denis mcdonough

Just released from the White House communications shop:
The White House today announced that Deputy National Security Director and National Security Council chief of staff Mark Lippert will be returning to active duty in the U.S. Navy. Denis McDonough will remain Deputy National Security Advisor and assume the role of chief of staff to the [...]

Ben Smith at Politico has a good piece attempting to shed light on one of the most opaque aspects of Obama administration Kremlinology: what in the world the appointment of Dennis Ross as a National Security Council senior director heralds for Obama’s Mideast policy. As a reporter, it’s been frustrating how few people, inside and [...]

It’s been going around the foreign-policy interwebs for weeks: Jim Jones, the national security adviser, has what Laura Rozen called “a problematic tenure” at the National Security Council. Joe Klein was like, “I heard that too.” And if you talk to enough White House staffers, you hear that sort of gossip. I don’t know what [...]

In the guts of this Washington Post tick-tock about President Obama’s decision to release the torture memos comes an account of a meeting at CIA headquarters in December between Obama emissaries and top outgoing CIA officials. The agency officials, including still-Deputy Director Steve Kappes, made a case for Obama to retain torture techniques not including [...]

Check out The New York Times’ tick-tock of how the Obama team came to its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Two observations.
One, Vice President Joe Biden is described as the voice of “caution.” But that appears to be cashed out in terms of Biden urging a clearer, al-Qaeda-based objective for the mission. No one in the story is [...]

On CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday, President Obama said “There’s got to be an exit strategy” for Afghanistan, but today he … didn’t give one. What’s the story with that?

In my last post, I asked what it means to “disrupt” and “defeat” al-Qaeda, which President Obama said in his speech was the goal in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Denis McDonough, the National Security Council’s director for strategic communication, fielded those questions for me.

I’ve been hearing what I guess you’d call credible rumors from a number of informed people both inside and outside the Obama administration that Judith McHale, the former president and CEO of the Discovery Channel, is going to be tapped imminently as the next Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Al Kamen at The Washington [...]

Politico’s Ben Smith adds to Laura Rozen’s report on President-elect Barack Obama’s South Asia-themed dinner last week. Ben learns that Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi was there, along with an important defense adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret).
That raises a question: why doesn’t — as best I can tell — [...]

On her excellent new Foreign Policy blog, Laura Rozen has a great scoop about a secret dinner last week between President-elect Obama at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars downtown. In attendance were Democratic foreign-policy wise man Lee Hamilton — whom, as Laura notes, has mentored many of Obama’s foreign policy advisers — and [...]