WASHINGTON -- White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert is leaving President Donald Trump's administration, joining a growing list of officials who have been fired or quit in recent months.
Bossert, a favorite of Chief of Staff John Kelly, is leaving a day after national security adviser John Bolton began the job. Bossert was believed to be on shaky footing in the Bolton era, and he resigned two days after Michael Anton, the National Security Council spokesman, also quit.
Bossert's resignation was requested by Bolton, according to two people familiar with the situation who requested anonymity to discuss internal personnel issues.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment on whether Bossert was pushed out.
"I'm not going to get into specific details about the ongoings of personnel. But I can tell you that he resigned," she told reporters Tuesday. "The president feels he's done a great job and wishes him the best as he moves forward."
So far this year, the president has changed his secretary of state, national security adviser, veterans affairs secretary, CIA director, chief economic adviser, staff secretary, communications director and members of his legal team.
Bossert and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster feuded throughout their tenure in the White House in meetings that on occasion devolved into screaming, according to people familiar with their relationship who requested anonymity to discuss the situation. McMaster and others in the White House were particularly frustrated that Bossert was slow to move forward with a strategy to both defend the United States and punish Russia for its efforts to undermine the U.S. elections.
In late February, Adm. Michael Rogers, the departing head of the National Security Agency, suggested in congressional testimony that he did not have the authority he required from the White House to combat Russian cyberattacks.
"[Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin has clearly come to the conclusion that there's little price to pay and that therefore 'I can continue this activity,'" said Rogers, who is set to retire this month. "Clearly what we have done hasn't been enough."
Inside the White House, many blamed Bossert for those shortcomings.
"He's a foot dragger on everything," said a former senior U.S. official who worked with Bossert in the White House. "But that's also how he hung on for a while."
Bossert has publicly taken issue with assertions that the Trump administration has not imposed sufficient costs on Russia.
"We are deterring through increased defenses, we are deterring through punitive measures that impose costs," he said Sunday while speaking at the CipherBrief national security conference held in Sea Island, Ga. "We are applying economic, diplomatic, military penalties to our adversaries, and in some cases, to our friends that are behaving poorly."
He also discounted any potential impact of Russian manipulation of social media in the 2016 election.
"I frankly have a whole lot more confidence that no voter in this country was influenced by those ads," he said. "I'm not forgiving the meddling in the slightest; it's galling."
Beyond Russia, there was widespread frustration in the White House that Bossert's office had failed to produce formal strategies to deal with counterterrorism and cyberactivities.
And there were issues related to chain-of-commmand: Bossert insisted that he reported directly to the president and not to the national security adviser, which became a key source of frustration for McMaster. His sudden resignation, if forced, suggests that Bolton may be intent on ensuring that Bossert's replacement on cyber and counterterror strategy reports directly to him.
Bossert, who also served in the George W. Bush administration, wasn't a marquee name, but he was liked by Trump, senior administration officials said, and often defended his agenda in meetings and in interviews with the media.
His most public role came during last summer's hurricane season, when he often appeared in the White House briefing room and on TV. When the administration was facing heavy criticism for its response to the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico, Bossert was one of the officials put forward to defend the president.
In Bossert's last public remarks in office, he told a group of current and former intelligence officials, private sector executives and reporters Sunday night that "this White House seems to function just about the same as every other White House." He added: "At the end of the day the only thing that creates instability or the perception of it is (a) the coverage and (b) the turnover. I think at this point we've reached what seems to be a decent stability point."
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post.
A Section on 04/11/2018