Executive Departments Part 2

[GreyhoundFan]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

I wrote "Rodent sex with" and my phone autocomplete knew to suggest Scotty

I gave a WTF reaction for the rest of your post, but I got a much needed laugh on a really crappy day from your phone's autocomplete. Thank you!!

[GreyhoundFan]

More swampiness:

 

[AmazonGrace]

The Latest: UN migration agency rejects Trump-pitched leader

 

https://apnews.com/4b90b110892448ebacb808f7cc5db77c

 

Quote

 

GENEVA (AP) — The Latest on the U.N. migration agency’s rejection of (all times local):

1:55 p.m.

The U.N.’s migration agency has rejected the Trump administration’s proposed candidate to head the body, a post previously held by Americans since 1951.

Diplomats who took part in three rounds of voting Friday told the Associated Press that American Ken Isaacs was eliminated in the still-ongoing contest, now being led by Antonio Vitorino, a Portuguese Socialist, and the remaining candidate, IOM deputy director-general Laura Thompson of Costa Rica.

Senegalese diplomat Youssoupha Ndiaye, upon leaving the voting in Geneva, said: “the American is out.”

Isaacs’ candidacy had been clouded by U.S. policies like travel bans and migrant family separations — and his own comments that critics have called anti-Muslim.

___

10:00 a.m.

The U.N.’s migration agency is electing its next director-general, a post long held by Americans. But the ambitions of the Trump administration’s favored candidate could be clouded by U.S. policies like travel bans and migrant family separations.

Dues-paying, ballot-casting members among the 172 in the International Organization for Migration are deciding among American Ken Isaacs, an executive with Christian humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse; IOM deputy director-general Laura Thompson of Costa Rica; and Antonio Vitorino, a Portuguese Socialist.

The winner will succeed longtime U.S. diplomat William Lacy Swing, who leaves in September.

An intergovernmental body that became a U.N.-related agency in 2016, IOM has had only one director-general who wasn’t American since its creation in 1951.

Aside from concerns about Trump policies, critics say Isaacs has made anti-Muslim posts on social media.

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/22/politics/kfile-more-tweets-ken-isaacs/index.html

 

Spoiler

In several of the newly unearthed tweets, Isaacs shared a post that called climate change a "hoax," shared a story from the conspiracy-peddling website InfoWars about the "Clinton body count," and wrote "#Islam is not peaceful."

 

He was very sorry and only posted anti Islam tweets because he has nothing against anybody.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/04/world/un-migration-agency-nominee-isaacs-islam/index.html

He works for Samaritan's Purse which thinks the best way to help refugee children is to send them Christmas Child shoeboxes.

[AmazonGrace]

How come everyone is a liar 

 

[Audrey2]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

How come everyone is a liar 

 

Just remember, it's FOX ENTERTAINMENT, not FOX News. Making things up to rile/mislead their base is their specialty.

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

How come everyone is a liar 

They want to fit in with the liar-in-chief. The best and bigliest way to do that is by shoveling the shit on Faux.

[Howl]

Talking Points Memo has an article up about Scott Pruitt defaming an aide who was forced to truthfully testify about some of his, Pruitt's actions, because of course he was PISSED that someone told the truth about him.

This tasty, insightful and brutally on target morsel is from the comments section of Livid Over Aide’s Testimony, Pruitt Tried To Ruin Her Future Job Prospects

Spoiler

For evil "Christians" like Pruitt, you see this mind set where their own accumulation of power and wealth is synonymous with doing God's work, and anyone who hampers this in any way is not only hurting him but defying God and therefore can be targeted righteously without remorse. It is conspiracy thinking turned sideways. Pruitt has been kissing up and screwing down his entire career and has left many stunned Baptists in his wake who never felt the knife until he pulled it out and the bleeding started.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting read:

 

[JMarie]

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/07/02/from-top-to-bottom-trumps-white-house-churns-through-staff-report/23473032/

Quote

Forty percent of the staff members who were working a year ago in U.S. President Donald Trump's White House have since left for other jobs, a new report shows, providing a snapshot of the chaos among Trump's closest subordinates.

