Trump Names National Security Advisory Team

Billionaire and 2016 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has listed, for the first time on Monday, a series of national security experts who are advising him and his campaign for the presidency.

Trump had already previously named U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as the chairman of his national security team, but on Monday, for the first time ever, he provided the Washington Post with a list of advisers that comprise the team. Trump’s rivals and critics have argued repeatedly that his refusal, until now, to name his advisers meant he was not to be trusted with a president’s most important responsibility: Keeping the country safe.

But Trump’s list of national security advisers, preliminarily released in the Post interview with more on the way, comes on a day he has held meetings with Sessions, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and other Republican lawmakers.

“Walid Phares, who you probably know. Ph.D., adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s a counter-terrorism expert,” Trump said in the Post interview, according to reporters Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “Carter Page, Ph.D. George Papadopoulos. He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. The honorable Joe Schmitz, [was] inspector general at the Department of Defense. General Keith Kellogg. And I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that’s a pretty representative group.”

Rucker and Costa noted the interview went for about an hour in the Washington Post’s new offices downtown in Washington, D.C., and Trump began the meeting “by pulling out a list of some of his foreign policy advisers.”

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