Narula worked at KKR for 13 years. Our Investments JFLCO’s investment strategy focuses on middle market companies with proven, market-leading engineering / technical capabilities involving specialized products and services where performance is critical Cernovich has also targeted other McMaster allies in the NSC such as Dina Powell. Cohen-Watnick talked about his goal of becoming a spy “all the time,” this person said. He did not enter the office. And they have a different theory as to why he has retained his job, and why he’s drawn attacks: It’s because, they insist, he’s good at what he does. The incident, coming in the aftermath of Trump baselessly accusing his predecessor of wiretapping Trump Tower, became one of the first dust-ups related to the investigations into possible Russian collusion during the 2016 campaign that have gripped the White House. Visit us to know more about ars collections process with us! Others, who supported Trump’s insurgent campaign early on, tend to favor the ideas he advocated on the stump: concern that allies are freeloading, interest in strengthening ties with Russia, and a focus on the threat posed Islamic extremism in nations like Iran. Flynn became a prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign, famously leading a “lock her up” chant at the Republican National Convention, and was even considered as the running mate. That Cohen-Watnick, 31 years old and largely unknown before entering the administration, has become unfireable reveals how important he has become to the Trump White House, where loyalty is prized. Yet what we don’t know about Cohen-Watnick far outstrips what we do. As Delivery Manager, supporting Atlantic Shores for the past 2 years, Mr. Cognard seconds the Technical and Delivery Director in planning and designing the Atlantic Shores portfolio, to ensure safe and cost-efficient delivery. Whether or not Cohen-Watnick was actually one of Nunes's sources, the public reports tied him to the controversy. "We need people to be passionate about the problem of terrorism,” he’s quoted as saying in a Daily Pennsylvanian article about the event, advocating more courses devoted to the subject. Yet he hardly comes into sharper focus when you talk to co-workers, friends, and former colleagues. These and the other officers who served in that position were career intelligence officials with serious credentials, demonstrated maturity, and a wealth of experience.". Records show he registered to vote in 2012 with a Miami address, as a Republican and as a Hispanic male (his mother is Colombian). The Nunes scandal cemented Cohen-Watnick's reputation as a loyalist and as someone who could withstand the heat of public controversy. The strong implication of the stories about the incident has been that either Cohen-Watnick, Ellis, or both cleared Nunes onto the campus. McMaster, promptly began clearing out Flynn’s people, among them Dave Cattler, the deputy assistant to the president for regional affairs, Adam Lovinger, a strategic affairs analyst on loan from the Pentagon, and KT McFarland, Flynn’s deputy, who was eased out with the ambassadorship to Singapore. “But the Agency guys were all like ‘Fuck this guy, he’s just here to spy on us for Flynn and the DIA.’”, A White House official said that Cohen-Watnick did not know Flynn at the time he was in Afghanistan but did not dispute that there were “rivalries between CIA and DIA.”. Jüsto is a leading vertically-integrated online grocery platform in Mexico. In the intelligence world, incidental collection refers to intelligence agencies obtaining, in the course of monitoring foreigners, communications that either refer to or involve Americans, whose names are typically “masked” unless officials request that they be “unmasked.”. Since then, the conflicts within the NSC have settled down, at least publicly. Nunes claimed at one point that his source had been an intelligence official, not White House. But then, McMaster himself became the target of unflattering leaks. One White House official praised Cohen-Watnick as a "true professional and most importantly he is incredibly loyal to the president and this administration.”. The CIA has traditionally had control over who fills this position, and normally the job is staffed by a more experienced official. One person familiar with his career asserted that Cohen-Watnick had met Matt Flynn, Michael Flynn’s son, at “The Farm.” Another, a former senior intelligence official, said he had briefed Flynn at the DIA. Kushner and the president were apparently impressed with the young briefer and took an interest in him. Here, again, multiple officials directly familiar with the events offer contrasting versions of what took place. Ask around about Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and people get defensive. Cohen-Watnick has developed a reputation as one of the primary proponents of an aggressive, Flynn-style stance towards Iran within the NSC. In the summer of 2016, Cohen, unhappy at the DIA, began applying for positions on Capitol Hill, interviewing with the House Armed Services Committee, a congressional staffer said. It’s an appealing account. The trouble is, like most everything else about Cohen-Watnick, it’s all but impossible to verify, or to reconcile with other versions. Cohen-Watnick entered the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2004. Gen II is a leading independent U.S. private capital focused fund administrator. The leaks have created an atmosphere of suspicion on the NSC, where morale has never been particularly high since the start of the administration. Just 24 days into his tenure as Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, Michael Flynn was forced to resign, having reportedly misled Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian officials. KGBio focuses on the in-licensing, clinical development, and manufacturing of biological products, especially in the area of immuno-oncology. Also in May, Foreign Policy reported that “the knives are out” for McMaster over internal conflicts on Afghanistan policy, with him on one side and Bannon on the other. By using this site, you consent to the use of cookies. “I won’t talk to any journalist about Ezra,” said Michael Ledeen, a Flynn