Ex-aide to Flynn gets Defense post

WASHINGTON — Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former intelligence aide to President Donald Trump who left the White House amid controversy in 2017, is returning to the Trump administration as a top official at the Defense Department.

Cohen-Watnick’s latest position is deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, Pentagon officials said Monday. The job, which does not require Senate confirmation, will be Cohen-Watnick’s third stint in the administration.

His first was at the White House in 2017 and began during the short-lived tenure of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Cohen-Watnick did not get along with Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster, and was pushed out.

On Thursday, the Justice Department moved to drop criminal charges against Flynn for lying to FBI agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington.

Cohen-Watnick was swept up in the tumult of early 2017 when Trump accused the Barack Obama administration, without evidence, of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower.

The president’s allegations were bolstered by U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes of California, then the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who said he had evidence that Trump’s communications were incidentally swept up in surveillance of foreigners.

Nunes did not divulge the sources of this information, but U.S. officials later told The New York Times that Cohen-Watnick, at the instruction of two senior White House officials, helped print intelligence reports that later served as Nunes’ proof. Nunes later publicly denied that he got the reports from Cohen-Watnick.

In April 2018, Cohen-Watnick was named national security adviser to Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time. When Sessions resigned, at Trump’s request, after the November 2018 midterm elections, Cohen-Watnick then decided to attend law school.

From 2010 to 2014, he worked at U.S. Southern Command on countering drug and human trafficking and money laundering.

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