Bolton Adds Loyalists to National Security Council Staff

(Bloomberg) -- White House National Security Adviser John Bolton began building out a team of loyalists who have supported his hard-line foreign policy views.

Bolton tapped as the NSC’s executive secretary and chief of staff Fred Fleitz, an ardent critic of the Iran nuclear accord and Bolton’s former chief of staff while an undersecretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, according to Robert Palladino, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and occasional guest on Fox News, is the author of “Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud” and “The Coming North Korea Nuclear Nightmare: What Trump Must Do to Reverse Obama’s Strategic Patience.”

Bolton also hired Sarah Tinsley to serve as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for strategic communications, Palladino said Tuesday. Garrett Marquis was hired as special assistant to the president and a senior director for strategic communications.

Tinsley, who was director of Bolton’s super PAC, first worked for Bolton at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the 1980s and was one of his deputies when he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration.

Marquis, a former Bush administration aide and managing partner at the Prism Strategy Group, had been serving as a Bolton spokesman outside the administration.

The new staffing comes as Bolton, who is President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser, settles into a job he took in April to replace H.R. McMaster. Bolton is in the midst of final preparations for a Trump summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un planned for Singapore next month.

Bolton is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and State Department official under President George W. Bush. He also served in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

To contact the reporters on this story: Margaret Talev in Washington at mtalev@bloomberg.net;Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Mike Dorning, Joshua Gallu

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