What's going on with the Executive Departments

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Someone wished Mnuchin a Merry Christmas: "A package for Steven Mnuchin caused a bomb scare. It turned out to be filled with horse manure."

Spoiler

A suspicious package that appeared Saturday night in the swanky Los Angeles neighborhood of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin prompted lengthy street closures and a sizable response by local and federal authorities, including members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s bomb squad.

But the bomb scare was a false alarm, police told local media, after the package was discovered to contain only horse manure.

A large box, covered in holiday wrapping paper and addressed to Mnuchin, was left outside the home of one of his Bel Air neighbors Saturday evening, ABC 7 News reported.

The package was labeled as being from “the American people,” according to the news station.

Secret Service agents and Los Angeles police, including bomb-squad officers, soon swarmed the area to investigate the package.

In video of the scene taken by an NBC Los Angeles helicopter, an officer can be seen opening the box, dumping out its contents and spreading a dark, unevenly clumped substance across the ground.

The substance ended up being horse manure, police said. And, according to aerial footage, there was a lot of it.

Afterward, at least three officers could be seen standing around the pile, shining flashlights on the manure and moving it around with their feet, presumably to check whether anything else might be hidden in it.

The LAPD told local media on Saturday that the Secret Service is taking over the investigation. The Secret Service said Sunday that it was “aware of this matter” but referred all questions back to Los Angeles police.

The Bel Air neighborhood is filled with multimillion-dollar mansions and is home to many celebrities.

One resident, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, told CBS Los Angeles that he was blocked from leaving his neighborhood for about two hours while police cleared the scene.

“We have $50 million homes and we can’t move. We can’t get out,” von Anhalt, an entrepreneur and husband of the late actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, told the news station Saturday night. “That’s bad. They have to find another way.”

It is unclear whether Mnuchin was home during the incident. Representatives for the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday morning.

According to the LAPD, its bomb squad handles more than 1,000 calls potentially related to bombs every year. Of those calls, about 22 percent actually involve live devices, live military ordnance or illegal explosives.

 

[AmazonGrace]

I thought Trump was going to revive the coal industry but it can't be going so well if naughty people don't even get lumps of coal anymore

[Audrey2]

Sounds like a road apple pie is on the menu for Christmas at the Mnuchin house!

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

One resident, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, told CBS Los Angeles that he was blocked from leaving his neighborhood for about two hours while police cleared the scene.

"We have $50 million homes and we can’t move. We can’t get out,” von Anhalt, an entrepreneur and husband of the late actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, told the news station Saturday night. “That’s bad. They have to find another way.”

Prince Frederic von Anhalt: Don't you people know who I am? 

Police: Yeah, you're that tacky guy who likes to brag about spending $50 million on a house. 

 

[candygirl200413]

Le sigh. Another POS pick:

Trump EPA pick for Chicago office cut enforcement, scrapped climate change information in Wisconsin

Quote

The Trump administration's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office is a former Wisconsin state official who rolled back enforcement of anti-pollution laws, reduced funding for scientific research and scrubbed references to human-caused climate change from government websites.

Cathy Stepp, who since August has been a deputy regional administrator in the EPA's Kansas City, Kan., office, will take over the top spot at the agency's Chicago outpost less than two years after the Obama administration ousted a predecessor over the agency's lax response to the Flint, Mich., water crisis.

The Midwest office traditionally has been one of the agency's biggest and busiest, prosecuting companies that pollute the air, water and land in Illinois and five other states around the Great Lakes. The Trump administration has been pushing for deep cuts in the EPA's budget and proposing massive layoffs of agency employees.

An EPA statement announcing Stepp's appointment Tuesday included references to her background as a homebuilder, Republican state lawmaker and director of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources under Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

"Cathy Stepp's experience working as a statewide cabinet official, elected official, and small business owner will bring a fresh perspective to EPA as we look to implement President Trump's agenda," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in the statement.

"I have no doubt that she will take a common-sense approach to environmental oversight, just as she did for nearly seven years in Wisconsin," Kurt Bauer, president of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce trade group, said in the release.

Environmental groups were less enthused, accusing Stepp of routinely siding with polluters instead of protecting public health and the environment during her tenure in Wisconsin state government.

Fines for environmental violations fell sharply during Stepp's tenure at the Wisconsin DNR. She cut funding for a science office that had studied potential environmental damages from iron mining in northern Wisconsin and researched the effects of climate change in the state.

Stepp also prompted an outcry when she ordered information purged from the agency's website about heat-trapping pollution from "human activities."

"Her track record is rolling back safeguards," said Howard Learner, president of the nonprofit, Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center. "It's out of touch with what the public believes are core environment and public health values."

"Groups like ours are going to be very, very busy because it's unlikely the feds will come riding in to deal with messes on Chicago's Southeast Side or in northwest Indiana," said Henry Henderson, Midwest director of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council and former commissioner of the now-defunct Chicago Department of Environment.

Stepp will join the EPA's Chicago office as several enforcement actions initiated during the last days of the Obama administration remain unresolved.

The Tribune first reported in July that EPA inspectors had documented hundreds of air pollution violations at the Indiana Harbor Coke Co. on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, where coal is baked into high-carbon coke for the steel industry. Work on a legal settlement negotiated by the EPA and the Department of Justice has stalled since Pruitt and Attorney General Jeff Sessions took office.

Other cases include S.H. Bell, a bulk storage company cited for high levels of brain-damaging manganese at facilities on the Southeast Side of Chicago and outside East Liverpool, Ohio; and Behr Iron and Metal, a Rockford scrap metal processor cited twice last year for violating federal limits on lead, another metal that can permanently damage the developing brains of children.

All three companies were cited after receiving requests for air pollution testing from Chicago-based EPA officials. Testing requests in the Midwest have declined sharply this year, dropping to 12 since Donald Trump took office from 23 during the last year of the Obama administration and 76 the year before, according to EPA records.

Robert Kaplan, who has been acting regional administrator since Susan Hedman was forced out during the Flint crisis, told colleagues in an email that Stepp "will hit the ground running as we implement the administrator's priorities."

But the president of the EPA employees union, who has been sharply critical of Pruitt, said choosing Stepp to run the Midwest office is akin to "asking the fox to guard the henhouse."

"About the only thing I can assure you is after Cathy steps away from her new role ... the dedicated civilian workforce at the agency will still be here (I hope) to protect human health and the environment," John O'Grady, an environmental scientist who leads the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, said in an email to the Tribune. "Hopefully, there will not be too many disasters to clean up at taxpayers' expense."

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good, albeit scary, read. "Where is Trump’s Cabinet? It's anybody’s guess."

It's too long, with too many important images, to copy everything here, but here's the beginning:

Quote

The Cabinet members carrying out President Donald Trump’s orders to shake up the federal government are doing so under an unusual layer of secrecy — often shielding their schedules from public view, keeping their travels under wraps and refusing to identify the people and groups they’re meeting.

