An Obama transition press release announces the new (but expected) appointments of Jim Steinberg, Tom Donilon, Jacob Lew, and Tony Blinken, the last of whom will be Joe Biden's national security advisor, and whose bio includes a tidbit I hadn't known:
Antony “Tony” Blinken was appointed Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2002. From 1994 to 2001, Mr. Blinken served on the National Security Council staff at The White House. He was Senior Director for European Affairs (1999-2001) and Senior Director for Strategic Planning and NSC Senior Director for Speechwriting (1994-1998). He also served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (1993 – 1994), and was a lawyer in New York and Paris. Mr. Blinken was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2001 to 2002) and a Senior Foreign Policy adviser to the Obama-Biden presidential campaign. He has been a reporter for The New Republic magazine and has written about foreign policy for numerous publications, including The New York Times and Foreign Affairs Magazine. He is the author Ally Verses Ally: America, Europe and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis (1987). Mr. Blinken is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School. [emphasis added]
Next week: Chait and Noam at Treasury and Cohn at HHS. I'd settle for a lucrative do-nothing union-backed nonprofit job, but apparently Obama don't play that way.
--Michael Crowley