[CTC] IUST Sources: Navarro to be promoted to ‘assistant to the president,’ regaining influence on trade

[Dolan, Mike]

https://insidetrade.com/daily-news/sources-navarro-be-promoted-%E2%80%98assistant-president%E2%80%99-regaining-influence-trade
Sources: Navarro to be promoted to ‘assistant to the president,’ regaining influence on trade
Peter Navarro, whose influence on trade policy was seen as diminished when his office was moved under the National Economic Council last year, is being promoted to an “assistant to the president” role -- a move likely to elevate his ability to impact looming trade actions and ongoing negotiations, sources briefed on the personnel decision told Inside U.S. Trade.
As one of his first acts in office last September, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly moved Navarro’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under the purview of the NEC, where Navarro had to report to Director Gary Cohn and lost previously obtained one-on-one access to the Oval Office.
Sources said Kelly, in establishing a paper trail and organizational structure at the White House, also forced Navarro to copy Cohn on all of his emails in an attempt to control what they described as “chaos” that reigned whenever President Trump was making a decision on a trade matter.
The people informed about the personnel change said both Kelly and former staff secretary Rob Porter over time had weakened Navarro’s role on trade policy and limited his access to Trump, and that Porter’s recent departure from the White House and Kelly’s reportedly weakened trust with the president had helped elevate the former economics professor to a position outside of the NEC.
Porter, a former staffer for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT), organized weekly trade meetings during which the president could hear input from key officials. Sources also saw Porter as an important connection to Hatch and his caucus who often gave Capitol Hill a heads-up on pending actions as well as readouts of the weekly sessions.
“It’s going to be much more like the first six months of this administration than the last six months,” one source briefed on the planned announcement said. “You have to have responsibility to come to these trade meetings, and in the last six months he has had no job, Porter had him in Siberia, Cohn ignored him and Kelly was happy with it.”
A former trade official said the announcement means Navarro is being “elevated in a pretty significant way.”
A White House spokeswoman said there were no personnel announcements to make at this time.
Sources say that while Navarro’s relationship with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer may not be the best, both are trusted Trump trade advisers with similar views on many issues.
The former trade official said Lighthizer “doesn’t necessarily have tremendous respect for him” but noted that he has “a lot of other people who are really on the other side of issues” -- and that Navarro would at the very least be a “force for the general direction of where Lighthizer wants to go.”
A private-sector source who previously worked with Lighthizer and Navarro agreed. “He’s smart enough to know that Navarro has the ear of the president,” the source said. “He’s going to use Navarro to his advantage to make his case.”
A former GOP leadership staffer said the personnel move suggested a shift further away from the trade priorities that congressional Republicans have laid out for Trump in recent White House meetings on various trade issues, including his decision on what, if anything, to do about his administration’s Section 232 investigations into steel and aluminum imports.
“If his history is any guide, Navarro's return to the West Wing would certainly send a signal that the administration isn't listening to anything Republicans in Congress are trying to tell the president on their priorities and what's important in their states and districts,” the source said. “Between them, I don't think either Navarro or Lighthizer have ever tried to count to 218.”
Navarro last year drafted an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from NAFTA</node/158485> that almost made its way to the president’s desk but was stopped due to the objections of Cohn and other senior officials as well as the business community. -- Jenny Leonard (jleonard at iwpnews.com<mailto:jleonard at iwpnews.com>)




Michael F. Dolan, J.D.
Legislative Representative
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Desk  202.624.6891
Fax    202.624.8973
Cell    202.437.2254

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20180224/db14db13/attachment.html>