A POLITICO review of the practices of 17 Cabinet heads found that at least seven routinely decline to release information on their planned schedules or travels — information that was more widely available during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Four other departments — Agriculture, Labor, Homeland Security and Education — provide the secretaries’ schedules only sporadically or with few details. The Treasury Department began releasing weekly schedules for Secretary Steven Mnuchin only in November.

In addition, at least seven Cabinet departments don’t release appointment calendars that would show, after the fact, who their leaders had met with, what they discussed and where they traveled — a potential violation of the Freedom of Information Act, which says agencies must make their records “promptly available to any person.” At least two departments — Education and the Environmental Protection Agency — have released some of those details after activist groups sued them.

This information clampdown is occurring with little oversight by Trump’s White House, which said only that agencies should follow the law when it comes to deciding what information to release.

“The White House does not issue guidance specifically addressing the daily schedules of Cabinet agency heads,” Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement. On the other hand, he added, “The White House expects federal agencies to comply with FOIA requests.”

Government watchdog groups and activists who closely follow the departments’ policies say the secrecy is more than just a Trumpian swipe at political enemies and a meddlesome news media: It’s an attempt, they say, to conceal the special access that some powerful interests have gotten in shaping policies that directly affect them.

"How officials spend their time is the best window into what their priorities are,” said Austin Evers, a former Obama State Department lawyer who heads the watchdog group American Oversight, which has sued for the calendars of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “When public officials resist public disclosure of what they do, people should be skeptical of what they're trying to hide.”

...

I keep going back to how different it would be in any other administration.

[GreyhoundFan]

By the time this administration is through, there probably won't be anything alive in the US: "Trump administration eases rule against killing birds"

Spoiler

The Interior Department has quietly rolled back an Obama-era policy aimed at protecting migratory birds, stating in a solicitor’s opinion that it will no longer prosecute oil and gas, wind, and solar operators that accidentally kill birds.

The new interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), which was issued Friday, marks a win for energy interests that described the federal government’s previous position as overreaching. On Jan. 10, before President Trump’s inauguration, Interior had issued an opinion declaring that operators could face legal liability for the incidental deaths of birds ensnared by uncovered oil-waste pits or unmarked transmission lines. The law in question, enacted in 1918, makes it illegal to “pursue, hunt, take, [or] capture” migratory birds without a permit, and the dispute centers largely on how to interpret “take.”

In the new opinion, Interior’s principal deputy solicitor, Daniel Jorjani, wrote that applying the law “to incidental or accidental actions hangs the sword of Damocles over a host of otherwise lawful and productive actions, threatening up to six months in jail and a $15,000 fine for each and every bird injured or killed.”

Before joining the Trump administration, Jorjani worked as general counsel for Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a project of the billionaire oil executives Charles G. and David H. Koch.

David O’Neill, chief conservation officer for the National Audubon Society, said in an interview Tuesday that the policy reversal could make it less likely that energy operators would invest in precautionary measures to prevent bird deaths. He said that the prospect of legal liability had fostered efforts such as developing bird-friendly guidelines for placing transmission lines.

“We just don’t want to lose any incentive for the industry to come to the table and work through this with us,” O’Neill said. “And the solutions are out there.”

Energy groups such as the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) hailed the new interpretation as a reasonable approach to a vexing problem.

“Over the last few years, the management of ‘take’ under MBTA has been riddled with flawed decisions that have created massive uncertainty,” said Tim Charters, senior director of government affairs for NOIA. “This common-sense approach ensures that lawful activities are not held hostage to unnecessary threats of criminalization.”

Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, said in an interview Tuesday that the new opinion will not provide the kind of certainty both industry and conservationists have sought for years. While the Obama administration interpretation was too sweeping, O’Mara said, the new one is far too narrow.

“We’re seeing the whipsaw from one extreme to the other,” he said, adding that when it comes to Interior’s energy policies, “one year in, there’s been no balance. If the choice is between energy and conservation, energy always wins.”

O’Mara said that a federal regulation outlining permitting standards would provide the kind of certainty needed for these energy projects. The Obama administration worked on crafting such a rule but failed to finish it.

The House Committee on Natural Resources recently adopted an amendment by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as part of a broader energy bill that would abolish incidental take as a violation of the MBTA. A slew of energy interests are registered to lobby on the issue this year, according to federal records, including the Solar Energy Industries Association, Siemens, the National Stripper Well Association and the gas industry’s GPA Midstream Association.

Over the years, the federal government has used the MBTA — which was enacted to stem the widespread slaughter of birds at the turn of the 20th century for millinery and other purposes — to impose large fines after environmental disasters. BP agreed to pay $100 million for violating the act as part of its compensation for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill; the money was earmarked for wildlife habitat restoration.

But Interior’s deputy communications director, Russell Newell, said in an email that the fact that “the government has relied on prosecutorial discretion” has led to “tremendous uncertainty in how the act will be applied.”

“Interior’s action on the MBTA is a victory over the regulatory state,” Newell said, adding, “There remain several other statutes, including the Endangered Species Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, that continue to provide protections to birds.”

One of the sharpest critics of the MBTA is Harold Hamm, chief executive of the energy exploration company Continental Resources, who served as Trump’s energy adviser during the 2016 campaign. In 2011, a U.S. attorney in North Dakota charged Hamm with a criminal misdemeanor after a Say’s phoebe got stuck and died in a pond of oil waste. Hamm fought the charge and got it dismissed in 2012.

Trump attacked the Obama administration over the incident during an energy speech in May 2016.

However, Trump also has repeatedly criticized wind energy for causing bird deaths.

“The wind kills all your birds. All your birds, killed,” Trump remarked during a rally in Pennsylvania in August 2016. “You know, the environmentalists never talk about that.”

While exact estimates are difficult to find, hundreds of thousands of birds probably die each year when they become caught in wind turbine blades. Oil-waste pits kill between a half-million and 1 million birds each year, according to Audubon, while power lines cause the death of up to 175 million birds per year.

O’Neill said it’s “ironic” that Trump has lamented how birds are dying from flying into turbines when “he’s gutting one of the best tools we have to make sure the wind industry is properly siting these projects.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

This seems like such a nobrainer to me. Why is it even a debate whether financial advisors are allowed to mislead you?

[AmazonGrace]

This admin is A) evil 

and  B ) stupid  

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2017/12/26/WATCH-UN-envoy-Nikki-Haley-gets-pranked-by-Russian-comedians.html

Spoiler

 

Hours after the UN’s decision was announced, Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov gave Haley a call in which they made her believe that she was speaking to Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister.

