AEI Scholar Tried to Hide Trump Attacks to Snag White House Job

Here is more from The Washington Post:

Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Andrew Bowen, like many scholars in Washington, predicted Hillary Clinton would surely win.

Bowen, then a global fellow in the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, wrote a weekly column in Arab News, an English-language outlet based in Saudi Arabia. In his columns before the election, Bowen frequently criticized Donald Trump, denouncing his temper and xenophobic remarks and calling him “a man not often suited to the responsibilities of the presidency.”

Like many others, Bowen was shocked on Nov. 8. But within days, his tone changed, calling for a “new beginning” under President Trump.

Now, months later, Arab News says that Bowen requested that it delete his earlier, pre-election columns, stating he needed “to be cleared” for a possible job with the Trump administration’s State Department.

Arab News initially refused to take down the articles, and fired back — publicly. In an unapologetic post on its website, Arab News announced Tuesday it would be discontinuing Bowen’s column, explaining Bowen’s request and blasting it as “unprofessional journalistically, particularly given that there were no factual errors or libelous comments that require a redaction or correction.”

Here is what Foreign Policy has to say about  this incident.  As Think Tank Watch previously noted, any attacks on Trump by think tankers have made it nearly impossible for them to get jobs in the Trump Administration.

Bowen was reportedly recommended for the State Department post by Brian Hook, co-founder of the John Hay Initiative, a group of former Mitt Romney foreign policy advisors.

Andrew Bowen is now a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), focusing on the Middle East.  His biography says that he concurrently advises Greenmantle (an economic/geopolitical advisory firm) and writes a weekly column for Al Arabiya English.

He was previously a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center and Senior Fellow and Director of Middle East for the Center for the National Interest.

Think Tanks Suckered Into White House Talking Points on Iran?

Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Adviser to President Obama, recently admitted that the White House spoon-fed talking points about the Iran nuclear deal to think tanks and others in order to sell it to the US Congress, the US public, and others.

He made the comments in a profile in the New York Times Magazine.  Here is an excerpt:

Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Interestingly, he defended his approach at a Washington think tank - the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).  Well, more precisely, at an event sponsored by CNAS at the swanky Willard Hotel.

The media, members of Congress, and others seem to be shocked, but the White House frequently passes along its talking points to numerous think tanks around town.  [Whether that information was meant to deceive is another question.]

And Rhodes is quite familiar with think tanks, having worked for one himself.  Here is more from the NYT piece about how Rhodes snagged his think tank job:

The editor at Foreign Policy...suggested that he apply for a job with Lee Hamilton, the onetime congressman from Indiana, who was looking for a speechwriter.

“I was surprised,” Hamilton remembered. “What the hell does a guy who wanted to write fiction come to me for?” But he had always found writers useful, and Rhodes’s writing sample was the best in the pile. So he hired him on at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Though Rhodes never said a word in meetings, Hamilton says, he had a keen understanding of what was going on and a talent for putting the positions of distinguished participants down on paper.

In response to the whole flare-up with Rhodes, Brookings Middle East scholar Suzanne Maloney came out in defense of Rhodes, saying that claims of deception were never substantiated.

Here is what Peter Apps, Founder and Executive Director of the think tank Project for the Study of the 21st Century (PS21), had to say.

In related news, it was recently reported that the arms control non-profit Ploughshares Fund worked alongside the White House to sell the Iran deal.  Ploughshares, which is financed by billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others, funds a number of think tanks, including Brookings and Atlantic Council.

Also, here is an interesting Slate article, entitled "The Little Think Tank That Could," about Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the pro-Israel think tank that led the attack on President Obama's Iran deal.

Likelihood of a Think Tanker Being Invited to a State Dinner?

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's recent visit to Washington got Think Tank Watch thinking about how often think tankers get invitations to presidential state dinners.

Fortunately, The New York Times has done much of the leg-work, analyzing the previous nine state dinners to come up with an answer.  Here is the breakdown of who gets invited:

• Wall Street and business sector: 35%
• Intelligentsia: 17%
• Media: 16%
• Hollywood and arts: 14%
• Sports, tech, and health: 12%

In other words, around 17% of state dinner guests are from "intelligentsia," which includes the think tank world.  However, that category also includes authors, professors, and others in similar fields.  That means the chances of a think tanker securing a coveted state dinner invite are probably harder than getting into Harvard or Yale.

NYT notes that think tank guests for state dinners under President Obama have included Robert Kagan and Strobe Talbott of Brookings, and George Shultz of the Hoover Institution.