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 w

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