As one of the 35 countries abstaining from the anti-American vote, Haley highly praised this decision from Poland and begun the call by showing her gratitude: “Let me start with very much thanking you for the support we received on the vote today.”

Although Poland didn’t vote on America’s side and merely abstained, Haley thought this was memorable, adding: “We will never forget it.”

The pranksters continued the conversation and directed Haley’s attention to the topic of a “tense situation” on the island of Binomo in the South China Sea. “Do you know Binomo? They have declared independence. We suppose Russians had its intervention.”

This was met by Haley agreeing, “Yes, of course they did. We’ve been watching that very closely. I think we will continue to watch as we deal with the issues about the South China Sea.”

However, Binomo does not exist.

As the conversation progressed, Haley expressed her thoughts on Russia, stating that the country was “trying to be relevant in every region and they are trying to have some sort of say in every region.”

She continued: “They do try to cause some disruption, but we manage them and we continue to remind them what their place is.”

Once exposed, Haley’s comments cost her on a global scale, attracting attention from the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakarova, who responded “Nikki, do you really want Russia to remember all of its ‘places’ in the world?” on Facebook.

Interestingly, Haley’s mishap has yet to be covered by American media, who often praise Haley’s neo-conservatism to the point that she is now seen as a likely presidential contender.

 

 

It's a long call but the Binomo bit starts at about 11 minutes

Your national security is in good hands. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

The call goes on for quite a bit after the Binomo part so it doesn't seem like she googled it and found out it doesn't exist. 
In the end of the call the pranksters tell her that the former prime minister of Poland Beata Szydlo told them Trump groped her in 2012 and now she's sorry that she rejected him in a rude manner. Haley laughs and says that might have been what was needed, let's leave it at that. 

The call ends by her saying you can call me at any time in this number, thanks bye. So I'm not convinced she had any suspicions at all. 

[GrumpyGran]

8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

This admin is A) evil 

and  B ) stupid  

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2017/12/26/WATCH-UN-envoy-Nikki-Haley-gets-pranked-by-Russian-comedians.html

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Hours after the UN’s decision was announced, Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov gave Haley a call in which they made her believe that she was speaking to Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister.

As one of the 35 countries abstaining from the anti-American vote, Haley highly praised this decision from Poland and begun the call by showing her gratitude: “Let me start with very much thanking you for the support we received on the vote today.”

Although Poland didn’t vote on America’s side and merely abstained, Haley thought this was memorable, adding: “We will never forget it.”

The pranksters continued the conversation and directed Haley’s attention to the topic of a “tense situation” on the island of Binomo in the South China Sea. “Do you know Binomo? They have declared independence. We suppose Russians had its intervention.”

This was met by Haley agreeing, “Yes, of course they did. We’ve been watching that very closely. I think we will continue to watch as we deal with the issues about the South China Sea.”

However, Binomo does not exist.

As the conversation progressed, Haley expressed her thoughts on Russia, stating that the country was “trying to be relevant in every region and they are trying to have some sort of say in every region.”

She continued: “They do try to cause some disruption, but we manage them and we continue to remind them what their place is.”

Once exposed, Haley’s comments cost her on a global scale, attracting attention from the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakarova, who responded “Nikki, do you really want Russia to remember all of its ‘places’ in the world?” on Facebook.

Interestingly, Haley’s mishap has yet to be covered by American media, who often praise Haley’s neo-conservatism to the point that she is now seen as a likely presidential contender.

 

 

It's a long call but the Binomo bit starts at about 11 minutes

Your national security is in good hands. 

 

What the hell is wrong with all these clowns? Their inability or unwillingness to simply say "I don't know what you're talking about" is a sign of their stupidity. How can you pretend to understand a situation when you are talking to a high-ranking government official? That's very dangerous. She's a fool, I'm eternally pissed at her about the stupid driver's license situation anyway but she just looks stupider every day.

[candygirl200413]

So I know it's obviously hollywood but while recovering from food poisoning post vacation flight, I watched on my 14 hour flight Deepwater Horrizon and it was honestly so terrifying that it ever happened. Like regulations and the earth EVERYONE uses, but I guess if you're so brought by money it really doesn't matter in the end.

[GrumpyGran]

11 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

So I know it's obviously hollywood but while recovering from food poisoning post vacation flight, I watched on my 14 hour flight Deepwater Horrizon and it was honestly so terrifying that it ever happened. Like regulations and the earth EVERYONE uses, but I guess if you're so brought by money it really doesn't matter in the end.

Odd how they think that money will somehow protect them. There's an idiot state senator here who is so obviously in the pocket of oil companies who's insulting all of the citizens of this state because most people here don't want off-shore drilling. A Deepwater Horizon here would decimate the economy of this state. But, boy, he wants that money.

[GreyhoundFan]

"How the Trump era is changing the federal bureaucracy"

Spoiler

Nearly a year into his takeover of Washington, President Trump has made a significant down payment on his campaign pledge to shrink the federal bureaucracy, a shift long sought by conservatives that could eventually bring the workforce down to levels not seen in decades.

By the end of September, all Cabinet departments except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January — with most shedding many hundreds of employees, according to an analysis of federal personnel data by The Washington Post.

The diminishing federal footprint comes after Trump promised in last year’s campaign to “cut so much your head will spin,” and it reverses a boost in hiring under President Barack Obama. The falloff has been driven by an exodus of civil servants, a diminished corps of political appointees and an effective hiring freeze.

Even though Congress did not pass a new budget in his first year, the drastic spending cuts Trump laid out in the spring — which would slash more than 30 percent of funding at some agencies — also has triggered a spending slowdown, according to officials at multiple departments.

The White House is now warning agencies to brace for even deeper cuts in the 2019 budget it will announce early next year, part of an effort to lower the federal deficit to pay for the new tax law, according to officials briefed on the budgets for their agencies. One possible casualty: a pay raise that federal employees historically have received when the economy is humming.

The administration’s effort so far to reshape the workforce of nearly 2 million civil servants that serves as the backbone of the government already has provoked a contentious culture shift.

Federal workers fret that their jobs could be zeroed out amid buyouts and early retirement offers that already have prompted hundreds of their colleagues to leave, according to interviews with three dozen employees across the government. Many chafed as supervisors laid down new rules they said are aimed at holding poor performers and problem workers to account.

A hiring freeze technically lifted in the spring has been kept in practice at most agencies, hollowing out many offices. And the slow pace of political appointments has left a number of departments with a leadership vacuum in their upper ranks.

“Morale has never been lower,” said Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers at more than 30 agencies. “Government is making itself a lot less attractive as an employer.”

Administration officials said that Trump has actually improved employee morale, citing an annual survey of federal workers taken in the spring that showed a slight uptick across most agencies. They said they are streamlining the government to make it leaner and more effective.

