Elliot Abrams explained on Monday why President Donald Trump rejected him for a top State Department position.
Abrams described his meeting with Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and his failure to gain the approval of a President who he had publicly criticized in the leadup to the election in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront.”
“The meeting was fine,” Abrams said. “(Trump) didn’t say, ‘Why did you say those mean things about me.’ We talked foreign policy.”
He said Trump told him Tillerson wanted him for the post, and when the meeting was over, he assumed everything was fine. But then he found out Trump had rejected him.
“Somebody, I think, put in front of the President, some of the things I’d said last year and perhaps riled him up,” Abrams said.
Abrams was a former official under President Ronald Reagan. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanors stemming from the Iran-Contra affair and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. He went on to serve as deputy national security adviser for President George W. Bush, where he advocated for the Iraq War.
Given Abrams’ past experiences and positions, he may have found himself strongly at odds with the Trump White House. The President made opposition to major foreign interventions a mainstay of his campaign and chief strategist Steve Bannon has a documented opposition to neoconservatives like Abrams.
Despite the potential ideological gap, Tillerson apparently wanted the seasoned Republican foreign policy hand to serve as his No. 2 in the State Department. Like Trump, Tillerson has no prior experience in government.
Sources told CNN that Abrams’ failure to secure a prominent spot in the administration was due to his past criticisms of the man who now occupies the Oval Office.
In May, Abrams wrote in the neoconservative Weekly Standard that Trump was “someone who cannot win and should not be president of the United States.”