Is Rexit Real?

Discussions to remove Rex Tillerson from the State Department and replace him with CIA director Mike Pompeo have been going on for months, even if State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert says White House chief of staff John Kellyis telling State the “rumors are not true.”

Those “rumors” were actually a well-sourced New York Times story that said Tillerson could be out “within the next several weeks.” To replace Pompeo, the Timessaid, President Trump would tap one of his strongest Senate allies, Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, to head up the CIA.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was vague when asked about those reports Thursday. “When the president loses confidence in someone, they will no longer serve in the capacity that they're in,” she said, not answering whether or not that time had come for Tillerson.

What About the CIA?—Pompeo has viewed his post at the CIA as a dream job. Despite coming into the agency as a political type (a three-term Republican congressman from Kansas), he has established a good rapport with the employees in Langley amid tense relations between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump.

Morale among some officials at the CIA has been down in the last several years, in part due to the broad condemnation among politicians of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques (dubbed by opponents as “torture”) and the government’s justification of using them on terrorism suspects. The previous CIA director’s ambiguous defense of EIT did little to encourage demoralized CIA officials.