The head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was briefly on President Donald Trump’s short list to replace John Bolton as national security adviser, media reported Tuesday.
However, Trump on Wednesday announced via Twitter he had selected Robert O’Brien, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the State Department and a former U.S. representative to the United Nations.
That means Lisa Gordon-Hagerty will remain NNSA administrator, a position she has held for nearly two years.
While the president’s national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation, Gordon-Hagerty was the only person on the list of five candidates to get it during the Trump administration. The Senate in February 2018 unanimously confirmed Gordon-Hagerty, just two months after Trump nominated her to lead the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch that maintains and modernizes U.S. nuclear weapons. That made her’s the second-fastest trip through the Senate of any NNSA administrator since Congress created the agency in 2000.
Bolton left his post Sept. 10 over policy differences with Trump. The president said he asked for Bolton’s resignation, while Bolton said he offered his resignation unsolicited.
Trump on Tuesday shared the short list to reporters travelling with him on Air Force One. Along with Gordon-Hagerty and O’Brien, the other candidates were: Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who served as Trump’s National Security Council chief of staff in 2018; Keith Kellogg, current national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence; and Rick Waddell, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former deputy national security adviser to Trump in 2017-2018.
Like most of the other people on Trump’s short list, Gordon-Hagerty has prior experience on the National Security Council — in years on the job, more than the other candidates. For a combined five years during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Gordon-Hagerty was the National Security Council’s (NSC) director for combating terrorism.
Editor’s note: Sept. 18, 2019, 1:30 p.m. Eastern: the story was corrected to show that the Senate confirmed Gordon-Hagerty in 2018.
