Breaking news via the Washington Post:
President Trump has ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and plans to nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him as the nation’s top diplomat, orchestrating a major change to his national security team amid delicate negotiations with North Korea, White House officials said Tuesday.
Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled diplomat cut short a trip to Africa on Monday to return to Washington.
Tension between Trump and Tillerson has simmered for many months, but the president and his top diplomat reached a breaking point over the past week, officials said.
The reason for the latest rift was unclear. A spokesman for Tillerson said the secretary of state “had every intention of staying” in his job and was “unaware of the reason” for his firing.
Trump has selected Pompeo to replace him at the State Department, and Gina Haspel — the deputy director at the CIA — to succeed him at the CIA. She would become the first woman to run the spy agency.
The good news is, he's not replacing him with John Bolton. But Pompeo is a Benghazi nut. Why would Dems confirm him -- because Trump might pick someone worse?
Oddly enough, the firing came the day after Tillerson responded to the news of Russia poisoning a spy with a nerve agent in the UK:
Later in the evening, Tillerson told reporters the attack "clearly" came from Russia and then expressed shock at the Kremlin's actions.
"It's almost beyond comprehension that a state, an organized state, would do something like that," he told reporters aboard a US airplane on a trip to Africa.
"A non-state actor, I could understand. A state actor — I cannot understand why anyone would take such an action," he said.
When asked whether the incident would prompt a mutual defense response with the UK, Tillerson said that "it certainly will trigger a response. I'll leave it at that."
Well, yes. Yes it did. This is how Tillerson found out he was fired:
