thanks to an enterprising blogger in attendance, this got him into hot water back home, and he wound up having to resign, mainly because it's completely untrue. Also in Davos, Bill Clinton endorsed the mullahs: 'Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.' That's true in the very narrow sense that in both Mr Clinton's sex life and the ayatollahs' repressive theocracy it's the gals who wind up as the fall guys. But Slick Willie was making a broader point about the perfect harmony between him and Iran: 'In every single election, the guys I identify with got two thirds to 70 per cent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.'

I've never been to Davos, but I've sat next to the hot-looking Eurototty in the Alpine bar and tried to wangle me a little après-ski action and there comes a point in the evening when she says, 'Zat Jhorjhe Boosh. What an idiot, hein!' And you start to bristle, but then you realise that America and Old Europe are riven by as deep a divide as the magnificent plunging cleavage beckoning from her low-cut Fahrenheit 9/11 T-shirt and maybe now would be a good time for some transatlantic outreach in a very real sense, so you say, 'Yeah, Bush. What a chump. Not like that Ruud Lubbers, eh?' And you stare down her cleavage and catch your creepy sweaty face reflected in her shoes and feel momentarily ashamed, but not for long. My guess is that that's what Bill Clinton and Eason Jordan were up to when they respectively hailed the progressivism of Iranian politics and defamed the entire US military. You're with a bunch of foreigners and you want them to like you and it's easy to get carried away.

That's what was so stunning about Bolton. In a roomful of Euro-grandees, he was perfectly relaxed, a genial fellow with a rather Mitteleuropean moustache, but he thwacked every ball they served back down their gullets with amazing precision. He was the absolute antithesis of Schmoozer Bill and Pandering Eason: he seemed to relish their hostility. At one event, a startled British cabinet minister said to me afterwards, 'He doesn't mean all that, does he?'

But he does. And that's why the Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism. Diplomats are supposed to be 'diplomatic'. Why is that? Well, as the late Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson used to say, diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as a means to an end. Not any more. None of John Bolton's detractors is worried that his bluntness will jeopardise the administration's policy goals. Quite the contrary. They're concerned that the administration has policy goals — that it isn't yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of 'diplomacy' has become corrupted: it's no longer the language through which nation states treat with one another so much as the code-speak consensus of a global elite.

For much of the civilised world the transnational pabulum has become an end in itself, and one largely unmoored from anything so tiresome as reality. It doesn't matter whether there is any global warming or, if there is, whether Kyoto will do anything about it or, if you ratify Kyoto, whether you bother to comply with it: all that matters is that you sign on to the transnational articles of faith. The same thinking applies to the ICC, and Darfur, and the Oil-for-Fraud programme, and anything else involving the UN. It was at the heart of Clare Short's freaky objection to the Aussie–American post-tsunami relief effort. 'I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,' she told the BBC. 'Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.'

Leaving aside the question of whether one can be the only body with moral authority when one's tastes run mainly to bodies under the age of twelve, the reality is that the UN couldn't do the job. Its permanent 24/7 365-days-a-year humanitarian bureaucracy took a month to get to Banda Aceh. The ad-hoc US–Australian operation was on the ground within hours. Miss Short's position seems to be that she'd be willing to forgive Washington's very effective relief effort as long as the Americans were more rhetorically submissive to the UN. In that sense, it's not so much that the American rapid response 'undermined' the UN as that the normal Western deference to the organisation has grossly over-inflated its 'legitimacy' and 'moral authority'.

That's what John Bolton had in mind with his observations about international law: 'It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.' Just so. When George Bush Sr went through the UN to assemble his Stanley Gibbons coalition for the first Gulf war, it might have been a 'diplomatic triumph' but it was also the biggest single contributing factor to the received wisdom in the decade and a half since that only the UN has the international legitimacy to sanction war — to the point where, on the eve of Iraq's liberation, the Church of England decided that a 'just war' could only be one approved by the Security Council. That in turn amplifies the UN's claim to sole global legitimacy in a thousand other areas, big and small — the environment, guns, smoking, taxation.

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of John Kerry is that, regardless of his government's foreign policy, a UN ambassador has to be at some level a UN booster. Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration's ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who'd just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. 'No,' Schultz would say, 'this is your country' — and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan's embryo world government.

A slyer argument is that yes, the UN's in a terrible state, what with the Oil-for-Fraud and the Congolese moppets and the flop response to Darfur and the tsunami, but that's all the more reason why America needs an ambassador able to build consensus for much-needed reforms. The problem with that seductive line is that most of the proposed reforms are likely to make things worse. Again, Bolton is right to be dismissive about restructuring the Security Council. Even as the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, it makes little sense: in 1945, both de Gaulle's France and Chiang Kai-shek's China had less convincing claims to a permanent seat at the table than my beloved Canada. Today, Russia is literally the sick man of Europe and the emaciated cadaver of Central Asia. Midway through its transition from 'superpower' to ghost town, the country already has lower male life expectancy than Bangladesh; by 2050, it will have a smaller population than Yemen. As for Germany, why should a European Union with a European foreign policy and a European foreign minister get a third permanent vote on the council? India? Brazil? South Africa? To be sure, they're all important regional powers, but regionalism is the curse of the UN: it's the division of the organisation into regional voting blocs with regional candidates that leads to the absurd elevation of Libya to the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission. Giving every corner of the world its own permanent member and veto will only ensure that the response to the next decade's never-again genocide is even more sclerotic.

The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, isn't as pithy as Bolton, but an unreported speech of his in 2003 captures the mood of Washington, too:

The UN is structurally unable to address those challenges. In recent years, for example, I can find only one example of a senior UN figure having the guts to call a member state a 'totalitarian regime'. It was former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali last autumn, and he was talking about America. John Bolton's sin isn't that he's 'undiplomatic', but that he's correct.

~Alas, the US Senate decided to hold all that scoffing at ineffectual transnationalism against Mr Bolton. This is from my column in The Irish Times of April 18th 2005, when the ambassadorial nominee found himself singlehandedly provoking a #MeToo movement among hippaphobic members of the diplomatic corps. Aside from the cheap gags, the point about bureaucratic resistance to any meaningful reform remains pertinent:

Mr Bolton is the president's plain-spoken nominee for UN ambassador ("There is no such thing as the United Nations") and the Democrats in the US Senate are reluctant to confirm him for anything other than the title role in the next Incredible Hulk movie. Senator Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely California obstructionist, has charged that Bolton needs "anger management lessons".

I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to hurl a chair through the window and punch someone's lights out like being told I need anger management lessons. So I was interested to hear about the kind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Senator Boxer to her diagnosis.

Well, here it comes. (If you've got young children present, you might want to take them out of the room.) From the shockingly brutal testimony of Thomas Fingar, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Intelligence Research:

He was "standing up" with "hands on hips"! Who does he think he is - Carmen Miranda? Fortunately, before Bolton could let rip with a "pursed lip" or escalate to the lethal "tsk-ing" manoeuvre, Fingar was able to back cautiously out of the room and call the FBI anger management team, who surrounded the building and told the deranged diplomat to come out slowly with his hands above his hips.

Well, I haven't been so horrified since, well, since David Gest split from Liza Minnelli and launched a multimillion dollar suit for damages because she'd beaten him up. As Jon Stewart, host of "The Daily Show", observed: "There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli." Likewise, whatever one's feelings about the UN and Kofi Annan and multilateralism, there's nothing that could get most self-respecting men to appear in front of a Senate committee and complain that John Bolton put his hands on his hips to them. At least, Liza allegedly beat her ex to a pulp.

True, she'd recently had two hip replacements, so if she'd slapped her hands on her hips, she'd have fallen to the ground howling in agony. But my point is: even David Gest might have baulked at complaining about hands on hips.

Still, in the ever accelerating descent into parody of the Senate confirmation process, nothing is too trivial. By the time Senator Boxer & Co are through huffing about the need for anger management lessons, Two-Hips Bolton will be able to walk into every saloon in Dodge and the meanest hombres will be diving for cover behind the hoochie-koochie gals' petticoats before his pinky's so much as brushed his waist.

If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchant critique of Bolton's geopolitical philosophy, that would be reasonable enough. But there's not even a pretence of any of that. Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode - an intelligence analyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others were dissatisfied - and used it to advance the bizarre proposition that every junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyond such aggressive "body language" as putting one's hands on hips. Or as Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic, complained to the BBC the other night: Bolton was "disloyal to his subordinates".

It's been obvious for three years now that the torpid federal bureaucracies - the agencies that so comprehensively failed America on 9/11 - are resistant to meaningful reform, but Beinart, in demanding that the executive branch swear fealty to the most incompetent underling, distils the "reform" charade to its essence: we'll talk reform, we'll pass reform bills, we'll merge and de-merge and re-merge every so often, we'll change three-letter acronyms to four-letter acronyms (the immigration agency INS is now BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and a year or four down the line we may well get real tough and require five-letter acronyms (BCINS?). But in the end we believe under-performing bureaucrats in key roles should be allowed to go on underperforming until retirement age. And, if you happen to show you're just the teensy-weensiest bit upset with one of them, we'll blow it up into a month of hearings on TV.

So vast battalions of America's "public servants" sit around all day cross-examining each other about some guy's unacceptably aggressive body language. He put his left hand in! His left hip out! In, out, in, out, he shook them all about!

As for the job Bolton's up for, what would make Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden put their hands on hips? Child sex rings run from UN peacekeeping operations? Sudan sitting on the Human Rights Commission while it licenses mass murder in Darfur? Kofi Annan's son doing a $30,000-a-year job, but somehow having a spare quarter-million dollars to invest in a Swiss soccer club?

There are tides in the affairs of men when someone has to put his hands on his hips and toss his curls.

Whoops, I shouldn't have mentioned "tossing his curls". From Friday's Washington Post:

They mean it. When it comes to the present depraved state of the UN, John Bolton is hip to the scene, and that's why the multilateral blatherers are wigging out.

~and now Bolton's back: we'll see how hairy things get. But I don't think he'll be starting any wars - if only because it will conflict with all the transgender-awareness training sessions funded by this great new spending bill.

If you're a Mark Steyn Club member, feel free to disagree in the comments section - but please do stay on topic and be respectful of your fellow members; disrespect and outright contempt should be reserved for yours truly. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership.

Listeners and viewers and readers have asked me to reprise the details of my upcoming event in Bernie Sanders' socialist utopia of Vermont. It's the 25th anniversary gala of the Ethan Allen Institute, which takes place in South Burlington on Thursday April 26th. The Green Mountain State is not exactly natural Steyn territory these days, but, if you're in the surrounding jurisdictions of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, upstate New York or Quebec, it's a short drive and I'll be thrilled to see you. You can find more details here - and you can get 15 per cent off the ticket price if you enter the promo code EAIMARK.</s>WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is replacing national security adviser H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Trump tweets that McMaster has done “an outstanding job & will always remain my friend.” He says Bolton will take over April 9.

Trump has repeatedly clashed with McMaster, a respected three-star general, and talk that McMaster would soon leave the administration had picked up in recent weeks.

His departure follows Trump’s dramatic ouster of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week.

It also comes after someone at the White House leaked that Trump was urged in briefing documents not to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin about his recent re-election win. Trump did it anyway.

McMaster was brought in after Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was dismissed.</s>President-elect Donald Trump will become 45th President of the United States, claiming victory and addressing the faithful at a rally in New York.</s>WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster has agreed to resign, a White House official announced on Thursday.

“The two have been discussing this for some time. The timeline was expedited as they both felt it was important to have the new team in place, instead of constant speculation,” the official said. “This was not related to any one moment or incident, rather it was the result of ongoing conversations between the two.”

McMaster will be replaced by John Bolton, Trump tweeted.

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

This story will be updated.</s>Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton recorded a video used by the Russian gun rights group The Right to Bear Arms in 2013 to encourage the Russian government to loosen gun laws.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, illustrates the common cause that Russian and American gun rights groups were forming in the years leading up to the 2016 election through former National Rifle Association president David Keene. Keene appointed Bolton to the NRA's international affairs subcommittee in 2011.

Russian politician Alexander Torshin helped establish The Right to Bear Arms and cultivate ties with American gun rights groups including the NRA. As a Putin ally, Torshin served as the deputy speaker of Russia's parliament for more than a decade, and also spent time on Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee, a state body that includes the director of Russia's internal security service.

The Bolton video appears to be another plank in a bridge built by Russia to conservative political organizations inside the United States. It's unclear why Russian leaders wanted to curry favor with the NRA, but Torshin and Keene appeared to have developed close ties over in the years prior to the 2016 election.

It's a relationship that has outsized importance now that the FBI is reportedly investigating whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the NRA to assist the Trump campaign in 2016, as McClatchy reported in January. The NRA has declined wrongdoing.

Bolton, who visited President Donald Trump in the Oval Office earlier this month and has reportedly been considered as a replacement for national security adviser H.R. McMaster, is a curious pick for The Right to Bear Arms in its video effort to influence the Russian legislature.

After all, Bolton is one of the most hawkish, anti-Russia figures in Republican Party foreign policy circles. And yet the video recorded by Bolton was used by this obscure Russian gun rights group with ties to the Kremlin.

A source close to Bolton told NPR that he was originally asked to record the video by David Keene, who served as NRA president from 2011 to 2013, and that he was informed the recording was for the Russian legislature. The source also said the former ambassador had never heard of The Right to Bear Arms until recent news coverage of the group.

