Report: Trump’s UK Ambassador Fired Diplomat For Mentioning Obama In A Speech
Darren.Woon
Lewis Lukens, the former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London and a career diplomat of nearly three decades of service, was fired because he talked positively about former President Barack Obama, according to Vice.
Lukens told U.K. students about former President Obama’s ability to handle a tough media question about LGBT rights in Senegal and emphasized that civil disagreement between world leaders was possible.
U.S. ambassador to the U.K., Woody Johnson, fired him a week later. Johnson is the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, owner of the New York Jets NFL team, and was a major Trump donor.
“There’s a higher level of mistrust from political ambassadors of career [foreign services officers] than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lukens told GQ. “Many of Trump’s political ambassadors have an unfounded belief that government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Democrats and liberals and working against Trump’s agenda, and that’s just not the case.”
Nicholas Burns, a retired career foreign service officer, told GQ, “It’s a hollowing out of the foreign service. You can’t replace those mid-level people easily at the numbers at which they’re losing them. That will take a generation to rebuild.”
