Executive Departments Part 2

[GreyhoundFan]

Driving Mr. Brock: "Trump’s FEMA chief under investigation over use of official cars"

Spoiler

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long is the target of an ongoing Department of Homeland Security inspector general investigation into whether he misused government vehicles during his commutes to North Carolina from Washington, according to three people familiar with the matter, including current and former administration officials.

The actions by Long, the U.S. government’s lead disaster official as the country braces for Hurricane Florence, have been called into question by the inspector general over whether taxpayers have inappropriately footed the bill for his travel, an issue that has tripped up a number of current and former top Trump administration officials.

Long’s travel habits triggered a clash between him and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in recent weeks, clouding their relationship just as senior aides close to President Donald Trump prepared for hurricane season — a task that’s attracted extra scrutiny in the wake of the disaster that befell Puerto Rico in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Maria.

The IG is investigating whether Long misused government resources and personnel on trips back home to Hickory, North Carolina, on the weekends, said two of the officials. The IG’s interest was drawn after one of the vehicles — a black Suburban — was involved in an accident, according to one of the officials.

Long’s routine absences from the office due to frequent six-hour drives between North Carolina and Washington also drew Nielsen’s attention, this person said. Nielsen had raised the issue of Long’s in-office schedule with him in recent months, this person added.

At a meeting in late August, Nielsen confronted Long about his travel, though people familiar with the meeting gave conflicting accounts about whether she took the step of asking him to step down over the issue.

One of the officials said Nielsen asked Long to consider resigning, though he declined to do so and remains in his role. The program to support the FEMA administrator “was never intended for this purpose,” said the official.

Long did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO but addressed the IG investigation at a FEMA briefing on Thursday morning, saying his office was working closely with the inspector general’s office “to make improvements to make sure we are running programs and policies according to regulation.”

“Bottom line is, we’ll continue to fully cooperate with any investigation that goes on and own up to any mistakes and push forward and keep going,” Long said.

“I would never intentionally run a program incorrectly,“ he added. “Doing something unethical is not part of my DNA, and it is not part of my track record in my whole entire career. We will work with the OIG.”

Jessica Nalepa, FEMA’s director of external affairs, said questions about specific IG investigations should be directed to DHS’ IG office and that FEMA fully cooperates with all investigations conducted by the IG. The DHS IG’s office and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

“All questions about any potential investigation by the Office of the Inspector General should be directed to the IG. At this time, we are fully focused on preparing for, responding to, and recovering from Hurricane Florence and the storms in the Pacific,” said DHS press secretary Tyler Houlton. “The secretary is confident in the leadership at FEMA and their proven disaster management ability.”

Long started using a staff driver to get him home to North Carolina at the beginning of his tenure at FEMA last year. On the weekends Long spent in North Carolina, aides were put up in a hotel at taxpayer expense, according to one of the current officials.

DHS employees must be authorized to access government vehicles for personal use, including travel to a residence outside Washington, according to one of the officials. But a former DHS official said Long, as administrator, is entitled to have a contingency aide accompany him so he can have secure communications in case of a national emergency.

The former official added that Long “never asked for it and believed access to secure communications to be part of a presidential directive.” FEMA recently scaled back the use of the contingency team for cost-saving purposes, and Long now drives himself or flies to North Carolina.

Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, who served under President Barack Obama, said he could remember using government cars for commuting purposes only in seven instances during the eight years he held the job. In those emergency or extreme cases, Fugate said, it was deemed appropriate for a FEMA aide to brief him face-to-face as a driver took him from his home in Gainesville, Florida, to the Jacksonville airport for outbound flights to Washington, where his presence was required.

Long previously worked at an emergency management consulting firm and also served as director of Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency.

The Trump administration has come under intense criticism for its response to the damage Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico. Almost 3,000 people died in the natural disaster, many more than the earlier official tally of 64 people. Trump said this week that his government’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico “was an incredible, unsung success.”

 

[fraurosena]

This could be bad news. If the presidunce ousts Mattis, which sycophant will he put in the Pentagon to replace him? Will that person be able to contain the worst presiduncial impulses, or will they go along with them? The latter option is a very frightening prospect indeed.

Fraying Ties With Trump Put Jim Mattis’s Fate in Doubt

Quote

Back when their relationship was fresh and new, and President Trump still called his defense secretary “Mad Dog” — a nickname Jim Mattis detests — the wiry retired Marine general often took a dinner break to eat burgers with his boss in the White House residence.

Mr. Mattis brought briefing folders with him, aides said, to help explain the military’s shared “ready to fight tonight” strategy with South Korea, and why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has long been viewed as central to protecting the United States. Using his folksy manner, Mr. Mattis talked the president out of ordering torture against terrorism detainees and persuaded him to send thousands more American troops to Afghanistan — all without igniting the public Twitter castigations that have plagued other national security officials.

But the burger dinners have stopped. Interviews with more than a dozen White House, congressional and current and former Defense Department officials over the past six weeks paint a portrait of a president who has soured on his defense secretary, weary of unfavorable comparisons to Mr. Mattis as the adult in the room, and increasingly concerned that he is a Democrat at heart.

Nearly all of the officials, as well as confidants of Mr. Mattis, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal tensions — in some cases, out of fear of losing their jobs.

In the second year of his presidency, Mr. Trump has largely tuned out his national security aides as he feels more confident as commander in chief, the officials said. Facing what is likely to be a heated re-election fight once the 2018 midterms are over, aides said Mr. Trump was pondering whether he wanted someone running the Pentagon who would be more vocally supportive than Mr. Mattis, who is vehemently protective of the American military against perceptions it could be used for political purposes.

White House officials said Mr. Mattis had balked at a number of Mr. Trump’s requests. That included initially slow-walking the president’s order to ban transgender troops from the military and refusing a White House demand to stop family members from accompanying troops deploying to South Korea. The Pentagon worried that doing so could have been seen by North Korea as a precursor to war.