In a statement, White House spokesman Raj Shah said Trump “is committed to streamlining government for the 21st century, reducing bloat, duplication and waste, and focusing resources on key priorities like public safety and protecting our nation’s homeland.”

Conservatives who have long pushed for smaller government are cheered by the developments.

“This is going very well,” said anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who famously once quipped that he wanted to shrink government small enough so he could “drown it in the bathtub.”

“Slow and steady — for all the bluster, this is how you downsize government without engendering blowback,” Norquist added.

And some civil servants said they welcome the focus on rooting out waste and holding federal workers to high standards.

“Oftentimes we run on autopilot and continue to fund programs that don’t produce the results that were intended,” said Stephanie Valentine, a program analyst at the Education Department. “You can’t keep blindly spending because that’s what we’ve always done.”

Trump already has begun to reverse the growth of the Obama era, when the government added a total of 188,000 permanent employees, according to Office of Personnel Management data.

By the end of September, the federal government had 1.94 million permanent workers, down nearly 16,000 overall since the beginning of the year, according to the most recent OPM data. In the first nine months of 2009, Obama’s first year in office, the government added 68,000 permanent employees, growing to 1.84 million.

The last time federal employment dropped during a president’s first year, President Bill Clinton was in the White House.

The relatively small net decrease under Trump so far masks what has been a substantial drop-off in staffing at certain agencies.

One of the biggest reductions has been at the Bureau of Prisons, which lost 2,320 permanent workers at a time when the Justice Department plans to return to using private prisons to house some federal inmates. (A spokesman said the staffing decline was largely due to attrition and hiring delays.) The Census Bureau, which has not received its full budget request from Congress for multiple years, fell by more than 1,000 employees. The Environmental Protection Agency, where Administrator Scott Pruitt has moved quickly to reverse a generation of environmental protections and rules, was down 508 employees.

The shrinking federal workforce could end up undercutting some of Trump’s priorities. Employment within the Defense Department, which Trump has promised to beef up, dropped by 1 percent, or 7,811 civilian workers across all branches of the military.

And the Internal Revenue Service, which is charged with the complex task of implementing Trump’s tax overhaul plan, lost 6,801 permanent staffers in the first nine months of this year, a drop of nearly 9 percent, personnel data shows.

... < sobering chart >

There are signs that Trump’s polarizing presidency has helped drive more civil servants to the exits this year — voluntary departures that have contributed to the shrinking workforce.

During the first six months of the administration, 71,285 career employees quit or retired. That’s up from 50,000 who left during the same period in 2009, according to the most recent OPM data.

Among them is Noah Kunin, the former infrastructure director for 18F, the high-profile office created in the General Services Administration in 2014 to boost the government’s digital services.

Kunin said he lost staff who did not want to work for the new administration — and then was unable to replace them because of the early hiring freeze. He said he grew frustrated with what he called a slow start by the White House on bringing private-sector solutions to the government.

“I was involved in several major initiatives, and they were all stalled,” he recalled.

When he heard former FBI director James B. Comey tell Congress in June that Trump had asked him for his personal loyalty, Kunin said his red line was crossed.

Now working in Minneapolis as a software consultant, Kunin says the decision was “the most personal choice I’ve ever made: to stay engaged or leave.”

In some agencies, the number of people leaving has been crippling, according to former officials. At the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a wave of recent retirements has depleted the managerial staff at the enforcement agency’s 70 field offices, said Jordan Barab, who was a top OSHA official in the Obama administration. In all, the agency shed 119 permanent workers by the end of September, a 6 percent drop, personnel data shows.

“It’s starting to create major problems,” Barab said. Enforcement actions must be reviewed by supervisors in multiple offices, he said, and if too many months pass, they can be thrown out. “You can’t run an enforcement agency with no managers.”

A spokesman for the Labor Department declined to comment on the current number of OSHA managers but said that new inspectors have been hired in recent months, helping increase the number of safety and health inspections in 2017 — the first such boost in five years.

Across the government, roughly a third of workers who were hired in 2015 will be eligible to retire by 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office. But one of the best pipelines for getting young talent into the government has languished this year.

The Presidential Management Fellows program, a prestigious internship for top graduate students, has been unable to place many recruits because of a lingering hiring freeze at many agencies, according to a half-dozen current fellows.

Meanwhile, other federal workers are in limbo because their jobs could cease to exist. That’s the precarious state right now of the tiny Chemical Safety Board, one of 19 small agencies Trump has marked for elimination.

The $11 million office investigates the causes of major chemical accidents and makes recommendations for safety improvements. In early December, a White House budget official told Chairperson Vanessa Allen Sutherland that because the deficit has grown, the safety board must do its part and prepare to shut down, she said.

So far, no members of Congress have called for the board to be eliminated. But Sutherland is still busy bolstering the spirits of her 43 employees while formulating a shutdown plan. “I think I’ll definitely be there to turn out the light switches and take the Styrofoam cups with me,” she said.

Trump has also moved slowly in appointing the most important personnel in his government: the political leaders who are supposed to be the architects of his vision.

Of 624 key political positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 240 were confirmed as of Friday, according to data tracked by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.

A slow recruitment and vetting process, combined with drawn-out Senate confirmation schedules, stalled the process. As of last week, 79 nominees across the government had waited more than 100 days for a Senate hearing.

But the president has also expressed skepticism that such appointees are valuable.

“I tell my people, ‘Where you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them,’ ” Trump told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham in November.

In the meantime, many agencies have relied heavily on career employees in acting leadership roles. But their leadership can be tentative.

“Some careerists feel paralyzed,” said Reginald Wells, who recently retired from the Social Security Administration as human resources chief. “They don’t want to make a mistake.”

At the Labor Department, most top political posts still lack Trump appointees. For months, Secretary Alexander Acosta’s chief of staff doubled up jobs, serving as the department’s chief lawyer in an acting capacity until the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee late this month.

The clock ran out for hundreds of acting officials in November when a little-known law called the Vacancies Act — designed to spur presidents to staff their government — kicked in, limiting them from making official decisions.

The law allows acting officials to serve for up to 300 days, at which point they must yield their authority to the agency head, unless the president has nominated someone to the job. An official action taken in violation of the law could face a legal challenge.

That forced a complicated workaround at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where Deputy Director Thomas Homan has been serving as acting director while he awaits confirmation.

For now, to continue to act as ICE chief, he has been signing his name with this title: deputy director and senior official performing the duties of the director.

Other agencies have been virtually paralyzed without political appointees.

The small Merit Systems Protection Board, which considers appeals from federal employees who believe they were unfairly fired or demoted, has not heard a case in 11 months.

One of Obama’s appointees to the three-member board left in January, leaving two vacancies. Trump has yet to nominate anyone to the panel. With no quorum, the lone board member, Republican Mark Robbins, cannot take action on a backlog of more than 700 cases dating to early 2015.