At all levels of seniority and pay levels, Trump staff churn has exceeded that of the executive office of former President Barack Obama, with a noticeably larger turnover among top aides, according to an annual report on the White House payroll released late on Friday and reviewed by Reuters.

In the top tier of staff, Trump's White House has so far had the highest turnover of any modern administration, said Martha Kumar, a Towson University political scientist emeritus.

That hurts Trump's ability to advance his policies in coordination with outside allies, said Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, who has kept track of the turnover since the Reagan administration.

"You need to have a continuity," she said.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Fifty-six percent of the highest-ranking people in Trump's White House named in last year's payroll report have since left or have announced they will soon leave, including chief of staff Reince Priebus, top economic adviser Gary Cohn, deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn and spokesman Sean Spicer.
 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"These Trump Staffers — Including an ex-NRA Lobbyist — Left Their Financial Disclosure Forms Blank"

Spoiler

Before accepting a position at the U.S. Department of the Interior last October, Benjamin Cassidy championed gun rights for nearly seven years as a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, collecting a peak annual salary of $288,333 for his work on Capitol Hill.

The public wouldn’t know that by looking at Cassidy’s government financial disclosure report. The form, which he filed soon after taking a job as senior deputy director of the office of intergovernmental and external affairs, doesn’t list his old job at the NRA — or any past job, for that matter. Cassidy’s form was nearly blank, save for his name, title and some bank holdings and investments. In the space allotted to show his income, it incorrectly stated “None.”

... < financial disclosure form >

Federal law requires nearly all executive branch employees to submit reports intended to reveal and resolve conflicts of interest that might arise from their personal finances. The reports are supposed to be carefully reviewed, preferably by agency ethics attorneys, before being made public.

After we asked the Interior Department about the failure of Cassidy and at least three other staffers to disclose their work histories and finances, the agency responded with a bullet-pointed assessment that acknowledged ongoing problems while also noting that they “predated the current administration.” 

Among the department’s findings:

• The Interior Department’s ethics office did not “have adequate resources to accomplish its legally required compliance functions, including its responsibilities relating to the financial disclosure report program.” Just one ethics specialist, who is not an attorney, is responsible for reviewing hundreds of reports and advising thousands of employees on issues relating to those reports. This contributed to the certification and release of inaccurate reports.
• Government employees are responsible for the accuracy of their forms. But Interior’s ethics office “is culpable in certifying forms that appeared ‘blank’ without conducting a certain level of due diligence to ensure that the filers submitted correct forms.”
• Four Interior staffers ultimately had to re-submit their disclosure reports following ProPublica’s inquiry. As part of that process, they were interviewed by a senior career ethics attorney who went over their reports with them. The interviews revealed some staffers “were confused about what information was supposed to be reported,” according to the agency’s statement.
• Other employees “thought they had filled out the form correctly when, in fact, they had not.” None of them appeared to intentionally hide information they were required to disclose, the department said.

Many of the problems and omissions were easy to spot. For example, an attorney for the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management, Cally Younger, submitted her financial disclosure form in September, days after joining the agency. An ethics official, Tia Barner, reviewed and approved the form, concluding that it complied with federal law.

But Younger’s form was blank, apart from her electronic signature and some perfunctory investment details. It completely neglected basic employment information, such as her old job as an attorney in Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s office. Ironically, it also left out Younger’s past role as a “public records ombudsman” in Idaho, whose mission included examining how the state’s public record laws could be improved.

After we asked about the batch of blank forms, a senior ethics official, Kim Hintz, determined that Younger “inadvertently omitted certain information.” A revised version of her form now includes more employment and financial information.

Younger should have been questioned by ethics officials when she filed her original form, said Don Fox, who served as acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics during the Obama administration. “It may be, honestly, she just didn’t read the instructions and she just started filling out paperwork,” Fox said, “because if you’d even done a cursory review of the instructions, she should have known that she should have listed her position with the state of Idaho.”

