President-elect Donald Trump is filling out his National Security Council with several officials who served in his first administration.
Brian McCormack, a longtime energy adviser, and Andrew Peek, a veteran Middle East adviser, will take senior roles on the White House National Security Council, according to people familiar with the matter, in a sign of a focus on Iran and on strengthening domestic energy production. .
The National Security Council is an advisory body composed of regional and substantive experts who help coordinate domestic and foreign policy.
The NSC’s executive secretary will be Catherine Keller, according to multiple people familiar with the new hires. Keller served as deputy general counsel at the Commerce Department and as deputy White House staff secretary during Trump’s first term.
Trump appointed Florida as a Republican Congressman Mike Waltz as his national security advisor less than a week after the election. Waltz’s congressional chief of staff, Micah Ketchel, will be a senior adviser and special assistant to the president, one of the sources said. Ketchel previously worked for the Republican Attorneys General Association and the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Peek is Waltz’s national security adviser in Congress and a former Army intelligence officer. During Trump’s first term, Peek served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran and then became the NSC’s senior director for Europe. He was expelled from the NSC after just three months during a safety research in 2020. The allegations were unfounded, one of the sources said, and Peek never lost his security clearance. He has a PhD in Russian and Iranian proxy warfare.
McCormack is known for his deep knowledge of energy policy after serving as a top aide in the Energy Department for then-Secretary Rick Perry and later in the Office of Management and Budget. He co-founded an organization that advocates nuclear energy, including for military purposes.
McCormack was one of several aides who refused to participate in the U.S. House of Representatives hearings on Ukraine during Trump’s impeachment proceedings in 2019. Early in his career, McCormack was an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and found himself on September 11, 2001 in the West Wing.
One of the spokespersons for Trump’s transition team, Brian Hughes, will be deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, according to sources. And James Hewitt, Waltz’s congressional communications director, will serve in a communications role at Trump’s new NSC.
In a statement in November, the president-elect said Alex Wong, a longtime Asia adviser, will become deputy national security adviser. Sebastian Gorka will serve as the NSC’s senior director of counterterrorism.
With a new president, seats in the NSC often change. President Joe Biden’s NSC has more than 300 people after Trump made efforts to shrink the group during his first term.