Over the last four months alone, the president and the defense chief have found themselves at odds over NATO policy, whether to resume large-scale military exercises with South Korea and, privately, whether Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal has proved effective.

The arrival at the White House earlier this year of Mira Ricardel, a deputy national security adviser with a history of bad blood with Mr. Mattis, has coincided with new assertions from the West Wing that the defense secretary may be asked to leave after the midterms.

Mr. Mattis himself is becoming weary, some aides said, of the amount of time spent pushing back against what Defense Department officials think are capricious whims of an erratic president.

The defense secretary has been careful to not criticize Mr. Trump outright. Pentagon officials said Mr. Mattis had bent over backward to appear loyal, only to be contradicted by positions the president later staked out. How much longer Mr. Mattis can continue to play the loyal Marine has become an open question in the Pentagon’s E Ring, home to the Defense Department’s top officials.

The fate of Mr. Mattis is important because he is widely viewed — by foreign allies and adversaries but also by the traditional national security establishment in the United States — as the cabinet official standing between a mercurial president and global tumult.

“Secretary Mattis is probably one of the most qualified individuals to hold that job,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. His departure from the Pentagon, Mr. Reed said, “would, first of all, create a disruption in an area where there has been competence and continuity.”

But that very sentiment is part of a narrative the president has come to resent.

The one-two punch last week of the Bob Woodward book that quoted Mr. Mattis likening Mr. Trump’s intellect to that of a “fifth or sixth grader,” combined with the New York Times Op-Ed by an unnamed senior administration official who criticized the president, has fueled Mr. Trump’s belief that he wants only like-minded loyalists around him. (Mr. Mattis has denied comparing his boss to an elementary school student and said he did not write the Op-Ed.)

Mr. Trump, two aides said, wants Mr. Mattis to be more like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a political supporter of the president. During a televised June 21 cabinet meeting, held as migrant children were being separated from their parents at the southwestern border, Mr. Mattis and Mr. Pompeo were a study of contrasts: On the president’s left, the defense secretary sat stone-faced; on his right, the secretary of state was chuckling at all of Mr. Trump’s jokes.

Getting Mr. Mattis to abandon the apolitical stand he has clung to his entire life will be next to impossible, his friends and aides said.

Mr. Mattis has assiduously avoided the limelight during his tenure because he is fearful, aides said, about being put on the spot by questions that will expose differences with his boss. He has batted down multiple requests from the White House to go on “Fox & Friends” to praise the president’s agenda. And he has appeared before reporters at the podium in the Pentagon press room only a handful of times, giving remarkably few on-the-record one-on-one news media interviews — one of which was with a reporter for a high school newspaper in Washington State who had obtained Mr. Mattis’s cellphone number.

“Secretary Mattis lives by a code that is part of his DNA,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, who retired last month from the Navy after serving as a spokesman for Mr. Mattis since early in the Trump administration. “He is genetically incapable of lying, and genetically incapable of disloyalty.”

That means the defense secretary’s only recourse is to stay silent, aides to Mr. Mattis said. While he does not want to publicly disagree with his boss, he is also uncomfortable with showering false praise on Mr. Trump.

But cracks are showing.

In April, John R. Bolton became the White House national security adviser, replacing Army Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who was long viewed as a subordinate to Mr. Mattis because of his rank as a three-star general compared with the retired Marine general’s four stars. Mr. Bolton is far more hawkish than either Mr. Mattis or General McMaster; administration officials said his deputy, Ms. Ricardel, actively dislikes the Pentagon chief — a feeling Mr. Mattis is believed to return in full.

Ms. Ricardel, a former Boeing executive who worked at the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration, has a reputation for being as combative as Mr. Bolton.

As the Trump transition official responsible for Pentagon appointments, Ms. Ricardel stopped Mr. Mattis from hiring Anne Patterson as under secretary of defense for policy, one of the department’s highest political jobs. Ms. Patterson was a career diplomat who served as an ambassador under Presidents Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, but administration officials said Ms. Ricardel suspected Mr. Mattis was trying to load up the Pentagon with Democrats and former supporters of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

(Mr. Mattis also tried, unsuccessfully, to hire Michèle A. Flournoy, a Defense Department under secretary in the Obama administration, as his deputy. “He needed a deputy who wouldn’t be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape,” Ms. Flournoy told a conference hosted by Politico.)

After a stint at the Commerce Department, Ms. Ricardel moved to the White House as Mr. Bolton’s deputy. Since her arrival, friction has increased between the White House and the Pentagon — along with speculation from West Wing aides that Mr. Mattis’s star is falling.

For instance, Mr. Mattis has recently resisted White House attempts to closely supervise military operations by demanding details about American troops involved in specific raids in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

One American official said the White House had bypassed the Pentagon by getting classified briefings of coming operations directly from the Special Operations task forces, to the frustration of Mr. Mattis.

That may seem a small and insular example of bureaucratic gamesmanship. But administration officials said it illustrates the tensions between Mr. Mattis and Mr. Trump: Either the defense secretary cannot appeal to the president, or he has and Mr. Trump is refusing to back him up.

Asked about disagreements between the National Security Council and the Pentagon, Garrett Marquis, a council spokesman, said in an email that “Ambassador Bolton is coordinating and working closely with all national security agencies to provide the president with national security options and guidance.”

In contrast with General McMaster, Mr. Bolton recently began attending regular weekly meetings between Mr. Mattis and Mr. Pompeo. Pentagon officials complain that White House interference has returned to the level of Susan E. Rice, who as Mr. Obama’s national security adviser was accused of micromanaging the department’s every move.

Mr. Mattis has repeatedly been blindsided by his boss this summer.

In June, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Mattis to set up a Space Force over the defense secretary’s objections that such a move would weigh down an already cumbersome bureaucracy.

In July, the president blew up a NATO summit meeting that Mr. Mattis and other national security officials had worked on for months. The Pentagon chief and others saved the final agreement only because they shielded it from the president and urged envoys to complete it before Mr. Trump arrived in Brussels.

In August, the president undercut Mr. Mattis after a news conference at the Pentagon in which the defense secretary suggested that the United States military would resume war games on the Korean Peninsula. The exercises had been suspended — against Mr. Mattis’s advice — after Mr. Trump met with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore. “There is no reason at this time to be spending large amounts of money on joint U.S.-South Korea war games,” the president tweeted.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mattis has begun questioning the efficacy of Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal — a move that, again, was made against his advice. Mr. Mattis has told aides that he has yet to see any difference in Iran’s behavior since Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement between world powers and Tehran.

Mr. Mattis famously was pushed out of his job as head of United States Central Command in 2013 because he was viewed as too much of a hawk on Iran policy during the Obama administration. But now, in the Trump administration, Mr. Mattis makes his arguments on Iran from the left of Mr. Bolton, Ms. Ricardel and the president himself.

For Mr. Trump, getting rid of his popular defense secretary would carry a political cost. Mr. Mattis is revered by the men and women of the American military. Most of the rest of his fans are people Mr. Trump does not care about: Democrats, establishment Republicans and American allies.

But moderate Republicans — whom Mr. Trump will need in 2020 — appear to trust Mr. Mattis as well, and firing him could hurt the president with that key group.

Mr. Trump, at the moment, is publicly standing by his defense secretary. “He’ll stay right there,” the president told reporters last week when asked about Mr. Mattis’s comments in Mr. Woodward’s book. “We’re very happy with him. We’re having victories people don’t even know about.”

As for Mr. Mattis, “there’s no daylight between the secretary and the president when it comes to the unwavering support of our military,” said Dana W. White, the Pentagon press secretary. “It’s up to the president of the United States to decide what he wants to do.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This could be bad news. If the presidunce ousts Mattis, which sycophant will he put in the Pentagon to replace him? Will that person be able to contain the worst presiduncial impulses, or will they go along with them? The latter option is a very frightening prospect indeed.

Fraying Ties With Trump Put Jim Mattis’s Fate in Doubt

 

I hope Mattis will man up and spill the whole disgraceful story with all the red flags. Colbert    had a joke that Trump hates him because his new nickname is Moderate Dog

[Howl]

Thought this belonged here rather than on the Hurricane thread in Wide World of Snark.  WaPo is behind a paywall, but all Hurricane Florence content is available for free, so hopefully y'all can access this article: Alarm grows inside FEMA as administrator Brock Long fights for his job

If not, here's a rough summary: 

Apparently, the head of FEMA, Brock Long, is being investigated for misuse of Federal vehicles, driving home to see his wife and kids in NC.  According to WaPo, Long is revered among FEMA employees for his competence and considered a very ethical guy, and the WaPo article is generally very supportive of him. 

The FEMA second in command position has been vacant for TWO YEARS.  The next guy down the line is Kaniewski, (surprise/not surprised!) a long time friend and ex housemate of Kirstjen Nielsen, head of DHS. 

Quote

Nielsen’s alleged desire to remove Long dates back months, according to people familiar with the matter who believe the inspector general’s investigation of Long is part of Nielsen’s effort to make a change at FEMA. She and Kaniewski are close friends and onetime housemates, according to three current and former colleagues.

Kaniewski is, apparently, very good at what he does, but what he is good at does not translate to being good at what Brock Long is good at (direct emergency response) so apples and avocados.   There's much concern about replacing the competent head of FEMA during the height of hurricane season or even in the middle of the aftermath of Florence, leading to another "Heck of a job, Brownie" moment. 

 The WaPo article noted that Brock Long had been "surveilled" on his drives home, which sounded suspicious to me, like "someone" decided to give him the axe and was looking for an excuse. Everyone is awaiting the Inspector General's report. 

As noted, the WaPo article was a bit more nuanced and detailed and more complementary towards Long; other articles were more breathless OMG!  Another Corrupt Trump Admin Official! and I find this quite intriguing.  

[AmazonGrace]

The best people 

 

[AmazonGrace]

There is discrimination in the State Dept because of course there is 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Crooks-R-Us

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ben Carson’s HUD: Political loyalty required, no experience necessary"

Spoiler

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded promotions and pay increases to five political operatives with no housing policy experience within their first months on the job, demonstrating what government watchdogs and career staff describe as a premium put on loyalty over expertise.

The raises, documented in a Washington Post analysis of HUD political hires, resulted in annual salaries between $98,000 and $155,000 for the five appointees, all of whom had worked on Donald Trump’s or Ben Carson’s presidential campaigns. Three of them did not list bachelor’s degrees on their résumés.

The political hires were among at least 24 people without evident housing policy experience who were appointed to the best-paying political positions at HUD, an agency charged with serving the poorest Americans. They account for a third of the 70 HUD appointees at the upper ranks of the federal government, with salaries above $94,000, according to the Post review of agency records.

The limited experience at the upper reaches of the agency — HUD Secretary Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, has no prior housing, executive or government background — injected confusion into the rollout of policy initiatives and brought delays to even routine functions, according to interviews with 16 current and former career staff members.

“This administration is different, because the people coming in really don’t know housing at all,” said Ron Ashford, who retired as director of HUD’s public-housing supportive-service programs in January after 22 years at the agency. “As a result, they’re pursuing initiatives that aren’t grounded in reality.”

The Post conducted its analysis of HUD appointees using government information on their salaries and positions through mid-March, obtained through a public-records request from the Office of Personnel Management. The Post also examined HUD documents — including official résumés, internal emails, appointee salaries and job titles, and documentation of promotions and other position changes — obtained as of mid-July by American Oversight, a watchdog group formed last year to investigate the Trump administration, through separate, multiple records requests as well as other publicly available information such as LinkedIn profiles.

Under the Obama administration, senior political appointees to HUD were widely recognized housing experts who were tapped to stabilize the agency after the housing market crash. Of the 66 most highly paid appointees, at least seven — 11 percent — appear to have lacked housing-related experience, according to a Post review of the professional backgrounds of those named in the 2012 Plum Book, a compilation of political appointees published every four years.

Of the 24 Trump administration HUD appointees without housing policy experience on their résumés or LinkedIn profiles, 16 listed work on either Carson’s or Trump’s presidential campaigns — or had personal connections to their families.

They include a former event manager turned senior HUD adviser making $131,767 after a 23 percent raise and a former real estate agent whose new job is to advise a HUD administrator, a longtime Trump family aide who also lacks housing credentials.

HUD spokesman Raffi Williams said in a written statement to The Post that appointing people with “varying experiences to government is not unusual” and makes HUD a “more dynamic organization.” The majority of top political appointees do have housing backgrounds, he noted.

“This administration has assembled a senior team at HUD with a deep well of experience in housing, community development and mortgage finance. Any suggestion to the contrary discounts their public service to the American people,” Williams said. “HUD employees represent a broad array of backgrounds and experiences, as different roles have unique responsibilities and require diverse skill sets.”

Brian Sullivan, another HUD spokesman, said in a phone conversation that the ranks of political appointees “change all the time” and that at least 10 of the 70 best-paid appointees included in the Post analysis have left the agency.

The Post laid out the scope of its analysis to the agency, which did not dispute the salaries and job titles of the individuals named in this story. HUD did not provide updated salary information or answer questions about appointees’ promotions and job duties.

Scott Keller, former chief of staff to Alphonso Jackson, a HUD secretary under President George W. Bush, also defended the hirings.

“Political staffers are not expected to be subject matter experts in every case,” said Keller, who had coached Carson during his confirmation hearings. “Their job is to keep the trains running on time. And they don’t need to be housing policy experts to do that.”

Political appointees without housing experience have driven controversial initiatives that were later put on hold by the agency or are likely to be blocked by Congress, according to former officials and other experts who work closely with the agency as well as HUD staff, most of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified because of fear of retaliation or their current business with HUD.

In one high-profile episode, Carson unveiled a proposal in April to triple the minimum rent paid by families receiving federal housing assistance and to make it easier for local housing authorities to impose more-stringent work requirements for those receiving government benefits.

The plan was largely driven by Ben Hobbs, a special policy adviser in HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing, according to four people with knowledge of Hobbs’s role. Hobbs has no experience as a policymaker but spent three months as a graduate fellow in “welfare studies” at the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2016 and five months as a poverty consultant at the libertarian Charles Koch Institute in 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“As an ideologue, he wanted to institute his grandiose concept,” said a former HUD official. “This policy was dead on arrival because it was rolled out poorly.”

Hobbs’s inexperience showed in his failure to build support around the policy within Congress or HUD, the former official said. Two others with direct knowledge said he neglected to secure the buy-in of career employees, even though many had a long-held goal of changing the rent structure.

By June, even Carson appeared to back off the initiative, saying that there was no longer a pressing need to raise rents after Congress reinstated Trump’s proposed budget cuts.

Hobbs, who started at HUD making $79,720, took a leave from the agency in July when he was promoted to Trump’s domestic-policy council, according to his LinkedIn profile. Hobbs directed all Post questions to HUD, which noted that he had also gained experience during three months as a graduate fellow on the House Ways and Means Committee in 2016. The agency added that Hobbs, who lists a master’s degree in public policy from the London School of Economics on his profile, wrote his dissertation on the social safety net.

There were other policy misfires that career staff members said resulted from inexperienced leadership.

Carson’s signature EnVision Centers initiative — hubs to be backed by nonprofit foundations to help low-income families access employment, education and health care — duplicates existing centers near public-housing developments, staffers said. Those decades-old efforts had limited success moving families out of poverty, a fact that a potential funder said foundation representatives noted during a meeting with Carson.

“The problem is they’re creating a program without knowing the landscape,” Ashford said. “They didn’t do the groundwork and investigation to take into account the failures or holes of the past.”

HUD staff said Carson failed to attract much financial support from foundations or the White House, which has budgeted just $2 million toward the initiative. Nevertheless, Carson announced the launch of 18 such centers during a June ceremony in his hometown of Detroit.

The lack of experience in a chronically understaffed agency brought even routine work to a halt for much of Carson’s first year at HUD because none of the appointees felt comfortable signing off on grants and technical guidance, according to career staffers.

“There’s a huge learning curve getting leadership up to the point where they are willing to make a decision on something because they just don’t understand the concepts,” said a longtime career staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation.

The White House was slow to fill HUD’s leadership ranks, with no nominees to eight of 13 Senate-confirmed positions for the first six months of Carson’s tenure. Four nominees, including the assistant secretaries overseeing policy development and research as well as public and Indian housing, have yet to be confirmed.

“The assistant secretaries, along with the secretary, are supposed to be the ones setting policy,” said David Horne, former chief of staff to Steve Preston, Bush’s last HUD secretary. “The fact that they weren’t confirmed as readily as in the past substantially paralyzed parts of the agency.”

The White House said that the agency has been carrying out its mission effectively. “Starting with Secretary Carson, the Trump administration has assembled an experienced and well-qualified team of leaders at HUD,” said White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters.

Over the past year, the White House did appoint a number of senior officials with housing experience.

Pamela Patenaude, confirmed as deputy secretary last September, spent more than two decades in housing policy and economic development and had served as Bush’s assistant secretary for community planning and development at HUD. She remains respected by career staff and housing advocates and, by many accounts, is the main administrator running the agency.

Still, HUD triggered a public outcry in March with the leak of a proposal circulated to political appointees — but not to career staff — to drop the focus on combating discrimination from the agency’s mission statement.

Patenaude later apologized to civil rights and consumer protection advocates at a forum hosted by the National Fair Housing Alliance, according to two people who attended the April event at the Marriott Marquis in Washington.

“She described it as an honest mistake that happened while she was on vacation. She said it was not this evil, pernicious thing that HUD was trying to do,” recalled one of the attendees. “She reiterated her personal goal of advancing fair housing.”

Many of Trump’s HUD appointees without housing experience hold titles such as “special assistant” or “senior adviser,” often relatively high-paying positions that require no public vetting.

“The American public has reasonable expectations that people being paid by them and serve them are going to be well qualified,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on improving government performance that has previously worked with The Post on tracking presidential appointments. “The administration ought to publicize who is being put into these political positions and what their expectations are for them.”

Political appointees who did not list housing policy experience on their résumés and who landed in high-paying roles include Carson’s chief of staff, Andrew Hughes, a former plumbing and HVAC salesman who had also worked as a special projects coordinator at the University of Texas System’s Washington lobbying shop.

Hughes, a Carson and Trump campaign worker, listed Carson as a reference on his résumé. HUD would not divulge his current salary, but he was making $155,000 last December as deputy chief of staff, a 14 percent salary increase from his initial appointment as the agency’s liaison to the White House. Hughes did not respond to multiple messages seeking requests for comment.

Keller, former HUD Secretary Jackson’s chief of staff, said that Hughes’s close bond with Carson, developed during his work on the campaign, makes up for his lack of housing background.

Mason Alexander, a former event manager, entered HUD last January as a special assistant making $107,435 a year. A HUD staffer who recently resigned said Alexander had started in executive scheduling, planning Carson’s travel and listening tour. By September, he was promoted to senior adviser, though not in a policy role, and received a 23 percent raise, bringing his salary to $131,767.

Alexander’s résumé says he has an associate degree in communication from Tallahassee Community College and a professional background in strategic planning. The résumé noted that Alexander had helped prepare press staging areas for Trump campaign rallies.

Alexander did not respond to multiple attempts to reach him.

Barbara Gruson, a New York real estate agent and property manager who organized voter outreach for the Trump campaign, started at HUD in January 2017 as a special assistant in public affairs making $90,350. She confirmed in a brief phone call that she does not have a bachelor’s degree. By May of that year, she was earning $97,869 as adviser to regional administrator Lynne Patton, a longtime aide and adviser to the Trump family who entered HUD as a senior adviser.

Patton was later tapped to oversee the agency’s New York and New Jersey region, a position paying $160,000 a year. She dismissed criticism about her lack of housing expertise, telling The Post last year that she is qualified for the job, given her years serving as liaison to the Trumps.

Patton said in a new statement that appointees, including Gruson, are now “soundly proficient in every single program area.” Gruson has “over 20 years of multi-faceted real estate experience,” Patton said. “The American people voted for both a president and an administration that brings common sense and business acumen to Washington, D.C.”

Richard Youngblood, a political consultant and former mortgage loan officer who organized Ohio evangelicals for the Trump campaign, started at HUD as a special assistant in January 2017 making $119,489. His résumé does not list a college degree. In August 2017, Youngblood was named the director of HUD’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and received a 10 percent raise, bringing his salary to $131,767. He said he was instructed not to comment.

Stephanie Holderfield, a real estate agent and political consultant who had worked on Carson’s and Trump’s presidential campaigns, also started at HUD as a special assistant in the community planning and development office before being named a senior policy adviser in the Office of Public and Indian Housing. Her résumé says she expects to graduate from college in December. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Patton said Holderfield’s two decades of work experience includes two years as Champaign County board member, during which she told Patton she helped shape Illinois housing policy and zoning ordinances.

The Trump administration even filled a job overseeing an Obama initiative that the current White House no longer appears to support, appointing John Gibbs, a former conservative commentator and software developer without housing experience, as director of the Strong Cities and Strong Communities program last May, according to HUD and Office of Personnel Management records.

“That was an Obama program that had effectively ended,” said Danielle Arigoni, former director of HUD’s Office of Economic Development who left the agency in September 2017.

The agency confirmed that Gibbs never worked as director of that program.

Gibbs, who promoted a conspiracy theory on Twitter that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman had taken part in a satanic ritual, transitioned last August to the role of senior adviser in the Office of Community Planning and Development.

A four-page job description for Gibbs’s $131,767-a-year role specified that the senior adviser should possess knowledge of the Fair Housing Act and underlying principles related to the enforcement of laws affecting HUD programs.

A recently updated online directory of HUD principals lists Gibbs as a senior adviser to Carson. Gibbs declined to comment. The agency said Gibbs, whose résumé includes a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, learned about developing and analyzing housing policy during his studies.

Gibbs’s background is a mismatch for his position at HUD because of his belief that government benefits — a core function of the agency — hurt, rather than help, the poor, said Cliff Taffet, who retired last July as general deputy assistant secretary in HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development after 26 years at the agency.

“In some cases, we’re populating the government with people who can’t function in their roles because they don’t believe in the mission of the agency,” Taffet said.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and resident scholar at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, said that every administration faces pressures to find positions for campaign workers.

“But every administration I’ve seen before this one tried to make sure that the balance was struck so that in positions that matter, you had people with the appropriate expertise and talent and backgrounds,” he said.

Career staff at the upper end of the HUD pay scale have at least a bachelor’s degree plus years of related experience, said Sara Pratt, a former deputy assistant secretary for fair-housing enforcement and programs. But political appointees come into HUD under different standards, Pratt and others said.

Where appointees end up on the pay scale depends on the position to which they are assigned and their previous salary history, said Keller, the former Bush official.

“The rules are different for politicals,” Keller said. “If you don’t have a college degree in these positions, it comes down to judgment and resilience, the ability to work 14-hour days and keep a clear head in this maelstrom.”

Preston, former HUD secretary under Bush, said it’s not critical for all political appointees to enter with deep housing backgrounds, as long as they are willing to seek the expertise of career staff, who he said senior appointees relied heavily upon during his time leading the agency.

“Knowing stuff doesn’t mean you can get stuff done,” Preston said.

HUD staffers say the administration has struggled with recruitment and has had to lower the bar for many political appointees.

“The reality is they’ve had a hard time finding political people who are qualified in this industry willing to come into this agency,” said a longtime HUD staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation.

Another former career employee said staffers had hoped Trump would appoint “non-ideological” business-oriented Republicans who would improve the agency’s technological and procurement shortcomings and make HUD run more efficiently.

