Washington,
\nUS President Donald Trump has said he has no plan to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, though he acknowledged disagreements with the latter on certain subjects.<\/p>\n
That was the President\u2019s first public response after The New York Times quoted anonymous sources saying that Trump wanted to replace Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo.<\/p>\n
Tillerson also made his first statement on Friday in that regard and said the news is \u201claughable,\u201d but avoided any mention of whether he has discussed the matter with the president.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s laughable. It\u2019s laughable,\u201d he responded earlier to a question about how he\u2019s handling the matter and what he\u2019ll do about news that the White House seeks his resignation.<\/p>\n
The news was repeated later by numerous US media including CNN and The Washington Post, also quoting anonymous sources.<\/p>\n
Tillerson gave his terse reply about the matter at the State Department while welcoming Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told Tillerson it wasn\u2019t true that Trump plans his ouster within the coming weeks or months.<\/p>\n
Questioned insistently about the matter during her daily press conference, Nauert defended Tillerson by saying he\u2019s \u201ccommitted to doing this job\u201d.<\/p>\n
She added, however, that the top diplomat \u201cdoes serve at the pleasure of the president\u201d.<\/p>\n
Asked if Tillerson would fight to keep his job despite all the rumors going around, the spokeswoman said she\u2019d rather not get involved in such speculation.<\/p>\n
She acknowledged that Trump and Tillerson \u201chave certainly had areas of disagreement\u201d that are well-known, and gave as an example their opposite positions on climate change.<\/p>\n
At a parallel press conference, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders avoided giving a \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d answer to the question of whether Trump has confidence in Tillerson.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the president loses confidence in somebody they will no longer be here,\u201d was all Sanders would say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington, US President Donald Trump has said he has no plan to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, though he acknowledged disagreements with the latter on certain subjects. That was the President\u2019s first public response after The New York Times quoted anonymous sources saying that Trump wanted to replace Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11792,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11790\/revisions\/11792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}