McMaster’s Huma Abedin, Dina Habib Powell, set to leave the White House

This is great news. Dina Habib Powell was part of the swamp, part of the willfully ignorant McMaster crowd that clearly opposes Trump’s agenda. Why is McMaster still there?

Daniel Greenfield said this about Dina Habib Powell: “The media dubbed her the Republican Huma Abedin. She’s been one of the most powerful women in two Republican administrations. She’s friends with Valerie Jarrett….Habib Powell had all the right friends. Like Valerie Jarrett. Arianna Huffington praised the White House for bringing her in. Her ex-husband heads up Teneo Strategy: the organization created by the same man who made the Clinton Foundation happen and which employed Huma Abedin. You could see her posing next to Huma, Arianna and a Saudi princess. You can see her photographed at the American Task Force of Palestine gala. The ATFP was originally Rashid Khalidi’s American Committee on Jerusalem. Khalidi was the former PLO spokesman at the center of the Obama tape scandal. And Habib Powell was there as a presenter at the Middle East Institute after a speech by the PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi….Dina Habib Powell is a deep part of the Republican establishment. Her top role at the NSC represents McMaster’s vision for our approach to Islam. And it’s an echo of the failed approach of the Bush years. Flynn made the NSC into a tool that matched Trump’s vision. McMaster is remaking it to match Jeb Bush’s vision.”

“Dina Powell, Influential Foreign Policy Adviser, Is Set to Exit White House,” by Mark Landler and Peter Baker, New York Times, December 8, 2017:

WASHINGTON — Dina H. Powell, a deputy national security adviser to President Trump and one of the most influential women in the Trump administration, will step down early next year, the White House said on Friday.

Ms. Powell has been involved in an array of foreign policy issues during the last year, including Mr. Trump’s effort to broker a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. On the president’s foreign trips, including his most recent to Asia, she regularly had a seat at the table during his meetings with other leaders.

In a White House fractured by tribal divisions, Ms. Powell has been a prominent member of the New York camp affiliated with Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Her departure will remove one of the figures who has resisted the more hard-line policies advocated by the nationalist wing associated with Stephen K. Bannon, who stepped down over the summer as the president’s chief strategist.

Ms. Powell’s influence extended beyond the national security issues that would normally be under her purview; her name was once floated as a potential White House chief of staff. But her family remained in New York while she worked in Washington, and friends have said the weekly commute, and the time away from her children, had worn on her.

“Dina has been an invaluable member of President Trump’s team,” the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, said in a statement. “She organized and drove an effort to restore our nation’s strategic competence.”

General McMaster said Ms. Powell would continue to work on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process after leaving the White House. Officials said she might even travel to the region with Mr. Kushner and the president’s special envoy, Jason D. Greenblatt, though the prospects for an accord seem more elusive than ever after Mr. Trump’s recognition this week of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Ms. Powell, a former philanthropic executive at Goldman Sachs who served in the George W. Bush administration, arrived at the White House through Ms. Trump, with whom she worked during the transition developing proposals related to the economic empowerment of women.

But Ms. Powell soon pivoted to national security, drawing on her experience as an assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She was a key architect of Mr. Trump’s first foreign trip, which was viewed as a major success after he received a lavish welcome in Saudi Arabia and Israel.

She was also deeply involved in drafting the National Security Strategy, a document that lays out the administration’s approach to issues like nuclear proliferation and upheaval in the Middle East. Ms. Powell worked closely with Nadia Schadlow, another N.S.C. staff official, who is expected to succeed her.

Ms. Rice said Ms. Powell had been a “steadying but creative influence, no small feat in any administration but particularly in one that has really needed the experience that she brought to the job.”…