Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, applauded the nominations as an important but overdue move from the White House.
“Simply put, the United States and the Trump Administration must do a better job of engaging on this critical continent, and I’m hopeful that these two nominees will prove that they are the right people for that important task,“ he said in a statement.The White House also sent to the Senate the nominations of Gordon Sondland to be ambassador to the European Union and Randy Berry to be ambassador to Nepal.
Sondland, a hotelier in Portland, Oregon, who gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee, would take a position that has remained vacant for nearly 2½ years.
Berry, an openly gay career officer, worked in the Obama administration as the State Department’s first special envoy for the human rights of LGBTI persons. He became a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in January 2017.
The State Department said late last year that the special envoy position had been retained under that bureau, but BuzzFeed reported in April that a replacement has not been named.
*Politico