confidant who knows Cohen-Watnick well. Cohen-Watnick was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland, an affluent suburb of Washington. Cohen-Watnick survived, but he's remained a topic of gossip and a target of leaks—a flashpoint in the ongoing fight over the administration’s foreign policy. Pharvaris is a clinical-stage company focused on the discovery and development of novel oral bradykinin-B2-receptor antagonists for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare and potentially life-threatening genetic condition. As a sophomore, Cohen-Watnick told The Daily Pennsylvanian that from a young age he had wanted to serve in the Navy. Germany-based Staffbase, which provides a suite of employee engagement tools for companies, raises $145M led by General Atlantic — Chemnitz-based employee engagement firm Staffbase has received $145 million in a financing round led by growth equity firm General Atlantic. This appears to have been a time at which Cohen-Watnick was at a crossroads. Citing four U.S. officials, the Times later reported that his sources on the intelligence reports were Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office focused on national security. Doug Logigian was formerly a Senior Managing Director with Blackstone from 2006 to 2019. “Ezra is deeply thoughtful, hard working, and committed to serving the president,” Kushner said, offering a rare on-the-record comment, which is itself a testament to Cohen-Watnick’s importance. What remains a mystery is who exactly has protected him since Flynn went down, and why. One way or another, Michael Flynn seems to have elevated Cohen-Watnick to his high station in the Trump administration. Cernovich has cited White House sources repeatedly in his reports, though he has told me that he doesn’t know who his sources are and relies on burner phones to keep in touch with them. Or maybe it’s because he sits on the fault line of a fractured administration. Cohen-Watnick is listed on an online roster among a group that attended the Penn in D.C. internship program in Washington in 2008, in his case interning with the Office of Naval Intelligence. This person pointed out that Cohen-Watnick’s career path was unusual for his milieu: “Not many folks from our sort of sphere were making the decision to go into public service.”. Trump’s election changed everything for Cohen-Watnick, as it did for many people in Washington. The site may also use cookies from third parties. He was the Head of Capital Markets and a Portfolio Manager for GSO Capital Partners, and he sat on the Investment Committee for GSO’s distressed funds and special situations funds. “This says much more about Cohen’s political connections than his experience in the intelligence business.". This split has created a decision-making process in which the responses to each unfolding event can point in a different policy direction than the last. Like most people in this kind of job, Cohen-Watnick is a workaholic, sometimes sleeping on his couch in case he has to respond to something or go somewhere in the middle of the night, the White House colleague who knows him well said. McMaster tried to move Cohen to another position within the NSC, his decision was publicly overturned by the president,” Wise said. A recent story in The New York Times said that Cohen-Watnick was pushing for regime change in Iran from within the administration. There was one person, however, who McMaster couldn’t get rid of: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence programs. But they’re not always unflattering; some leaks have suggested a prominent policy role for the young staffer. “I don’t think it was accurate at all,” said the former intelligence official on the NSC of the Foreign Policy piece, calling it “fake news recycling other fake news.” This official argued that Cohen-Watnick, in his role as the liaison between the White House and intelligence agencies, has no purview over Iran policy: “I’ve never heard Ezra talk about; it’s not in his lane and he’s not involved in those regional policy discussions.”, Furthermore, this official said, those who think NSC officials are exerting broad influence over policy are misreading the current NSC by comparing it to the Obama-era one, where “they were micromanagers who had a long screwdriver and were fundamentally calling the shots even on tactical- level operations in places like Syria and Iraq.”. This official described a recent interagency meeting in which Cohen-Watnick was asking about the reasons for covert programs in a country that “on the surface seemed to make sense,” but Cohen “identified a waste of resources and ineffective application,” a duplication of efforts costing an extra $30 million. Some insist that Kushner and Bannon were willing to expend capital on behalf of Cohen-Watnick. “It’s an early pick.” This official described Cohen-Watnick as someone who would seem like a natural choice for the job in five or 10 years’ time, but not now. A DIA spokesperson confirmed that Cohen-Watnick had joined the DIA in 2010, and left it in January of 2017, but would otherwise not confirm or comment on the details of his service. But the question of who cleared Nunes onto White House grounds, and why Cohen-Watnick was looking into the material, have never been fully answered. The next day, Nunes gave a now-infamous press conference at the Capitol in which he described how “the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.” Though the phrase “incidental collection” by definition refers to the communications individuals who are not targets of surveillance, Nunes’s statement was taken by Trump supporters as vindication of the president’s tweet accusing Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, an incident intelligence chiefs have told Congress never happened. “It is noteworthy that someone with very limited experience (a very junior GG-12 in DIA) is appointed to such a senior and critical position,” said Doug Wise, who was for a time Flynn’s top deputy at the DIA . After the Assad regime used chemical weapons against civilians in April, for example, Trump ordered strikes against one of their airbases, angering Syria's ally Russia. But now that he’s in the spotlight, he may find further