A former State Department official had little good to say about Donald Trump's chief envoy to the world's hot spots and ripped into him on MSNBC for "dropping the ball" multiple times.
Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Matthew Miller, who served as the spokesperson for the State Department after heading the Office of Public Affairs at the DOJ, was asked about Steve Witkoff's performance with MSNBC regular Mike Barnicle pointedly noting the Trump appointee is a real estate lawyer with no international negotiation experience to speak of.
Barnicle pointed out, "He [Witkoff] gets very high marks here in New York City from people who know him in the real estate business but this isn't the real estate business," and then asked, "Have you ever heard of a single presidential envoy being involved in so many hotspots around the world, and so many flashpoints around the world?"
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"Steve Witkoff does seem like a very capable individual to me, a very smart individual," Miller responded. "The problem, I think, is that he has no idea what he doesn't know. He doesn't have the experience in these fields, he doesn't have the background, he doesn't have the diplomatic knowledge and, from all reports, he doesn't have anyone around him who can tell him what he doesn't know."
"And so you see him go to Russia and meet with Vladimir Putin and then come back and do an interview where he says, 'So the five regions that Russia is either wholly or partially occupying. I can't remember the names of all five of them. Nevertheless, I know that the people there want to be part of Russia," he recalled with a smirk before exclaiming, "No they don't! There's no evidence that they do."
"But he's heard that from Putin, and he doesn't know enough about the backstory, he doesn't know enough about the history, he doesn't know enough to push back on that when he hears it from Putin," he explained. "And the problem with him being stretched so thin as, as you note, is, you can't do all of those things."
"You can't negotiate peace in Ukraine and Iran deal and into the war in Gaza which you might recall was his initial portfolio, the thing that he was initially designed to do," he added. "And he has completely dropped the ball on –– you look at just what's happened in Gaza. This administration was handed a cease fire that we spent a lot of effort trying to get over the finish line, and we got over the finish line in the last days of the [Biden] administration, the entire conceit of that cease-fire, the way it was designed, was that the incoming administration would spend the six weeks of phase one to try to get it to phase two, and they have completely dropped the ball, haven't spent any diplomatic time, haven't spent any, spent any diplomatic muscle trying to get that to an end, get that to an end to the war."
"It's a complete catastrophe and they have completely lost focus on it, I suspect, because Witkoff is busy working on other matters," he suggested.
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