“I was trying to convey to the team that there were important things they needed to be engaged with and make decisions or raise issues,” the staffer said. “Otherwise things just sit or self-implode.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

There must be something wrong with me that I even saw this tweet or instantly knew what this was about... But yay 

Seriously I don't know why I'm following this shit but it's like a trainwreck you cannot look away from. Shining city on the hill my ass  

[fraurosena]

14 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

There must be something wrong with me that I even saw this tweet or instantly knew what this was about... But yay 

Seriously I don't know why I'm following this shit but it's like a trainwreck you cannot look away from. Shining city on the hill my ass  

Don't worry, @AmazonGrace, you are not alone! I never gave a damn about politics, let alone those of a foreign country before the 2016 elections, but now I'm almost obsessively following American politics. And I can't even really explain why either. 

[AmazonGrace]

I mean, radiation exposure gives you superpowers. 

 

[fraurosena]

This is being drowned out by the Kavanaugh and Trump taxes news, but this happened today.

Ricin detected in mail sent to Pentagon

Quote

Two pieces of mail delivered to the Pentagon mail facility on Monday have initially tested positive for ricin, according to a US defense official.

The two suspicious envelopes were addressed to Secretary of Defense James Mattis and to Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, the official told CNN.

The mail facility is in a separate building on the grounds of the Pentagon and the piece of mail which tested positive never entered the Pentagon building.

All US Postal Service mail received at the Pentagon mail screening facility on Monday is currently under quarantine and poses no threat to Pentagon personnel, according to Pentagon spokesperson Col. Rob Manning.

"On Monday, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency detected a suspicious substance during mail screening at the Pentagon's remote screening facility," Manning said in a statement.

"The envelopes were taken by the FBI this morning for further analysis," Manning added.

The FBI issued a statement saying it has taken possession of two suspicious envelopes screened at the Pentagon mail facility and they are undergoing more testing.

"On Tuesday, October, 2, 2018, in coordination with the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, FBI Special Agents took possession of two suspicious envelopes that had been screened at the Pentagon mail facility. Those envelopes are currently undergoing further testing. As this is ongoing, we will have no further comment."

Ricin is a highly toxic compound that is extracted from castor beans and has been used in terror plots. It can be used in powder, pellet, mist or acid form.

If ingested, it causes nausea, vomiting and internal bleeding of the stomach and intestines, followed by failure of the liver, spleen and kidneys, and death by collapse of the circulatory system.

 

[fraurosena]

*Very sad sigh* 

 

[Howl]

On 10/2/2018 at 4:56 PM, fraurosena said:

Ricin detected in mail sent to Pentagon

Sent by disaffected (mentally ill?) sailor discharged from the Navy awhile back, from Ogden, Utah and none too smart:

Quote

Two envelopes sent to the Pentagon, one addressed to Defense Secretary James Mattis and the other to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, contained a return address that linked them to the former sailor, officials told Fox News.

Meanwhile, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told reporters traveling in Brussels with Mattis that the substance sent to the Pentagon was castor seeds, not the deadly poison ricin, as originally suspected.

To clarify the contents did test positive for ricin, but not in the scary scary form. 

The other scary part is the guy is eligible to be released on a $25,000 cash-only bond, so hopefully has no well-to-do relatives. 

 

[Howl]

Holy crap!  Nikki Haley has resigned, out of the blue! 

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley resigns

Maybe she got the message that Everything Trump Touches Dies and decided to get the hell out. 

[Audrey2]

In her defense, US Ambassador to the UN has to be an extremely difficult job now, at the rate Trump has been making enemies of our allies and aligning us with generally disliked countries. Maybe she's sick of trying to make nice with Canada as Trump keeps spewing his nonsense.

[Howl]

20 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

In her defense, US Ambassador to the UN has to be an extremely difficult job now, at the rate Trump has been making enemies of our allies and aligning us with generally disliked countries. Maybe she's sick of trying to make nice with Canada as Trump keeps spewing his nonsense.

And I suspect she's been chronically undermined and kept out of important loops with crap surprises ("The President said WHAT?) the entire time, because this administration runs on total chaos.  There must have been a final fucking straw for her, but we may never know what it was.  Apparently, her staff was not forewarned, but I'll be reading carefully to confirm that was the case. 

ETA: There's nothing like the excitement of a new Infrastructure Week! Twitter is making some nonspecific noises about John Bolton being the root cause of Haley's resignation  and some probably not unfounded fears that Trump will try to appoint Ivanka as the next UN Ambassador.  Other talk that says nepotism laws would block that avenue. 

Also, Ivanka has apparently just started to follow a bunch of Sec. of Defense-related twitter accounts......leading to speculation that Jim Mattis (the best qualified person for this job)  is on the chopping block.  But then, DC is relentlessly about rumors and speculation.  As my best friend always says, More will be revealed! 

[AmazonGrace]

I wonder if this complaint has anything to do with why Haley resigned. It was filed yesterday.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/storage.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/08175317/2018-10-8-Haley-gifts-flights.pdf

 

Via Walt Schaub.

[Howl]

16 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I wonder if this complaint has anything to do with why Haley resigned. It was filed yesterday.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/storage.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/08175317/2018-10-8-Haley-gifts-flights.pdf

 

Via Walt Schaub.

If only there were government ethics lawyers who could have clarified for Ambassador Haley whether her use of private aircraft was appropriate. Oh, wait......

[GreyhoundFan]

"EPA chief ‘liked’ a blatantly racist meme about the Obamas. He says he doesn’t remember."

Spoiler

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency “liked” a racist post about the Obamas a few years ago and engaged with prominent far-right conspiracy theorists on social media, according to screen images published online Tuesday.

Andrew Wheeler, who has been the agency’s acting administrator since Scott Pruitt resigned in July, “liked” a racist meme that showed President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama staring at a banana, sometime after it was published in January 2013, according to an image posted online by HuffPost.

The Obamas have been prominent targets of those seeking to spread the racist trope, which has a deep historical connection to racism in the United States.