His father jokes that he is a highly paid bureaucrat with nothing to do. But Robbins said he keeps busy reading cases and writing his opinion of each one. Then he carries each file across the hall to two empty offices piled high with legal accordion files, where they await review by future board members.

Robbins insisted that the administration “hasn’t been ignoring us,” adding that he hopes for a quorum by spring.

Even key White House posts have gone unfilled.

The president still has no science adviser. And the Office of Management and Budget is waiting for the Senate to confirm its nominees for deputy director and controller — vital positions tasked with restructuring the government.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), an advocate for modernizing federal technology systems, said that eight of 24 agencies are without chief information officers.

“We’re losing momentum in the fight against cyberattacks,” he said.

Federal contractors, including defense giant General Dynamics, have complained in earnings calls that leadership vacancies have slowed contract awards and delayed getting money authorized and appropriated.

“It’s very important to have senior leaders in place to make those long-term commitments,” said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president of the Professional Services Council, a trade group that represents federal contractors.

... < another sobering chart >

For those inside the bureaucracy, a new Trump-era focus on accountability has meant working under greater oversight — and in some cases, fear of reprisals.

Agencies have told employees that they should no longer count on getting glowing reviews in their performance appraisals, according to staff in multiple offices, as has been the case for years.

Housing and Urban Development managers, for example, are being evaluated for the first time on how effectively they address poor performers, according to Ashaki Robinson Johns, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 476, which represents HUD employees.

Telework — a popular Obama-era policy that expanded work from home — has come under scrutiny as Trump officials have questioned whether it is a license to goof off. The Agriculture and Commerce departments are now moving to restrict the flexible work policy, in some offices by half the amount of time previously permitted, according to documents and employees.

A spokesman for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that while he recognizes that telework is widely used in the public and private sectors, he has asked agency heads “to make sure that they have systems in place to assure that management’s objectives are met.”

There are also tensions over forced reassignments for employees whom Trump officials view as out of sync with their agency’s priorities.

Matthew Allen, a former Pentagon spokesman and onetime communications chief for the Bureau of Land Management, said he found himself quickly marginalized after he suggested that the bureau should share more public information about its activities.

In late September, he was abruptly transferred to another office and demoted — among dozens of senior executives whom Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reassigned in the fall. The Interior Department’s inspector general is investigating the reassignments.

Allen said he witnessed a “level of paranoia about whistleblowing and information that I’ve never encountered in all my years of federal service.” A spokeswoman for the Interior Department declined to comment, noting that Allen has a pending lawsuit against the agency.

The administration has made its biggest push for employee accountability at Veterans Affairs, which was found in 2014 to have covered up excessive wait times for patients. In June, the president signed a law allowing the agency to fire or demote poor performers or employees accused of misconduct with 15 days’ notice.

In a Veterans Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery, Vice President Pence drew applause from the crowd when he said that VA had fired or suspended more than 1,500 employees for negligent behavior.

In a letter to the White House, House Republicans recently asked if other agencies should have the same firing powers.

“The mood is different,” said Debra D’Agostino, founding partner of the Federal Practice Group, a law firm representing federal employees. In October alone, the firm took on 30 new clients facing proposed removals — up from the usual one or two a month, she said.

“There’s a feeling out there that they’re not going to get as much pushback for trying to fire someone,” she said.

Some civil servants have sought to stay as a bulwark against changes at their agency.

At Veterans Affairs, John Fuller wrestled with leaving for months. A retired Army major, he’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump. He has played a pioneering role in the federal government as VA’s chief race relations and culture educator, traveling the country to meet with employees in small groups to heal racial divisions.

“I have so much passion for the job left,” the 65-year-old said in early December. But Fuller said he was told his travel budget would be shifted to other priorities.

Days before Christmas. Fuller put in his retirement papers. In a letter to VA, he blamed officials for pulling support from what he called “a genuine race relations dialogue” that drew acclaim across the government.

His retirement is effective Jan. 15.

The effects of this will be felt for years, if not decades. So many experienced and talented people are leaving.

[fraurosena]

So, what will be done about this? Precisely nothing, of course. 

 

This kind of thing doesn’t surprise me anymore, but it still has the power to simultaneously sadden and anger me.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"How Scott Pruitt turned the EPA into one of Trump’s most powerful tools"

Spoiler

Since 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency has been embroiled in an enforcement battle with a Michigan-based company accused of modifying the state’s largest coal-fired power plant without getting federal permits for a projected rise in pollution.

On Dec. 7, as the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear the case, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a memo that single-handedly reversed the agency’s position. No longer would the EPA be “second-guessing” DTE Energy’s emission projections. Rather, it would accept the firm’s “intent” to manage its pollution without requiring an enforceable agreement — part of President Trump’s broader push to reduce the “burden” on companies, he wrote.

The little-noticed episode offers a glimpse into how Pruitt has spent his first year running the EPA. In legal maneuvers and executive actions, in public speeches and closed-door meetings with industry groups, he has moved to shrink the agency’s reach, alter its focus, and pause or reverse numerous environmental rules. The effect has been to steer the EPA in the direction sought by those being regulated.

Along the way, Pruitt has begun to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, halting the agency’s efforts to combat climate change and to shift the nation away from its reliance on fossil fuels.

Such aggressiveness on issues from coal waste to vehicle emissions has made Pruitt one of Trump’s most high-profile and consequential Cabinet members. It also has made him one of the most controversial.

Critics describe his short tenure as an assault on the agency’s mission, its science and its employees.

“We’ve spent 40 years putting together an apparatus to protect public health and the environment from a lot of different pollutants,” said William Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s first administrator, who led the agency under Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. “He’s pulling that whole apparatus down.”

Yet, allies praise Pruitt for returning more power to individual states while scaling back what they see as the previous administration’s regulatory excesses.

“It is a stark change, the way they solicit input from the industry that they’re seeking to regulate,” said Karen Harbert, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, who welcomes the shift.

In an interview, Pruitt said a priority during his first 10 months in office has been listening to “stakeholders that actually live under the regulations that we adopt. . . . I don’t understand how that’s not what I should be doing.”

Already, some people are speculating about what his future holds.

As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt was widely viewed as a potential gubernatorial candidate there. Since he joined the Trump administration, rumors have swirled about whether he might pursue a Senate seat. He regularly heads to the White House mess for lunch, which provides more opportunities to run into key presidential aides. Privately, he has mused about whether he could occupy other Cabinet spots, according to individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.

The man who spent years railing against the long reach of the federal government now seems determined to make his mark in Washington.

... < disturbing chart >

Pruitt, 49, stands on the opposite end of the political spectrum from his immediate predecessor, Gina McCarthy, but the two share something in common: a willingness to use the agency’s broad executive authority to act unilaterally.

