Trump picks security adviser

PALM BEACH, Fla. -- President Donald Trump on Monday appointed Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his new national security adviser, picking a military strategist known for challenging conventional thinking and helping to turn around the Iraq war in its darkest days.

Trump made the announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he interviewed candidates over the holiday weekend to replace Michael Flynn, who was forced out after withholding information from Vice President Mike Pence about a call with Russia's ambassador.

Sitting next to Trump for the announcement, McMaster said he was honored to take on the role and added that he looks forward to "doing everything that I can to advance and protect the interests of the American people."

Unlike Flynn, who served as a campaign adviser last year, McMaster has no links to Trump and is not thought of as being as ideological as the man he will replace. McMaster is also a battle-tested veteran of both the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq war.

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The selection encouraged Republicans who admire McMaster and waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to persuade Trump to select him. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., an Army veteran who once served under McMaster, contacted the White House to suggest that it consider him, and a coterie of other national security conservatives, including a top aide to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., also lobbied for him. Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has worked with McMaster, encouraged him to take the job.

"He's a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience," Trump told reporters as McMaster, wearing his uniform, sat next to him. "I watched and read a lot over the last two days. He is highly respected by everyone in the military, and we're very honored to have him."

The choice continued Trump's reliance on high-ranking military officers to advise him on national security. Flynn is a retired three-star general and Mattis a retired four-star general. John Kelly, the homeland security secretary, is a retired Marine general. Trump's first choice to replace Flynn, Robert Harward, who turned down the job, and two other finalists were current or former senior officers as well. McMaster will remain on active duty.

McMaster, 54, made a name for himself as a young officer with a searing critique of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their performance during the Vietnam War and later criticized the way President George W. Bush's administration went to war in Iraq.

As a commander, he was credited with demonstrating how a different counterterrorism strategy could defeat insurgents in Iraq, providing the basis for the change in approach that Gen. David Petraeus adopted to shift momentum in a war the United States was on the verge of losing.

For all of McMaster's war-making experience, however, he has little background in navigating Washington politics.

He will take over a rattled National Security Council apparatus that bristled at Flynn's leadership.

Most of the National Security Council staff is composed of career professionals, often on loan from military or civilian agencies, and they have complained privately about being shut out of their areas of expertise and kept in the dark about important decisions. Trump's aides look on many of those holdovers from the last administration with suspicion, blaming them for leaks. The atmosphere has grown so toxic that some security council staff members have said they feared that they were under surveillance.

Several security council aides said Monday that they learned about McMaster's selection the same way the public did and expressed concern that Flynn's associates would stick around. The White House has said it promised the original first choice complete autonomy in picking staff members, and McMaster is expected to insist on the same.

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Trump said Keith Kellogg, another retired lieutenant general, would remain as the security council's chief of staff. Kellogg has been acting national security adviser since Flynn's resignation a week ago and was one of the four candidates interviewed by Trump on Sunday for the permanent job. Trump made no mention of K.T. McFarland, the top deputy national security adviser, and whether she would stay.

McMaster has served as director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center at Fort Eustis in Virginia since 2014. A West Point graduate with a doctorate in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he commanded a unit that clashed with Iraq's Republican Guard in one of the biggest tank battles of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, earning him the Silver Star.

But he came to prominence with his 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty, which critiqued the Joint Chiefs for not standing up to President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. He cemented his reputation in 2005 during the Iraq war when he led the 3rd Armored Cavalry regiment in regaining control of Tal Afar.

The operation was cited as a textbook example in a manual on counterinsurgency doctrine prepared by Petraeus. Another commander who had a role in drafting that manual was Mattis, then a Marine general. Petraeus took a similar approach when he assumed command in Iraq in 2007 with a surge of troops authorized by Bush.

It was not clear how closely McMaster's and Trump's views align. On Russia, McMaster appears to hold a much dimmer view than Trump of Moscow's military and political objectives in Europe.

In remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in May 2016, McMaster said Russia managed to annex Crimea and intervene militarily in eastern Ukraine "at zero cost" from the international community.

McMaster said Moscow's broader goal is to "collapse the post-Cold War security, economic and political order in Europe and replace that order with something that is more sympathetic to Russian interests."

McCain, who has been sharply critical of Trump in recent days, praised the appointment and said, "I could not imagine a better, more capable national security team than the one we have right now."

The position of national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation.

Migrant crackdown

Separately, the Homeland Security Department has drafted sweeping new guidelines aimed at aggressively detaining and deporting aliens living in the U.S. illegally, according to a pair of memorandums signed by Kelly.

The memos dated Friday seek to implement Trump's broad directive to crack down on illegal immigration. Kelly outlines plans to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents, expand on the priority list for immigrants marked for immediate removal and enlist local law enforcement officers to help make arrests, according to a person briefed on the documents, who confirmed the details to The Associated Press.

"The surge of illegal immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources and has created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States," Kelly wrote.

He said apprehensions on the southern U.S. border had seen a surge of an additional 10,000 to 15,000 per month from 2015 to 2016.

The memos leave in place one directive from the Obama administration, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows young people who were transported into the country illegally as children to stay and obtain work permits. The program has protected about 750,000 immigrants since its inception in 2012. Trump has previously indicated his desire to end the program, but at his news conference last week, he indicated that he would "show great heart" toward the program.

The memos were reported first by The Washington Post and other news organizations. A U.S. official familiar with the documents did not dispute the accuracy of the memos signed by Kelly, which were originally scheduled for release Friday before they were postponed for White House review.

According to a draft document on another matter, Trump's revised immigration ban will target the same seven countries listed in his original executive order and exempts travelers who already have a visa to travel to the U.S., even if they haven't used it yet.

A senior administration official said the order, which Trump revised after federal courts held up his original immigration and refugee ban, will target only those same seven Muslim-majority countries -- Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya.

The official said that green-card holders and dual citizens of the U.S. and any of those countries are exempt. The new draft also no longer directs authorities to single out -- and reject -- Syrian refugees when processing new visa applications.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the order before it's made public. The official noted that the draft is subject to change ahead of its signing, which Trump said could come sometime this week.

Asked about the revised order, White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the document circulating was a draft and that a final version should be released soon. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker, Michael R. Gordon, Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Martin of The New York Times and by Catherine Lucey, Robert Burns, Hope Yen, Julie Pace, Vivian Salama and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press.

A Section on 02/21/2017