In a statement provided by spokesman James Hewitt, Wheeler did not dispute that he had liked the post but said that he did not remember it. Other posts unearthed by Huffpost included incidences in which Wheeler retweeted prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists.

“Over the years, I have been a prolific social media user and liked and inadvertently liked countless social media posts," the statement said. “As for some of the other posts, I agreed with the content and was unaware of the sources.”

The image was no longer publicly accessible Tuesday night on the Facebook page of the Italian meme group that posted it, Mia Mamma è Vergine (My Mother is a Virgin). The page had also posted other images comparing the Obamas to apes.

HuffPost said it had been alerted to Wheeler’s social media activity by the Democratic PAC American Bridge 21st Century.

The trope has a long connection to the world of racist thought in the United States and around the world. New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples, in a piece he wrote after Roseanne Barr employed it to attack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, called it “one of the oldest and most profoundly racist slanders in American history,” noting that it has been used to justify slavery and lynchings.

“The toxically racist ape characterization has been pushed to the margins of the public square,” Staples wrote. “Nevertheless, a growing body of research shows that it has maintained a pernicious grip on the American imagination. It is especially problematic in the criminal justice system, where subhuman treatment of African-Americans remains strikingly visible.”

Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, was nominated by Trump to be the second in command at the agency in October 2017, to cheers from those in the fossil-fuel industry.

He is now one of a long list of Trump appointees to draw scrutiny for making questionable or overtly racist statements before taking their current positions.

Carl Higbie, who was appointed as chief of external affairs at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs AmeriCorps and other service programs, resigned in January after comments he made disparaging blacks, Muslims, gays, women, veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and immigrants in the country illegally surfaced in the news media. Before that, Jamie Johnson, a Trump appointee at the Department of Homeland Security, resigned after comments he made linking blacks to laziness and promiscuity.

The White House did not return a request for comment about whether it planned to take any action about the disclosure.

 

[fraurosena]

The Rape-ugly-klans are all infected with the "I don't recall" virus. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"New emails reveal a central political motivation for changing the census"

Spoiler

When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross instructed the Census Bureau earlier this year to include a question on the decennial census about the citizenship of residents, he offered a specific rationale. Having data on citizenship, he wrote, would allow the government to better enforce the Voting Rights Act, Civil-Rights-era legislation meant to protect voting from discriminatory policies.

This rationale was quickly treated with skepticism. The Trump administration has not in other significant ways championed the importance of Americans to vote or seemed particularly concerned about cracking down on efforts to limit voting. In fact, President Trump convened a commission meant to study the purported issue of voter fraud, an effort that in other places has been a precursor to new laws making voting more difficult, not easier. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, even praised a 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the rule.

So what was the rationale? Newly released emails from the Commerce Department offer an unsurprising answer.

The emails were released in response to questions Ross faced about why he’d demanded the new question in the first place. He was asked in March whether he’d spoken with anyone at the White House about the question, a pointed effort to figure out whether this was part of the Trump administration’s broad effort to crack down on immigrants in the country illegally. Ross said he hadn’t spoken with anyone at the White House — but the new emails show that, in fact, he had. Specifically, he spoke with Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to the president who was one of the more outspoken anti-immigration members of the president’s early team.

Ross had also spoken with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, as shown in an email Kobach sent to the secretary. Kobach has long crusaded against the essentially nonexistent scourge of rampant voter fraud and served as the vice chairman of Trump’s voter fraud commission.

We’ve highlighted a critical part of the email (which then goes on to offer draft language for a question). Not asking people whether they are citizens during the census “leads to the problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.”

One of the concerns about including a question on citizenship is that people who are not in the country legally will be dissuaded from participating in the count, leading to an undervote of populations of individuals. The census is used for a lot of governmental purposes, including the allocation of things like housing money; having an underestimate of the actual population in a place means that the place then has less money per person than might be needed. Undercounts are already a problem for the Census Bureau. In 2010, there was a concerted effort to reach out to Hispanics in particular to ensure that they were counted. Adding the citizenship question would only make that job harder.

What Kobach is saying, though, is that the problem is the opposite: Immigrants in the country illegally are being counted in the census but shouldn’t be — giving places with more undocumented immigrants larger populations that then boost the number of congressional seats they’re allotted.

He’s saying, in effect, that not including the citizenship question gives states where they live more political power than those states should have. Where do those immigrants live? Mostly in large cities, according to Pew Research Center.

(If you’re curious, here’s why Pew is confident in its estimates of the population of immigrants in the country illegally.)

If the estimated population in major metro areas is removed from each state’s population — which assumes that all undocumented immigrants are currently counted in the census, which is not true — the resulting change in the apportionment of House seats would mean, for example, that California loses two House seats. Texas would lose one, but the net swing would add two to red states and take two from blue states.

For Kobach, now on the ballot in the Kansas gubernatorial race, that’s a feature, not a bug.

His argument that these immigrants do not actually “reside” in the United States appears to be the sort of rhetoric that has influenced American population estimates from the country’s earliest days. Two-thirds of undocumented immigrants have lived in the country for a decade or longer. For all intents and purposes, these are residents of the United States using government resources the same way as any resident.

It’s not clear if Kobach made the argument about House seats because that’s his primary concern or because he saw it as a compelling argument to make to the White House. Kobach has made uprooting immigrants who voted illegally a centerpiece of his efforts as secretary of state in Kansas. After more than two years of being empowered to prosecute fraud, he’s charged two noncitizens with having voted.

What the Kobach email reveals, though, is that the political effects of asking the question on immigration were part of the calculus on deciding whether to include it — in case there was any question in that regard. There’s an existing problem in counting noncitizen immigrants in the census, and experts argue that including the question will itself drive down response rates to the survey.

Including the question, in other words, will itself help meet Kobach’s goal of getting undocumented immigrants out of population totals (to whatever extent they’re already included) even without anyone actually answering it.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump Says Sears Was Mismanaged. Mnuchin Was on Its Board for Years"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump said that Sears Holdings Corp. had been mismanaged for years before it declared bankruptcy. Among those responsible for its management: his Treasury secretary.