“Vested in the administrator is this incredible power and this incredible regulatory reach,” said Ken Cook, president of the advocacy organization Environmental Working Group. “When there’s someone on the inside willing to unlock the door and let these special interests in, they can do tremendous damage to the environmental rule of law.”

From the moment Pruitt arrived at the agency in February, he began using his levers of power to halt existing regulations and shift the bureaucracy.

“The administrator has been effective and very decisive on a number of issues [where] he can do things with the stroke of a pen,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a former top EPA official under George W. Bush and now a partner at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell. “He came in with a list of targets he needed to deal with, and he’s been very decisive on saying, ‘Here’s what we need to do.’ ”

Within days of taking office, Pruitt canceled the EPA’s request that nearly 20,000 oil and gas companies gauge their emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The following month, he withdrew a proposed ban on a commonly used pesticide, chlorpyrifos, that the EPA’s own scientists had argued posed risks to human health.

Last month, the EPA issued a guidance document outlining how it would implement a bipartisan 2016 law that for the first time requires the agency to rule on a new chemical’s potential risks before allowing it on the market. Instead of including “reasonably foreseeable uses,” the document states, the agency will now consider only the “intended” conditions of use submitted by the manufacturer — a significant and contentious change.

Three of the bill’s Democratic authors say the interpretation defies the law’s intent. But it is precisely the approach pushed by the American Chemistry Council.

Despite his scant experience running environmental programs, Pruitt sued the Obama EPA 14 times as Oklahoma attorney general and challenged the agency’s authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants and the quality of wetlands and other waters.

“All that suing he did for years steeped him in the knowledge of the agency and how it works,” Ruckelshaus noted.

That doesn’t mean Pruitt has prevailed on all fronts this year. In July, a federal appeals court vacated the agency’s attempt to delay a rule limiting methane and other pollutants from oil and gas operations. The next month, after Democratic attorneys general and public health groups went to court, the EPA reversed its decision to delay implementing an Obama-era rule requiring more stringent air quality standards.

And on Wednesday, a separate federal appeals court in California ordered the agency to quickly issue new standards to protect children from lead in paint — rejecting the Trump administration’s position that a new rule on acceptable levels of exposure could take six years.

David Rivkin, a partner at Baker Hostetler and one of the administrator’s informal advisers, said Pruitt remains acutely aware of the gantlet he faces. “I cannot think of any administrator who paid so much attention to creating rules that are legally defensible,” Rivkin said.

Pruitt says he has set about “revitalizing” the agency and focusing on areas, such as the Superfund cleanup program, that were “dormant” in past administrations. He seems confident that he will succeed in reshaping the EPA as he and Trump envision, despite environmental advocates vowing to battle him at every turn.

“I’m pretty sanguine about our ability to defend our actions here at the agency, so long as we do things timely and within the text of the statute,” he said. “The problem the agency had historically is when [officials] have not done things in the time frame they were supposed to do something. That’s invited lawsuits that then allow others to set the priorities.”

From his wood-paneled office complex on the third floor of the EPA’s headquarters, Pruitt operates in a cocoon of sorts.

He is accompanied 24/7 by a security detail — a setup that has tripled past staffing requirements. He has installed biometric locks on his office doors, as well as a $25,000 soundproof booth from which he can make secure calls to the White House. And he has shied away from using email at the EPA, which would be subject to open records laws, preferring instead to communicate by phone or in face-to-face meetings.

While he has met with scores of industry executives, trade groups, farmers and ranchers, spoken to conservative political organizations and shuttled back and forth to the White House, Pruitt’s calendars show limited contact with the EPA’s own career staff. He has visited 30 states, by his count, but has yet to visit any of EPA’s 10 regional offices.

The EPA routinely refuses to release details about where Pruitt will be any given day, citing security concerns. So as he travels the country and sometimes the world, his appearances often come as a surprise to the media and the public.

Despite Pruitt’s claims that his door is open, advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club and Environmental Working Group have not bothered to request meetings. But when Earthjustice asked to attend a May session with state officials about how EPA planned to give them more authority over storing toxic coal ash, the agency refused. It also denied access to a 247-page guidance document it was drafting.

Other organizations have come up against similar walls. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a public watchdog group, government lawyers said Pruitt’s Superfund Task Force took no minutes of its meetings. On one of the administrator’s top priorities, the task force apparently produced just one document — a list of final recommendations.

The paradigm shift at EPA has been dominated so far by a handful of political aides and trusted advisers, led by agency chief of staff Ryan Jackson, who didn’t require confirmation. The Senate only recently confirmed several of the agency’s top deputies.

“It doesn’t take a big staff to delay things and provide almost no reasoning,” said Georgetown University law professor Lisa ­Heinzerling, who served as the EPA’s associate administrator for the Office of Policy between July 2009 and December 2010. But she cautioned that Pruitt eventually will have to provide more detailed legal justifications for his own regulatory proposals. “That’s where it’s going to get trickier.”

... < another disturbing chart >

Legal fights aside, Pruitt is making a more fundamental push to alter the agency’s composition and mind-set. Too often in recent years, he said, the agency has come at issues in terms of “prohibition” — “It was to put up fences. It was to keep fossil fuels in the ground, as an example.” By contrast, he sees his role as allowing the country to responsibly tap its natural resources.

“He understands the culture of the agency as part of the problem,” said former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who joined Pruitt in suing the Obama administration. Some EPA staff “believe they have been anointed by God” to pursue a specific agenda, he said.

To that end, Pruitt has moved aggressively to shrink the agency. More than 700 people have left, several hundred through buyouts this summer. With them have gone decades of scientific expertise. The EPA now has about 14,400 staff members — fewer than at any time since the final year of the Reagan administration. The exodus has dampened morale, numerous current and former career staffers say.

At the same time, Pruitt has overhauled the EPA’s scientific advisory boards, getting rid of numerous academic researchers in favor of experts from regulated industries and conservative states.

The EPA’s leader argues that he is trying to make it more efficient, to create “almost a franchise model” where regional offices around the country would act with more uniformity. He recruited a former top Arizona environmental official to create metrics for the agency’s performance.

What Pruitt describes as efficiency, his critics see as undermining the EPA’s ability to fulfill its mission. But friends and foes alike agree that he has been straightforward about his intentions.

Environmental group Trout Unlimited’s president, Chris Wood, met with the administrator early on. The two spoke cordially about cleaning up abandoned mines, but the reception “was a lot chillier” when Wood suggested maintaining Obama-era policies to protect seasonal streams and block a proposed gold mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

“It was an incredibly honest meeting,” Wood recalled. “He didn’t pretend he was going to be Theodore Roosevelt.”

Both at home and abroad, Pruitt is proving to be anything but a typical EPA head.

