United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley will leave at the end of the year, the latest departure from President Donald Trump’s national security circle.
Trump and Haley announced her departure plans on Tuesday morning — only a month before the critical midterm elections on Nov. 6. The former South Carolina governor has served since January 2017, as the U.S. has deliberately scaled back its role in the international institution.
Haley, 46, has represented the Trump administration at the UN amid several international crises, including efforts to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear program and ease conflict in Syria. She has also criticized Iran after Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear accord reached during the Obama administration.
Trump did not immediately announce her successor. The president said he has a number of people who want to take the job.
Haley is only the latest high profile Trump foreign policy official to leave the administration. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and two national security advisors, Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster, all served only brief stints.
Haley, who has criticized the president on some foreign policy points, wrote a column in September denying that she penned an explosive New York Times op-ed. In the Times piece, an anonymous “senior administration official” said people working for Trump have worked to undermine his worst impulses on issues such as trade and Russia policy.
“I, too, am a senior Trump administration official. I proudly serve in this administration, and I enthusiastically support most of its decisions and the direction it is taking the country,” Haley wrote in September. “But I don’t agree with the president on everything. When there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person.”
Ethics groups recently requested an investigation into Haley over whether she inappropriately accepted flights from South Carolina businessmen.
