Vice President Mike Pence's chief lawyer and domestic policy director are leaving his office at the beginning of the new year, according to four sources familiar with the staff turnover.
The moves come amid high tensions and staff turnover in the Trump administration thanks to the ongoing Russia probe and a new tell-all book about West Wing happenings.
"These moves have been in the works for weeks," the vice president's communications director confirmed to CNN.
CNN has learned that longtime senior staffers Mark Paoletta and Daris Meeks are leaving Pence's office. The announcement was made by chief of staff Nick Ayers in a staff meeting at the beginning of the week.
Paoletta and Meeks' departures follow two other top Pence aides who have left the Office of the Vice President: chief of staff Josh Pitcock and press secretary Marc Lotter. The vice president's staff is considerably smaller than the West Wing, making the departures a more notable shift at the beginning of the new year.
There has been talk for over a month that Pence will soon have his time testifying before the Muller team, which of course makes sense since Pence was in charge of the transition, and has been present at a lot of meetings with Flynn, Jared, and Donald Jr..
Apparently this possibility really troubled Steve Bannon who tried to keep Pence insulated from some of the more troubling goings on in the Trump White House.
Courtesy of Raw Story:
It’s been widely reported that former White House political strategist Steve Bannon thought that Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was “treasonous.”
However, author Michael Wolff also claims that Bannon worried that Vice President Mike Pence was similarly attending problematic meetings — and he worked to protect him from them because he saw Pence as a solid backup plan in the event of President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Specifically, Bannon worried about Pence taking meetings with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and First Daughter Ivanka Trump, whom he’d decided were, in Wolff’s words, “Russia toxic.”
“Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of ‘wrong meetings,’ and helped to bring in the Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get ‘our fallback guy’ out of the White House and ‘running around the world and looking like a vice president,'” writes Wolff.
Bannon apparently believed that at some point Trump would definitely be forced from office, and he wanted to keep Pence squeaky clean so that he could carry the agenda forward once Trump was no longer gumming up the works.
Here's hoping that his attempts to protect Pence failed to work, and that Mueller has significant dirt on him as well.
Source http://ift.tt/2EfYank