While he successfully lobbied Trump to exit the 2015 Paris climate accord, leaving the United States as the only nation in the world to reject it, Pruitt has shown an interest in raising his profile beyond U.S. borders.

In June, he took seven political aides to Rome before attending a summit of G-7 environment ministers in Bologna, Italy. Their first stop featured not just a meet-and-greet with business executives but two days of papal visits, including a private tour of the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica.

This month, he and an entourage of aides traveled to Morocco at a price tag of roughly $40,000. Pruitt met with the country’s foreign minister, talked about solid waste and toured a solar energy installation. But he also spent time touting the advantages of U.S. natural gas exports.

It was an extraordinary occurrence: the leader of the EPA, in a foreign land, serving as one of the most outspoken salesmen for the nation’s fossil fuel industry.

What a freaking snake.

[GrumpyGran]

Zinke and Pruitt, two natural disasters sweeping across our country. Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior of His Wallet, out scouting for protected land he can make available to his buddies. And Pruitt, head of the Enrich Pruitt Agency, holed up in his sound-proof booth, plotting to solve the health care situation by simply killing Americans sooner rather than later. The Trump plan to Make America Great Again.

[LeftCoastLurker]

And yet another head banging idea...WTF!! Require citizenship info for the 2020 census...

Spoiler

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/1/2/1729198/-Trump-administration-calls-for-citizenship-question-on-census-potentially-chilling-participation

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sessions announced a bunch of new US Attorneys today.

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh, for pity sake: "The FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation"

Spoiler

The FBI has been quietly investigating the Clinton Foundation for months, reviving a probe that was dialed back during the 2016 election amid tensions between Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents about the politically charged case, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigation is being run out of the FBI’s field office in Little Rock, where the foundation has offices in the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, the people said. Agents are trying to determine if any donations made to the foundation were linked to official acts when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, these people said.

It was not immediately clear what specific donations or interactions agents were scrutinizing, and there was some skepticism inside both the Justice Department and the FBI that the case would ultimately lead to any charges.

The very existence of such a probe will likely lead to accusations from Democrats that the Republican administration is pursuing old, dead cases to punish political enemies.

President Trump has repeatedly urged the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton and her aides. But while the Clinton Foundation investigation was effectively stopped in 2016, that stoppage at the time was described by people familiar with the matter as temporary, because Justice Department officials were concerned that if details of the probe were to become public, it would appear that investigators were trying to hurt Clinton’s chances in the election.

The Clinton Foundation inquiry was first reported by The Hill.

In a statement, Clinton Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian said: “Time after time, the Clinton Foundation has been subjected to politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false. None of this has made us waver in our mission to help people. The Clinton Foundation has demonstrably improved the lives of millions of people across America and around the world while earning top ratings from charity watchdog groups in the process. There are real issues in our society needing attention that the Clinton Foundation works hard to solve every day. So we’re going to stay focused on what really matters.”

Republicans, in particular, have long raised concerns about what they viewed as corruption and conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation, in particular Hillary Clinton’s dealings with its donors while she was secretary of state.

The Clinton Foundation probe dates back to 2015, when FBI agents in Los Angeles, New York, Little Rock and Washington, D.C., began looking at a variety of different figures who had made donations to the charity, based largely on news accounts, according to people familiar with the matter. In 2016, Justice Department prosecutors rejected a request from FBI agents to expand and intensify the foundation investigation, these people said.

Republican lawmakers had called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions in July and again in September to explore various Clinton Foundation dealings, as well as other matters, by appointing a special counsel to look into Clinton-related issues. In November, the Justice Department wrote that Sessions would direct senior prosecutors to look into the cases about which they raised concerns and hinted that some might already be under investigation.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that part of what the department would do was assess whether “any matters currently under investigation require further resources,” though he said his letter should not be construed as confirming or denying any probe.

By that time, according to the people familiar with the matter, agents were already investigating the Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton Foundation inquiry is separate from the FBI’s high-profile investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, though Republicans have said that probe, too, needs to be reopened. The email investigation focused on whether Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information by using the private server. FBI Director James B. Comey recommended in July 2016 the case be closed without charges, and though work on it briefly resumed in October — soon before the presidential election — he ultimately did not change his mind, and the Justice Department endorsed his recommendation.

Justice Department officials have said senior prosecutors are also reviewing investigative records on the Clinton email case to see if any of the concerns raised by Republican lawmakers merit appointment of a special counsel for further investigation.

Word of the ongoing foundation probe came shortly after Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested in a Washington Examiner column Thursday that it might be time for a new attorney general.

Trump has publicly toyed with removing Sessions, and he has repeatedly criticized the Justice Department and said his attorney general should look into Clinton and her allies, taking aim most recently at top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. On the campaign trail, Trump’s supporters frequently chanted “Lock her up!” at the mention of Clinton’s name, and Trump specifically called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Clinton Foundation.

“Let’s call this what it is: A sham,” Hillary Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said. “This is a philanthropy that does life-changing work, which Republicans have tried to turn into a political football. It began with a long-debunked project spearheaded by (former Trump adviser) Steve Bannon during the presidential campaign. It continues with Jeff Sessions doing Trump’s bidding by heeding his calls to meddle with a department that is supposed to function independently. The goal is to distract from the indictments, guilty pleas, and accusations of treason from Trump’s own people at the expense of our justice system’s integrity. It’s disgraceful, and should be concerning to all Americans.”

The calls for a special counsel to investigate Clinton-related matters and the FBI have intensified on the right as a separate investigation, led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, explores whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election, and whether Trump himself might have tried to obstruct justice in that inquiry.

The Clinton Foundation has raised billions of dollars since it was formed and generally receives high marks from philanthropy watchdog organizations. But, because of its global donor base and Hillary Clinton’s former position as America’s top diplomat, it also faced questions about contributions from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Algeria.

 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh, for pity sake: "The FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation"

  Reveal hidden contents

The FBI has been quietly investigating the Clinton Foundation for months, reviving a probe that was dialed back during the 2016 election amid tensions between Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents about the politically charged case, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigation is being run out of the FBI’s field office in Little Rock, where the foundation has offices in the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, the people said. Agents are trying to determine if any donations made to the foundation were linked to official acts when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, these people said.

It was not immediately clear what specific donations or interactions agents were scrutinizing, and there was some skepticism inside both the Justice Department and the FBI that the case would ultimately lead to any charges.

The very existence of such a probe will likely lead to accusations from Democrats that the Republican administration is pursuing old, dead cases to punish political enemies.

President Trump has repeatedly urged the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton and her aides. But while the Clinton Foundation investigation was effectively stopped in 2016, that stoppage at the time was described by people familiar with the matter as temporary, because Justice Department officials were concerned that if details of the probe were to become public, it would appear that investigators were trying to hurt Clinton’s chances in the election.

The Clinton Foundation inquiry was first reported by The Hill.