Steven Mnuchin was a member of Sears’s board from 2005 until December 2016, and before that was a director for K-Mart Corp., which was acquired by Sears in 2005.

“Sears has been dying for many years,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Monday to inspect hurricane damage in Florida. “It’s been obviously improperly run for many years and it’s a shame.”

Treasury didn’t immediately respond to questions about Mnuchin’s service on the company’s board.

Mnuchin was a college roommate of Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert, who attended Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing for Treasury secretary in January 2017. Mnuchin cut his ties to Sears when he joined the Trump administration.

Mnuchin said during his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017 that he had invested about $26 million in Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments Inc. He defended Lampert’s management of Sears, which he said “was already a failing issue” before Lampert invested in the company.

As Treasury secretary, Mnuchin sits on the board of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which considers applications from companies to terminate their pension plans. During the hearing, Mnuchin told Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, that he would recuse himself if the PBGC receives an application from Sears. Menendez noted that would leave the PBGC board with just two voting members.

“I’m not sure that the remaining two can ultimately make a decision on such a case which involves 200,000 people’s pensions,” Menendez told Mnuchin.

The retailing icon filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday and said it will attempt to reorganize around a smaller number of profitable stores. Lampert resigned as CEO, but he is negotiating a financing deal with the company.

“Somebody that is of my generation, Sears Roebuck was a big deal,” Trump said. “So it’s very sad to see.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"HUD appointee abruptly moved to lead Interior Dept.’s watchdog unit amid Zinke probe"

Spoiler

The Trump administration has abruptly moved a political appointee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to serve as the acting watchdog for the Interior Department, an unusual choice for a role that is traditionally nonpartisan.

As acting inspector general at the Interior Department, Suzanne Israel Tufts will oversee four ongoing investigations into Secretary Ryan Zinke’s conduct, including inquiries into his wife’s travel and a Montana land-development deal backed by the chairman of the oil services firm Halliburton.

Tufts, who has served as HUD’s assistant secretary for administration since December, is a lawyer from Queens. Before joining the Trump administration, she founded a consulting firm that focused on providing services for tax-exempt organizations and emerging companies.

Tufts — who does not have a background in government investigations or environmental policy and regulations — will be overseeing one of the government’s most active watchdog offices. The Interior Department’s inspector general is charged with auditing and investigating potential waste, fraud and abuse at 10 agencies, including the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Tufts’s move to the Interior Department, announced by HUD Secretary Ben Carson in an email to his agency’s staffers Friday, took lawmakers and officials at the Interior Department’s watchdog unit by surprise. Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall, who had led the office for nine years and served as its deputy since 1999, learned of Tufts’s appointment from a colleague who showed her Carson’s email, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange.

“The Office of Inspector General has received no official communication about any leadership changes,” Nancy DiPaolo, a spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office, said in a statement.

Asked who hired Tufts for the position, Faith Vander Voort, an Interior Department spokeswoman, referred the question to the White House. “The position of the Inspector General has been vacant for about ten years,” Vander Voort said in an email. “This is a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed position, which would be announced by the White House.”

The White House, which has not announced that Tufts was nominated for the permanent position of inspector general, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

A HUD spokesman said Tufts’s move is a temporary detail, which means she would return to that agency. But Carson, in his email to HUD staffers last week, said she was leaving.

In his email Friday announcing her move, Carson praised Tufts’s work for HUD, calling her “an extremely enthusiastic and energetic leader who reestablished HUD’s Office of Administration, implementing improvements to the agency’s governance and internal controls.” Tufts’s new post was first reported by The Hill.

Tufts, who had been earning a $155,000 annual salary at HUD, oversaw personnel management at the department, as well as contracts and training. She replaced a career official who had voiced objections about a redecoration of Carson’s office, according to people familiar with her role.

Elizabeth Hempowicz, director of public policy for the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group, called Tufts’s appointment “politically suspect, given the high-profile investigations involving Zinke.”

“Why replace an acting Inspector General with a political appointee who has no government oversight experience?” she asked.

“If the administration wants someone to replace the current acting watchdog, the White House should nominate someone for the post and they should go through the Senate confirmation process,” Hempowicz added.

While inspectors general at Cabinet agencies must be confirmed by the Senate, it is highly unusual for a political appointee to be brought in as a watchdog in an acting role. Acting inspectors general are traditionally promoted from within an agency’s civil-service ranks.

Kristina Baum, spokeswoman for House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), said in an email, “The Chairman and the committee plan on learning more about this new development as [the Interior Department] makes details available.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) questioned Tufts’s appointment, given the fact that Zinke faces several independent investigations by the office.

“Inspector Generals are supposed to be independent leaders on whom the American people can rely to keep government honest and forthright,” he said in a statement. “Americans need someone at the helm of Interior’s Inspector General office who is independent, not in the back pocket of this corrupt administration.”

Kendall is a longtime government lawyer who has served as acting and deputy inspector general for the Interior Department since 2009. She took over the office from Earl E. Devaney, who left to oversee the spending of $787 billion in stimulus funding. President Barack Obama nominated Kendall to serve as inspector general, but the Senate never voted on it.

Kendall’s office is investigating a range of actions by Zinke. They include a Montana investment deal involving land owned by a foundation connected to Zinke and his wife, as well as the department’s move to block a casino project in Connecticut proposed by the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes after Zinke met with lobbyists for MGM Resorts International. The casino decision, which overruled a recommendation from the Interior Department’s staff, raised questions about whether the administration was improperly influenced by MGM’s lobbying efforts.

Investigators are also probing how Zinke and his aides redrew the boundaries of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, given its impact on private property owned by a retiring state representative, Mike Noel (R).

And the inspector general’s office has been looking for months into whether Interior Department officials should have allowed Zinke’s wife, Lola, a Republican Party activist and consultant, to travel with her husband on official business.