President Trump's Pentagon purge is marching on.
On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesperson announced Christopher Maier, who led the Defense Department's Defeat ISIS Task Force, had resigned. But as three people briefed on the matter tell The New York Times, Maier's departure was more like a firing.
Maier had been leading the military effort to fight ISIS since the beginning of Trump's presidency. It was an "important but low-profile job" that required both navigating "Washington's counterterrorism bureaucracy" and working on the ground in combat zones, the Times writes. But on Monday morning, a White House appointee told Maier "the United States had won that war and that his office had been disbanded," the Times reports.
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Maier's reported ouster comes not long after Trump fired a slew of Pentagon officials, including former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and replaced them with his loyalists. The Pentagon's statement said Maier's office would be folded into two other bureaus headed by Trump appointees recently promoted amid the purge.
Brett McGurk, the former U.S. envoy for the ISIS fight who resigned over Trump's withdrawal of troops from Syria, criticized Maier's removal. "Chris is a nonpartisan professional and carries years of institutional knowledge on an exceedingly complex set of issues," McGurk told the Times, saying "it really makes no sense to force out someone like that 50 days before a transition to a new administration."
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