Russian gun laws are relatively strict, and there is no fundamental right to own a gun. In the video, Bolton urges the Russian people to adopt gun rights as part of their constitution — in much the same way that the United States has a Second Amendment. At the time, he was a member of the NRA's international affairs subcommittee, a position Keene had appointed him to. The two have known each other since 1972, when Bolton interned for Keene.

"Thank you for this opportunity to address the Russian people on the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Russian Constitution," Bolton said in the video, which has previously been unreported. "Were the Russian national government to grant a broader right to bear arms to its people, it would be creating a partnership with its citizens that would better allow for the protection of mothers, children and families without in any way compromising the integrity of the Russian state. That is my wish and my advice to your great people."

Keene is a central player in the links between the American and Russian gun rights movements, and the fall of 2013 was a key moment in the development of this relationship.

A few days before Bolton's video was posted online, in November 2013, Keene was in Moscow for The Right to Bear Arms annual conference, delivering a speech. More than 300 gun rights advocates across the globe gathered in an upscale hotel to hear arguments for loosening of gun rights, and even a concealed carry fashion show.

There were signs that the Russian government had given its approval that the conference take place. Russian politicians, such as Torshin, were present, made speeches, and were presented with honorary memberships to The Right to Bear Arms.

"One would have to make an assumption that in Russia, which is a fairly closed society, that if someone was doing this, the government wasn't upset by it and knew what was going on," said conference attendee Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the U.S.-based Second Amendment Foundation. "The feeling was that it was sanctioned by the powers that be, so to speak. Otherwise, I would have doubted if it were to have taken place."

Gary Burris, another attendee, recalled "two or three high-ranking government officials there" who represented the Russian legislature. "They were people who had some political sway."

Bolton was not present at this conference. But the issue the former ambassador raised in his 2013 video — changing the Russian constitution to guarantee gun rights — was a major theme.

"Amending the Russian constitution to include a right to keep and bear arms provision, like our Second Amendment, was definitely a high priority for the attendees at the conference," Gottlieb told NPR.

At the conference, Keene said that it was a "great honor to be here today, partly because over the course of the last three years, I've hosted your senator Alexander Torshin at the National Rifle Association's annual meetings."

Torshin regularly tweeted and posted photos of his visits with Keene over the years. Keene had once reciprocated, and posted a photo of Torshin on his personal website.

But with the report of an FBI investigation, as well as a preliminary inquiry into the National Rifle Association, times have changed — that photo was removed from Keene's website. However, he did not delete the reference from his Facebook page, where it remains.

Neither Torshin nor Keene responded to multiple requests for comment.</s>H.R. McMaster will be removed as national security adviser by President Trump, according to reports. (Source: AP Images)

The Washington Post is reporting President Donald Trump has decided to remove H.R. McMaster from his post as national security adviser, and is weighing potential replacements, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The news comes just days after Trump's decision to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson was reportedly unaware of his termination until he read the president's announcement on Twitter.

The pair joins scores of other WhIte House officials and staffers who have either been fired or resigned over the last several months.

Download the Cleveland 19 News app and First Alert Weather app.</s>President Donald Trump on Thursday announced he would replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster with John Bolton.

“I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor,” the president tweeted on Thursday evening. “I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.”

In a subsequent statement, McMaster, a three-star Army general, announced that he would also retire from the military.

“After thirty-four years of service to our nation, I am requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer after which I will leave public service,” he said. “Throughout my career it has been my greatest privilege to serve alongside extraordinary servicemembers and dedicated civilians.

“I am thankful to President Donald J. Trump for the opportunity to serve him and our nation as national security advisor. I am grateful for the friendship and support of the members of the National Security Council who worked together to provide the President with the best options to protect and advance our national interests.”

McMaster’s exit brings an end to his uneven tenure as leader of the NSC, marked by internal clashes with the president and other top administration officials and months of swirling speculation about his looming departure.

He never quite meshed with the president, , and at times clashed with him on foreign policy matters.

Though most of their disagreements took place in private, McMaster was the subject of a public rebuke from Trump in February when he stated during a conference in Munich that evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections was “incontrovertible.”

“General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems,” Trump tweeted in response. “Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

The jab was the first time Trump’s criticisms of McMaster spilled into public view, despite the president’s having seriously his ouster as early as November.

News of McMaster’s departure comes amid concerns over a larger West Wing shake-up, with several top administration officials reportedly under consideration for dismissal by Trump.

The speculation prompted chief of staff John Kelly to address White House staffers this month and offer a reassurance that more upheaval was not on its way for officials, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters last Friday.