In a statement, Clinton Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian said: “Time after time, the Clinton Foundation has been subjected to politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false. None of this has made us waver in our mission to help people. The Clinton Foundation has demonstrably improved the lives of millions of people across America and around the world while earning top ratings from charity watchdog groups in the process. There are real issues in our society needing attention that the Clinton Foundation works hard to solve every day. So we’re going to stay focused on what really matters.”

Republicans, in particular, have long raised concerns about what they viewed as corruption and conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation, in particular Hillary Clinton’s dealings with its donors while she was secretary of state.

The Clinton Foundation probe dates back to 2015, when FBI agents in Los Angeles, New York, Little Rock and Washington, D.C., began looking at a variety of different figures who had made donations to the charity, based largely on news accounts, according to people familiar with the matter. In 2016, Justice Department prosecutors rejected a request from FBI agents to expand and intensify the foundation investigation, these people said.

Republican lawmakers had called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions in July and again in September to explore various Clinton Foundation dealings, as well as other matters, by appointing a special counsel to look into Clinton-related issues. In November, the Justice Department wrote that Sessions would direct senior prosecutors to look into the cases about which they raised concerns and hinted that some might already be under investigation.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that part of what the department would do was assess whether “any matters currently under investigation require further resources,” though he said his letter should not be construed as confirming or denying any probe.

By that time, according to the people familiar with the matter, agents were already investigating the Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton Foundation inquiry is separate from the FBI’s high-profile investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, though Republicans have said that probe, too, needs to be reopened. The email investigation focused on whether Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information by using the private server. FBI Director James B. Comey recommended in July 2016 the case be closed without charges, and though work on it briefly resumed in October — soon before the presidential election — he ultimately did not change his mind, and the Justice Department endorsed his recommendation.

Justice Department officials have said senior prosecutors are also reviewing investigative records on the Clinton email case to see if any of the concerns raised by Republican lawmakers merit appointment of a special counsel for further investigation.

Word of the ongoing foundation probe came shortly after Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested in a Washington Examiner column Thursday that it might be time for a new attorney general.

Trump has publicly toyed with removing Sessions, and he has repeatedly criticized the Justice Department and said his attorney general should look into Clinton and her allies, taking aim most recently at top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. On the campaign trail, Trump’s supporters frequently chanted “Lock her up!” at the mention of Clinton’s name, and Trump specifically called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Clinton Foundation.

“Let’s call this what it is: A sham,” Hillary Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said. “This is a philanthropy that does life-changing work, which Republicans have tried to turn into a political football. It began with a long-debunked project spearheaded by (former Trump adviser) Steve Bannon during the presidential campaign. It continues with Jeff Sessions doing Trump’s bidding by heeding his calls to meddle with a department that is supposed to function independently. The goal is to distract from the indictments, guilty pleas, and accusations of treason from Trump’s own people at the expense of our justice system’s integrity. It’s disgraceful, and should be concerning to all Americans.”

The calls for a special counsel to investigate Clinton-related matters and the FBI have intensified on the right as a separate investigation, led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, explores whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election, and whether Trump himself might have tried to obstruct justice in that inquiry.

The Clinton Foundation has raised billions of dollars since it was formed and generally receives high marks from philanthropy watchdog organizations. But, because of its global donor base and Hillary Clinton’s former position as America’s top diplomat, it also faced questions about contributions from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Algeria.

 

This is just fucking ridiculous. Can't she at this point sue them for harassment and defamation of character?

[GreyhoundFan]

Not just no, but fuck no: "EPA chief Pruitt is said to be eyeing attorney general job"

Spoiler

Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has told friends and associates that he’s interested in becoming attorney general, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.

With rumors swirling that Jeff Sessions could depart the administration and two members of the House Freedom Caucus calling on the former Alabama senator to resign, Pruitt is quietly positioning himself as a possible candidate for the job.

“Pruitt is very interested,” a person close to him said. “He has expressed that on a number of occasions.”

It’s unclear whether Pruitt would be on the shortlist for the position, but people close to the president said Trump has grown to like him. Pruitt has emerged as the face of Trump’s deregulatory agenda, taking steps to overturn former President Barack Obama’s climate change regulations. He was also a leading advocate for pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.

Pruitt has developed a reputation in Washington as one of the most ambitious members of Trump’s Cabinet, and people close to him have long suspected that he harbors bigger aspirations in politics, perhaps as governor or senator. Two people close to him also said he has toyed with the possibility of running for president someday.

The EPA denied that Pruitt is eyeing the attorney general position.

“No, this is not true,” agency spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in a statement. “From creating regulatory certainty to cleaning up toxic superfund sites, Administrator Pruitt is solely focused on implementing President Trump’s agenda to protect the environment.”

Pruitt’s allies stressed that he is happy at the EPA and, in the words of one person who has talked to him, “feels he’s doing nation-changing work.”

Before joining the Trump administration in February, Pruitt served as Oklahoma’s attorney general, and he was a state senator before that.

A prominent Washington attorney advising one member of the administration said choosing Pruitt to replace Sessions would make sense because, as a member of the Cabinet who has already been confirmed by the Senate, Pruitt could serve in an acting capacity until he is formally nominated.

But a Pruitt nomination for attorney general would face fierce resistance from Democrats, who have criticized his tenure at the EPA, arguing that he is too closely tied to the oil industry and has weakened crucial environmental protections.

Sessions’ relationship with Trump has ebbed and flowed in recent months. It reached a low point over the summer, when Trump called out Sessions on Twitter, publicly wondering why the attorney general wasn’t investigating Hillary Clinton — and people close to the president said his relationship with Sessions has never fully recovered.

The president has also complained about Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

“Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump said in a July interview with The New York Times.

The Times published an article on Thursday that said a top White House lawyer tried to persuade Sessions not to recuse himself. The Times also reported that a Sessions aide asked a congressional staffer whether he had damaging information about the director of the FBI at the time, James Comey.

Trump fired Comey in May, a move that is under scrutiny by special counsel Robert Mueller as he investigates whether the president obstructed justice.

It’s unclear how the Times article will influence Sessions’ status in the White House. A White House spokeswoman and several senior administration officials did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.

In an op-ed published on Thursday, Republican Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, the chairman and former chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, appeared to channel Trump’s frustrations. The lawmakers called on Sessions to step down, railing against intelligence leaks to the press.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the Russia investigation, but it would appear he has no control at all of the premier law enforcement agency in the world,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is time for Sessions to start managing in a spirit of transparency to bring all of this improper behavior to light and stop further violations.

“If Sessions can’t address this issue immediately, then we have one final question needing an answer: When is it time for a new attorney general? Sadly, it seems the answer is now.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

What a surprise. Unqualified liars, the lot of them. I don't think it would be possible to create a swamp like this in nature.