The purge of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie loyalists from the Donald Trump presidential transition team has little to do with Christie’s Bridgegate scandal and everything to do with a battle between Bush-era neoconservatives and national security realists for control over key departments of the Trump administration.

It appears that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the publisher of the New York Observer and someone who is aligned with the Likud Party of Israel, is now the de facto chair of the Trump transition team, especially when it comes to national security matters.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the official chairman of the team, is concentrating on domestic policy appointments, such as the rumored appointment of Texas Senator Ted Cruz as Attorney General.

Kushner fired Christie and Christie loyalist, former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers, from the transition team and replaced them with the discredited neocon Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy.

It is likely that Gaffney will seek to bring a host of neocons who championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq into the Trump administration.

Also fired was Matthew Freedman, another Christie loyalist. Kushner never liked Christie because as a federal prosecutor in north Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner’s father, real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who received a prison sentence at Christie’s urging.


Where one finds the likes of Gaffney, former CIA director James Woolsey, also a member of the Trump transition team, and John Bolton, rumored to be in consideration for Secretary of State or deputy Secretary of State, one will find the other neocons who drove the United States into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These include Richard Perle, who claimed U.S. troops invading Iraq would be met with Iraqis throwing “flowers and candy.” This editor wrote the following about Perle’s fatuous claim in a March 31, 2003, article for CounterPunch: “Perle’s military experience does not permit him to distinguish between flowers and candy and bullets and mortar rounds.”

There is someone far more sinister than Gaffney, Bolton, and Perle chomping at the bit to join the new administration.

Wayne Madsen Reports has learned from multiple knowledgeable sources that the proponent of neo-fascism, Michael Ledeen, is working closely with former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, to ensure that as many neocons from the Bush 43 and Reagan eras find senior positions in the Trump administration.

Flynn co-authored a book with Ledeen that was released in July and titled, “The Field of Flight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.”

The book represents typical neocon pabulum more than it does realism.

In July, Kushner’s Observer, unsurprisingly, published a five-star review of the book.

Flynn, who distinguished himself admirably by suggesting that the Obama administration was coddling the Islamic State and its allied jihadists in Syria, appears not to recognize that it has long been the desire of neocons like Ledeen, Perle, Woolsey, and Bolton to divide the Arab nation-states into warring factions so that Israel can hold ultimate sway over the entire Middle East.



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