“The chief of staff actually spoke to a number of staff this morning, reassuring them that there were personnel changes — no immediate personnel changes at this time — and that people shouldn’t be concerned,” Sanders said at a press briefing that day.

According to Sanders, Trump and McMaster were in meetings together last Friday, but the pair were “not focused on the news stories” regarding the national security adviser’s status with the president.

After The Washington Post last week that Trump had already his mind about parting ways with his national security adviser — and was mulling over the timing of the announcement — Sanders directly addressed McMaster’s status in a late-night note.

“Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster — contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC,” Sanders tweeted.

McMaster stepped into the role of national security adviser in February 2017, replacing retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn who resigned amid concerns about his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump’s presidency has been marked by numerous prominent staffing changes. Trump abruptly announced in a tweet last week that Rex Tillerson would be replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state.

Earlier this month, Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, resigned amid a dispute with the president over his approach to trade tariffs. Late last month, White House communications director Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, announced she would step down from her role.</s>If you want to get a sense of just how the next national security adviser, John Bolton, fits into Washington's foreign policy ecosystem, consider his lobbying last year against the Iran nuclear deal. The details here tell us a lot about how President Donald Trump's next national security adviser understands America's place in the world.

Trump of course campaigned against the deal and publicly bemoaned the fact that he was required to keep certifying Iran's compliance with it. But a hasty exit from it carried its own risks. Could America effectively impose secondary sanctions on foreign banks and companies without cooperation at least from allies? The White House risked embarrassment since the intelligence community had determined Iran remained in compliance.

So eventually Trump settled on the current U.S. strategy: threaten to walk away unless America's European allies agree to address its weaknesses, namely its sunsets, Iran's missile programs and the weak inspection regime.

Even that strategy did not go over well inside the Washington establishment, or for that matter with Trump's former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. The argument was that the deal was working, so why rock the boat?

Not everyone agreed. Bolton wanted to rock the boat.

With the help of his longtime collaborator Fred Fleitz, Bolton crafted a policy paper on how to exit the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal title of the agreement intended to secure international monitoring of Iran's nuclear development in exchange for lifting certain sanctions against the regime. An exit would be more involved than just announcing America's withdrawal.

Bolton urged the Trump administration to pursue a diplomatic and political strategy that presented a paper on findings on how Iran was in breach of the agreement. He called for coordinating the decision with allies, but leaving Russia and China (two countries that negotiated and agreed to the deal in 2015) out of these consultations until the last minute.

Bolton also laid out options that come very close to regime change. He urged the White House to encourage discussions in Congress to consider pressing allies to end landing and docking rights for Iranian vessels and aircraft; demand Iran pay U.S. court orders in favor of the victims of terrorism; announce U.S. support for Iran's democratic opposition; and provide assistance to Iranian minority groups such as the Balochis, Khuzestan Arabs and Kurds as well as "internal resistance among labor unions, students and women's groups."

White House officials at the time told me that Bolton briefed Trump on the plan (he has had access to Trump since his campaign in 2016). But eventually the president went with the strategy to try to fix the Iran deal instead of killing it altogether. Next month, when Bolton comes into his new job, he will have a chance to make his case again to the president — this time as national security adviser.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @SoFlaOpinion or Facebook</s>Samantha Bee’s show Full Frontal featured a segment dedicated to the Iraq War and what, if anything, we have learned in the 15 years since. Near the end (4:44 in the video), she addressed how the rumored new national security advisor, John R. Bolton, could make America repeat history. This time with Iran instead of Iraq. The next day, the White House replaced H.R. McMaster with John R. Bolton as national security advisor.

This makes Bolton the third hawkish national security advisor in the Trump administration. Not only was he a very vocal supporter of the invasion of Iraq, he has also advocated for the bombing of Iran for years. His warmongering echoes the "shoot first, ask questions maybe" attitude that got the U.S. into Iraq 15 years ago. Bolton has expressed this opinion many times, which Bee shows us in many clips from talk shows. Why wasn’t he already in the Trump administration? Apparently 45 didn’t like the handlebar mustache aesthetic for his secretary of state.

Obviously that’s no longer a deal breaker. Now Bolton has “the desiccated beef-jerky-like ear of our impressionable president and is ready to lead us into Iraq 2: Iran. The most unwanted sequel since Donald Trump, Jr.” It’s funny, because it’s true.

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Anna Greer is an editorial intern and a senior at the University of Tennessee, where she studies comics and human rights. When she is not engaged in feminist activism, she usually can be found wearing Doc Martens and looking at Star Wars prequel memes.
U.S. President Donald Trump announces former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton will become his National Security Advisor, succeeding the outgoing H. R. McMaster.