Transition Rumint: Names for the weekend

A brief names post, before the weekend. Sources tell The Cable that:

Stanford’s Michael McFaul will be named senior director at the NSC for Russian affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. McFaul served as the senior lead advisor for the team advising the Obama campaign on Russia/Eurasia.

Former Clinton-era NSC transnational threats director Daniel Benjamin, now with the Brookings Institution, will be named coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department. (He did not immediately respond to a query).

Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer (Ret.) of the President’s Malaria Initiative was asked to stay on indefinitely by the transition.

Rexon Ryu, a former State Department official and foreign-policy advisor to retired Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), has been shepherding U.S. ambassador to the U.N. designate Susan Rice through her confirmation hearing process and on courtesy calls to Senate Foreign Relations Committee members. Ryu is being considered for a National Security Council job. He was Hagel’s foreign-policy advisor when the former senator traveled with Obama to Iraq and Afghanistan last summer. Ryu did not immediately respond to a query.

Daniel Shapiro, Obama campaign Mideast advisor and outreach coordinator to the Jewish community (and longtime Hill foreign-policy staffer), will take an NSC job on the Middle East.

And Saturday morning bonus:

Beth Jones, former assistant secretary of state for Europe and DAS in NEA, has been called this week to meet with an Obama transition official about a senior State Department job. Some hints that they are considering hiring someone to hold down the fort and steer the ship while others take the lead on regional hotspots. She didn’t respond to a query.