Younger’s original form was a veritable font of information compared to one filed in the name of Thomas Baptiste, who is now an advisor to the Bureau of Land Management. Baptiste’s form was completely blank, with no information beyond his name, and no signature or indication that it was reviewed or approved. Baptiste previously worked as a records manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, as a project director at a consulting firm that works for conservative political clients, and before that at Tepeyac OB/GYN, which calls itself a “pro-life obstetrics and gynecology medical practice.”

Hintz, the Interior Department ethics staffer, found that Baptiste had “inadvertently omitted certain information.”

Yet another completely blank report was submitted, this one by Rick May, who worked with veterans after leaving active military duty in 2010 and is now a senior adviser to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. May erred when he didn’t list his wife’s income in his December filing, the Interior Department said. (It was unclear whether other relevant information was not included in the original version since the DOI did not make May’s updated report available to ProPublica before this article was published.)

Cassidy, Baptiste, Hintz, May and Younger did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

The failure to properly check federal financial disclosures could result in substantive conflicts going unnoticed, said Virginia Canter, a former Obama administration ethics attorney who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She acknowledged that forms sometimes fall through the cracks, particularly given the volume of ethics issues arising in the Trump administration and the heavy workload of ethics offices.

As ProPublica has reported, failing to file the report correctly, or completely, can lead to serious consequences. Federal prosecutors can bring a civil lawsuit against any employee who willfully and knowingly submits a false report, with a fine of up to $50,000 and up to a year in prison.

The Office of Government Ethics, or OGE, audited the Interior Department’s ethics office in 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, and found multiple problems. Many Interior Department employees had been filing their financial disclosures late, and the department’s ethics office was short-staffed. The report also found that Interior’s ethics office wasn’t exercising oversight of special government employees, or SGEs, who hold jobs in the private sector while working for the government. In 2015, four SGEs at Interior did not file financial disclosure reports, the OGE found.

In a statement, the OGE said it is still scrutinizing Interior’s ethics office as part of its 2016 audit. “OGE’s policy is to continue to follow up on recommendations until we are satisfied that the agency has addressed those problems underlying the recommendations,” the statement said.

The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, is also auditing aspects of Interior’s ethics office and, according to Interior officials, “will likely highlight some of the problems” reported in this article. The acting director of strategic issues at GAO, Tranchau Nguyen, said the audit “will be completed later this year.”  

“Under our policies, we can’t share with you any findings until that work is completed and issued,” Nguyen wrote in an email. She added that the audit will evaluate the ethics programs of Interior and other executive branch agencies and “the processes and controls in place to oversee ethics compliance for political appointees.”

(As part of the GAO’s review, ProPublica staffers have been interviewed about our political appointee data, including Trump Town, and our interactions with federal ethics offices. None of the questions related to information or filings about any specific individual.)

 

[GreyhoundFan]

More fun with Scotty: "Pruitt aides reveal new details of his spending and management at EPA"

Spoiler

Two of Scott Pruitt’s top aides provided fresh details to congressional investigators in recent days about some of his most controversial spending and management decisions, including his push to find a six-figure job for his wife at a politically connected group, enlist staffers in performing personal tasks and seek high-end travel despite aides’ objections.

The Trump administration appointees described an administrator who sought a salary that topped $200,000 for his wife and accepted help from a subordinate in the job search, requested aid from senior EPA officials in a dispute with a Washington landlord and disregarded concerns about his first-class travel. 

The interviews conducted by staffers for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee late last week shed new light on the EPA administrator’s willingness to leverage his position for his personal benefit and to ignore warnings even from allies about potential ethical issues, according to three individuals familiar with the sessions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation. 

The EPA’s former associate administrator for the Office of Policy, Samantha Dravis, spoke to Republican and Democratic aides for several hours on Thursday, followed by Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, on Friday.

Both aides described instances in which their boss pressed to travel first-class or via private jet, while Dravis acknowleged that Pruitt asked his subordinates to do non-official work for him, multiple individuals said. 

Dravis’ attorney, Miller & Chevalier’s Andrew D. Herman, said in an interview Monday that his client answered questions from Republicans and Democrats “as forthrightly and candidly as she could, and she pushed back on both sides when they were either wrong or pushing their agenda.”

