McMaster recently fired two National Security Council staff members--Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick--in part because both aides regularly met with Bannon without notifying McMaster. Bannon is senior counselor to the president and initially had a seat on the National Security Council before President Trump removed him in April. A third Bannon ally at the NSC, Rich Higgins, was fired by McMaster's deputy Ricky Waddell.

Soon after the firings, the critical articles and posts about McMaster ramped up, several of which have White House sourcing. Caroline Glick, a conservative columnist at the Jerusalem Post, posted on her Facebook page late on August 2 that McMaster is "deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump" and implied he was sympathetic to Islamist ideology. Citing senior White House officials "aware of his behavior," Glick wrote that McMaster "constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews."

At Circa on August 3, Sara Carter provided a leaked copy of a letter McMaster sent to Obama national security adviser Susan Rice notifying her that her security clearance had been extended. Carter quoted an unnamed "senior West Wing official" who said the letter "in effect is a White House pardon" for Rice's possible violations of unmasking guidelines. But it turns out McMaster signed similar letters for other living national security advisers from both parties, a pro-forma practice to allow the former officials to legally discuss classified information with current government officials. Sources told the Daily Beast, and I have confirmed, that Cohen-Watnick was the person who earlier this year provided McMaster with these letters for his signature. Only the Rice letter was leaked. A White House source told the Beast "Cohen-Watnick's office did not handle such matters, and that his office would not have had access to such a letter regarding Rice" but I'm told by two sources that Cohen-Watnick was the NSC staffer who got McMaster to sign the letters.