Tuesday, June 29, 2021

H.R. McMaster Quits Atlantic Council Board Over Koch Funding

Here is more from The Washington Free Beacon:

H.R. McMaster, the retired general and former national security adviser, resigned in protest from the board of a Washington, D.C., think tank last month after expressing concern internally that funding from the billionaire Charles Koch was tainting the institution's scholarship.

McMaster, according to two sources familiar with the situation, was alarmed by the publication in March of an Atlantic Council report arguing that the promotion of human rights undercuts America's strategic interest. The report, authored by Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, was a product of an Atlantic Council project, the New American Engagement Initiative, funded by a $4.5 million grant from the Charles Koch foundation, according to a press release issued when the grant was announced.

The Atlantic Council has an enormous board of directors that includes retired public servants like George W. Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Gen. David Petraeus; lobbyists like Sally Painter of Blue Star Strategies, who is now under federal investigation for her work for the corrupt Ukrainian gas giant Burisma; and Amir Handjani, a onetime foreign agent for Saudi Arabia's government-controlled investment fund.

 

The article notes that on June 22, Stephen Wertheim, a scholar at the Quincy Institute, announced his departure from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's American Statecraft Program, funded earlier this year by a new Koch grant.

Here is more from Think Tank Watch about the Atlantic Council kerfuffle back in March.

While McMaster left Atlantic Council, he is still the holder of the Hudson Institute's Japan Chair and is also the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.