“I don’t think she was trying to protect anybody, and I don’t think she was trying to hurt anybody,” Herman said. “She was giving her view of what happened.” 

According to an individual with knowledge of the matter, Dravis told congressional staffers that Pruitt initially asked her to contact the Republican Attorneys General Association — a group Pruitt had once led and Dravis had worked for before coming to EPA — as part of the job search for his wife. Dravis said she declined to make that call to avoid any potential conflicts of interest or possible violations of the Hatch Act, which limits federal officials’ political activities.

Agency spokesman John Konkus declinede via email Monday to comment. “EPA has not spoken with Mr. Jackson or Ms. Dravis about their testimony,” he said.

The new accounts by Pruitt’s handpicked staff come as EPA’s chief ethics officer, Kevin Minoli, has urged the agency’s Office of Inspector General to broaden its review of Pruitt’s conduct. Minoli told the Office of Government Ethics in a letter dated Wednesday that he suggested the move after “additional potential issues regarding Mr. Pruitt have come to my attention through sources within the EPA and media reports.”

Don Fox, former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, said in an interview Sunday that the fact that the administrator asked federal employees to perform multiple tasks unrelated to their official work raises serious questions about whether the EPA administrator has violated federal rules of official conduct.

“Pruitt is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of examples of how senior government officials, particularly in this administration, abuse their power and their position,” Fox said, “and really treat the government’s resources — of which the most valuable are personnel — as personal servants.”

Fox said that because most of the behavior Pruitt has been accused of involve violations that fall under federal Standards of Ethical Conduct for executive branch employees, it is up to either the president or his chief of staff to respond.

“If we were talking about any other federal employee it would be that person’s supervisor to take disciplinary action, which could be anything from counseling to dismissal from public service,” he said. “This falls squarely on the shoulders of the president, and he seems to do nothing but go out of his way to praise Scott Pruitt.”

Officials on Capitol Hill declined to comment on the aides’ testimony.

“The committee plans to wait until the conclusion of our investigation to release our findings,” Charli Huddleston, a spokeswoman for House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), said in an email. “Selectively releasing interview accounts damages the credibility of our investigation and discourages future witnesses from coming forward,”she said.

Dravis, who The Post recently reported had helped seek employment for Pruitt’s wife, Marlyn, told investigators that the administrator wanted his spouse to find a post with an annual salary of more than $200,000, according to one individual familiar with the matter.

Working with GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Dravis eventually did help find Marlyn Pruitt a job at the Judicial Crisis Network, but the conservative group said it paid her less than six figures to work as an independent contractor setting up new offices. The arrangement ended earlier this year, the group told The Post. 

When Dravis raised the prospect of discussing the job search with an official in EPA’s ethics office, the former aide told congressional staffers, Pruitt instructed her instead to consult Mitchell.

During her session with investigators Thursday, according to two individuals, Dravis also described how Pruitt asked her and another former top aide, Sarah Greenwalt, to review a rental agreement which he had decided to break. Pruitt and his wife lived briefly last year in Washington’s U Street corridor before relocating — a move that forced them to pay a penalty. The administrator asked the two advisers, both of whom are attorneys, to examine the lease to see if there was a way to avoid the penalty, Dravis told committee staffers.

Jackson, according to two individuals familiar with the matter, confirmed that he had helped connect Pruitt with a fellow Oklahoman, lobbyist J. Steven Hart, to reach a housing deal in early 2017. The initial arrangement — under which Pruitt agreed to pay $50 a night only on the days when he stayed in the condo owned by Hart’s wife, Vicki — was supposed to last six weeks, Jackson said.

A spokesman for the Harts said Monday that Pruitt was initally supposed to stay in the Capitol Hill condo for 39 days. He lived there for six months, and the matter is now under review by lawmakers and the EPA’s inspector general, according to those offices.

Jackson said he, along with Dravis, also had raised concerns about the administrator’s decision to begin routinely traveling first class. Pruitt, who has repeatedly said that agency security experts made the decision to switch him to premium seats, returned to traveling coach earlier this year. 

