Pompeo & Mattis Using Hoover Institution to Rebel Against Trump?

Here is more from a Politico piece entitled "On Cleanup Duty After Trump Diplomatic Blowups":

President Donald Trump’s top national security and foreign policy leaders declared their allegiance Tuesday to the global order that U.S. diplomacy fashioned and reinforced over the decades — just a week after Trump upended that order in Helsinki.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis completed two days of meetings with Australia's foreign and defense ministers at the Hoover Institution, a citadel of the foreign policy elite that’s become increasingly dismayed by Trump’s repeated slams at NATO, widening trade war and last week’s private meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A top aide to Mattis said the choice to hold this week's meetings at Hoover, where many foreign policy and national security veterans of Republican and Democratic administrations are in residence, was made months ago and was not intended to send any signal beyond that both the United States and Australia are Pacific powers.

The Hoover Institution was founded in 1919 by future President Herbert Hoover, who played a leading role in the American reconstruction of war Europe after both world wars. The think tank is a repository for some of the most exhaustive records on Nazi propaganda and the Cold War and has served as an intellectual incubator for some of the top diplomats and national security leaders over the years.

Working just a few steps from where Mattis and Pompeo held their meetings, for example, are leading GOP figures such as George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and secretary of state under George W. Bush. Its visiting research fellows over the years have included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, most recently, retired Army Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump's national security adviser until earlier this year. McMaster was among the Trump administration's toughest critics of Russia.

The article goes on to note that Michael McFaul, who is on a list on names of people that the Russian government wants to question in connection to unspecified criminal allegations, is also a Hoover scholar.  Here is Hoover's statement supporting McFaul.

Here is a livestream of the July 24 Mattis/Pompeo event at Hoover.

The think tank recently held an event to promote former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden's new book "The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies."

Here is Think Tank Watch's recent piece about H.R. McMaster returning to Hoover.

The Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, recently spoke at the Hudson Institute.

Meet the Most Powerful Think Tankers of 2015

Politico Magazine has just released its annual list of the most interesting thinkers, doers, and visionaries who are transforming American politics in 2015.  And it is no surprise that several think tankers are on the list, including:

• Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is on the list for being "the rule breaker."
• Heather Boushey, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Executive Director/Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, is on the list for being a "campaigner for families."
• Ramesh Ponnuru, a Visiting Fellow at AEI, is on the list with his wife April Ponnuru for being "the conservative ideas power couple."
• Oren Cass, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is on the list for being "the conservative poverty crusader."
• Joseph Stiglitz, Senior Fellow and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute, is on the list for "calling foul on economic inequality."
• Timothy Carney, a Visiting Fellow at AEI and Veronique de Rugy, a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, are on the list for "helping put the Export-Import Bank at the center of a big political fight."
• Lanhee Chen, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution is on the list for being "the GOP's most-courted ideas adviser."

Although, he is not technically a think tanker, we would be remiss to point out that that Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard and Stanford, also made the list.  His bio in the Politico piece points out that he "has become one of Hillary Clinton's ideas men" on inequality issues, and Clinton cited his research in a talk at the Center for American Progress in March..