The Trump White House is trying to push the appointment of a right-wing conspiracy theorist to a key Defense Department position over the objections of top Pentagon officials.
Foreign Policy reports that the White House earlier this year directed the Pentagon to hire Rich Higgins, a former Trump National Security Council official who was ousted in 2017 after he wrote an unhinged memo that claimed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election amounted to a "Maoist insurgency" against President Donald Trump.
Although the White House initially backed off in the face of Pentagon resistance to hiring Higgins to be chief of staff to the under secretary of defense for policy, Foreign Policy's sources say that "the White House reached out again about Higgins this week... asking why the Pentagon had not begun the hiring process for him."
Higgins, an ally of disgraced former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, also believes that a cabal of "globalists, bankers, the ‘deep state,’ and Islamists" have been conspiring to bring down Trump. Additionally, Higgins believes that "the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national and international levels" and is coordinating with them against the president.
A former defense official tells Foreign Policy that they aren't surprised that Trump is trying to hire a conspiracy theorist, even though he was actually fired from the NSC less than three years earlier for his unhinged memo.
“He’s very typical of this sh*tshow of an administration,” they explained. “The best you can hope is they don’t do any damage.”
