# J.D. Gordon **J.D. Gordon** is a retired Navy commander and former Pentagon spokesman (2005–2009, under Rumsfeld and Gates) who ran the Trump 2016 campaign's National Security Advisory Committee under [[Jeff Sessions]]. He is best known as the campaign staffer who worked to soften the Republican platform's language on arming Ukraine. ## Background Gordon was communications VP and chief foreign-policy adviser to [[Herman Cain]]'s 2011 campaign and advised Mike Huckabee in 2015. He endorsed Trump in February 2016 and became the campaign's Director of National Security in March 2016. ## The platform change At the July 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, delegate Diana Denman proposed "providing lethal defensive weapons" to Ukraine; the adopted text says "appropriate assistance." Denman said Gordon and another campaign staffer walked over to the co-chairs when she read her amendment. Gordon later acknowledged advocating that the platform not call for arming Ukraine, but disputed Denman's December 2017 claim that he told her Trump directed the change: "Trump wasn't involved in the GOP Platform details. That was my job." See [[2016 Republican Platform Ukraine Amendment]]. ## The Kislyak encounter On July 20, 2016, at a State Department-organized event on the convention's sidelines, Gordon met Russian ambassador [[Sergey Kislyak]] along with [[Carter Page]] and [[Walid Phares]]. Gordon said "at no time did any inappropriate chatter come up about colluding with the Russians." **Current status:** not verified after 2018. ## RWKB angle The Ukraine plank is the earliest concrete instance of the Trump campaign moving party policy toward Moscow's preference — and Gordon is the named staffer who did it. The [[Mueller Investigation]] did not establish that he acted at the behest of Trump or Russia. ## See Also - [[2016 Republican Platform Ukraine Amendment]] - [[Paul Manafort]]