Fox News Analyst K.T. McFarland Joins Donald Trump’s National Security Team

Fox News analyst Kathleen Troia “K.T.” McFarland has been named deputy national security adviser, Donald Trump’s transition team has announced. McFarland will be a familiar face to Fox viewers: As the network’s national security analyst, she has appeared frequently on Fox News and Fox Business News.

In the wake of the appointment, Fox News Channel terminated McFarland’s contract with the network, a Fox spokesperson confirmed to Deadline.

McFarland is President-elect Trump’s third female appointee (after South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as U.N. ambassador and businesswoman Betsy DeVos for education secretary). In addition to McFarland, Trump today named his campaign lawyer Donald McGahn to serve as White House counsel.

Trump, in a statement, noted McFarland’s “tremendous experience and innate talent.” McFarland said in a statement that Trump “has the courage, brilliance and energy to Make America Great Again, and nobody has called foreign policy right more than President-elect Trump, and he gets no credit for it. I’m honored and humbled that he has asked me to be part of his team.”

McFarland has held national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations, and, according to her bio, served as an aide to Dr. Henry Kissinger and as senior speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

In her Fox appearances, McFarland has been both a harsh critic of President Barack Obama’s foreign policies and a strong early supporter of Trump. Yesterday, she tweeted her thanks to conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas for a column in which Thomas proposed McFarland for either U.N. ambassador or secretary of defense. In addition to her credentials, Thomas wrote, McFarland’s appointment “would force the diversity police to shift the conversation from gender, race and ethnicity, to ideology, about which they are anything but diverse.”

McFarland supported Trump’s appointment of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser – a controversial appointment due in part to Flynn’s anti-Muslim diatribes. McFarland called the appointment a “smart move.”

When Trump appointed Mike Pompeo and Jeff Sessions to his team, the Fox analyst hailed the arrival of “grownups back in charge” of national security.

Flynn returned the favor today:

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