scrutiny hard to avoid. Wide range of Bullion Investments including storage programs & TFSA, RRSPs The Atlantic Gold & Silver Centre provides Physical Delivery of Investment Grade Silver and Gold, and Crypto-Currencies for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI. Atlantic Recovery Solutions is top notch certified ars debt Collector Company in New York area. One of the most recent McMaster-related leaks was to the AP last week; sources said McMaster had told foreign officials he disapproves of Trump’s closeness with Russia. But one official with knowledge of the incident offered a sharply different account. And perhaps most important: Now that he has the president’s ear, what will he whisper into it? Atlantic Mechanical is a Preferred Certified Contractor for Heatcraft, giving our technicians additional skillsets to provide outstanding service to our customers. According to a third person familiar with the matter, the real story is that Cohen-Watnick actually met Flynn much later, in 2016, at a coffee arranged by Michael Ledeen’s wife Barbara, who Cohen-Watnick knows from growing up outside of Washington. Learn More. The new national-security adviser, General H.R. And in an administration that has struggled to fill senior national-security roles with appointees sympathetic to Trump’s ideas, a staffer whose views are closer to the president’s than to the think-tanks that line Massachusetts Avenue may be too valuable to lose. He was partner and head of the firm's portfolio operations team. Cohen-Watnick was asked to look at unmasking procedures by a civil servant working in the Situation Room as part of a review, this official claimed, weeks before the Nunes visit to the White House. It was Cohen-Watnick’s connection with Michael Flynn that would catapult him into the top ranks of America’s intelligence officials. I met him a few times. Nunes eventually bowed to pressure—and an ethics complaint—and announced his recusal on April 6. In a tweet on March 4, Trump had accused the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower during the election. “This is especially noteworthy when you compare Cohen to some of the individuals who have served in that position, George Tenet, David Shedd, Mary Sturtevant, Stephen Slick, and other very experienced officers were already members of the Senior Intelligence Service when they were appointed. Bannon and Ledeen may be wary of talking about Cohen-Watnick after his first, and thus far only, turn in the national spotlight. Equality Health is a leading provider of technology, services and support for value-based care, serving the Medicaid, Medicare and ACA Exchange populations. But in September 2007, he also told a friend that his main goal was working for the CIA. What, besides loyalty to the president, are his credentials? Weeks later, according to this official, Cohen-Watnick went over to Eisenberg’s office on a different matter and found the door closed; he was told that another White House staffer was inside the office with Nunes. In May, Bloomberg reported that Trump had “screamed” at McMaster in a phone call and had become “disillusioned” with him, and that Flynn loyalists on the NSC perceived McMaster as trying to “trick” the president into supporting nation-building efforts. Asked what he does for fun, the colleague said Cohen-Watnick works out and reads military history and philosophy. We specialize in building demolition, environmental remediation and carpentry services. Information about him in publicly available sources is scarce. Centessa Pharmaceuticals is a next-generation biopharmaceutical company that aims to reshape the traditional drug development process, with a subsidiary portfolio supported by a centralized infrastructure, asset-centric R&D model and the Centessa management team. “He’s loyal to the president and he’s made a super impression on everyone that deals with him, me included,” said the former intelligence officer who is now a senior NSC official. Later that year, in November, Cohen-Watnick married Rebecca Miller, according to a notice on his family’s synagogue’s website. But he is “able to parse and probe in a way that makes some of his interlocutors very uncomfortable.” Plus, “the fact that he’s younger than many of these people creates a natural backlash.”. Foreign Policy noted that McMaster has become the target of online critics, most notably Mike Cernovich, the pro-Trump activist and blogger. ... (COSA®) enables you to leverage our portfolio of pre-integrated modules, boards, systems and power supplies to quickly and easily meet complex mission processing requirements – today and down the road. Biotheus is a clinical development stage company treating cancer and autoimmune diseases through next-generation therapeutics. Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, operates an online and offline retail business in three core segments across India: Food & Grocery, Fashion & Lifestyle, and Consumer Electronics. Is he brash and difficult to work with, or modest and brilliant? One colleague of Cohen-Watnick’s said that his last job was three or four ranks higher than the one in which he began. “That human element has been I think completely lost in all of the coverage of him.”, “He’s very engaging, very personable, he tries to connect with people,” said the former intelligence officer on the NSC. He is in the thick of some of the most important policy fights at the White House; he is viewed as an Iran hawk and has been characterized, for instance, as a main proponent of expanding U.S. efforts against Iran-backed militias in Syria. “He did talk about the DIA,” this person said. “I didn’t know Ezra from Adam,” said one former intelligence officer who is a member of the NSC. In post-combat surveys, 94 percent of Soldiers rate the M4 as an effective weapon system. The weapon incorporates more than 90 improvements since its inception. ASCI prides itself on being a leading provider of specialty contracting services in the Mid-Atlantic Region, including Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Maryland. Mr. Cognard holds a Master’s Degree in energy systems engineering from IMT Atlantique (France). Copyright © 2021 General Atlantic Service Company, L.P. All Rights Reserved.