“Committee counsel explicitly asked me at the beginning of the morning not to reveal what the Committee asked me about,” Jackson said in an email. “I don’t know if there’s an obligation to follow that, but I intend to honor that request as long as Committee counsel honors it as well.”

Investigators at the Office of Special Counsel, on the Hill and at the EPA’s inspector general’s office continue to probe an array of spending and managment decisions during Pruitt’s time in office.

Even before Pruitt took the helm of the EPA, however, some of his own associates had tried to head off potential ethics issues, according to four individuals familiar with the matter. 

These individuals, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that some of the Republicans tasked with preparing him for Senate confirmation warned Pruitt that he needed to be careful to avoid conflicts of interest or spending decisions that could amount to — or be perceived as — a misuse of taxpayer funds.

Wilmer Hale partner Reginald Brown, who handled Pruitt’s financial disclosure documents in early 2017, took the step of asking an EPA ethics official to develop procedures to make sure Pruitt was compliant with federal rules on travel and political activity, two people familiar with the meeting said. Pruitt’s frequent EPA-funded trips to Oklahoma have been one subject of the ethics probes he faces. 

“Mr. Brown’s request for EPA ethics officials to help the new Administrator seems like a normal and reasonable request, that’s what EPA ethics officials are here to do,” Konkus said.

Brown declined to comment on the matter.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma State Supreme Court Justice Patrick Wyrick, who worked as the state’s solicitor general while Pruitt served as attorney general, cautioned Pruitt before and after he had assumed the helm of the EPA that his spending could lead to ethics problems and that he should curb it.

Wyrick is currently awaiting Senate confirmation to sit on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma. Wyrick’s name has also been floated in the past week as a possible candidate to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

“EPA cannot speak to a personal conversation between Administrator Pruitt and Justice Wyrick,” Konkus said.

Pruitt’s approach during transition foreshadowed the kind of the behavior that has attracted scrutiny in recent months. According to a current and former EPA official, Pruitt routinely asked his assistants — including then-executive scheduler Sydney Hupp — to put hotel reservations on their personal credit cards rather than his own.

In one instance, according to former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski, Hupp was stuck with a bill of roughly $600 for a booking she had made for the administrator’s family during the transition. Chmielewski said in an interview last month that he was in Jackson’s office when Hupp approached Pruitt’s chief of staff to explain that the period for transition reimbursements had expired and Pruitt had not covered the bill.

The incident, aspects of which were first reported in the Hill newspaper, prompted Jackson to leave $600 in cash in Hupp’s drawer.

Hupp could not be reached for comment.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Secret fun with Scotty : 

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Jobs, jobs, jobs! With Scotty 

 

[AmazonGrace]

I wonder if he was wearing tactical pants 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Womp womp 

 

[AmazonGrace]

More fun with Scotty 

 

[Cartmann99]

10 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Jobs, jobs, jobs! With Scotty 

 

 

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

More fun with Scotty 

 

This jackass is in deep financial trouble, which leaves him wide open for someone to exploit for their own benefits. This is one of the reasons why you do detailed background checks on people you are considering for important positions. He's going to take a bribe to look the other way on something, and people will end up seriously hurt or killed because of it. 

[AmazonGrace]

How would Attorney general Scotty sound?

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

How would Attorney general Scotty sound?

Not just no....

Instead of caging children, he'd rather poison their food and water.

[K'Z'K]

5 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

How would Attorney general Scotty sound?

Scotty thinks it sounds pretty good: https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/politics/scott-pruitt-jeff-sessions-trump/index.html

(warning: auto-play video)

 

 

You seriously cannot make anything up anymore.

[AmazonGrace]

Evil Elf strikes again  

 

[AmazonGrace]

Scotty done good, Scotty go now. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Total transparency with Scotty 

 

[AmazonGrace]

They make a point saying the whistleblower is still a rabid Trumpster despite hating on Scotty.

He got interns paying for hotel rooms for his family during the inauguration.

Methinks that Scotty is broke.