Yet another pick by President Donald Trump got their nomination yanked.
The White House has pulled Joel Rayburn’s nomination to become Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. A source familiar with the matter told the Daily Beast on Monday that he did not have the votes.
Rayburn, 56, was a special envoy for Syria during Trump’s first term. The president put him up for the State Department job in February.
His nomination got stuck in limbo, however, over concerns that he was part of an effort during the first Trump administration to mislead the president about U.S. troop levels in Syria.
Jim Jeffrey, Rayburn’s boss at the time, admitted in a 2020 interview with Defense One that his team was “always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.”
Rayburn faced a testy confirmation hearing in May, when Republican Sen. Rand Paul grilled him over the Syria controversy.
Rayburn denied involvement in hiding the troop levels from Trump and described his former boss’s 2020 comments as “inaccurate.”
“Senator, I think that was a very unfortunate comment by Ambassador Jeffrey,” Rayburn told Paul. “As a State Department person, we had no role in reporting troop numbers to the president.”
But Paul, 62, was left unsatisfied with Rayburn’s remarks.
“Amazing that you still consider him to be a close colleague. So that does disturb me,” he said.
“His evasiveness raises serious concerns,” Paul later wrote in an X post. “We need leaders that prioritize transparency and America First – not more endless wars.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced Rayburn’s nomination without recommendation in a 15-7 vote last week.
The source familiar told the Daily Beast that the administration has decided to proceed in a different direction. Axios first reported the withdrawal. The Daily Beast has reached out to Rayburn for comment.
Rayburn joins dozens of other individuals who have gotten their nominations by Trump pulled.
Analyses by Newsweek and Wake Up To Politics have found that the number of nominations withdrawn since Trump returned to the White House in January is approaching 50.
Just last week, Paul Ingrassia withdrew himself for consideration to lead the Office of Special Counsel after a Politico exposé revealed that he allegedly used racial and antisemitic slurs in a group chat, at one point admitting that he had a “Nazi streak.”
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