Executive Departments 3

[GreyhoundFan]

I shudder to think who Stephen Miller and Dumpy will appoint as acting DHS secretary. However, I'm not sorry to see Nielsen go. This went through my mind:

 

Also this one:

 

[Howl]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

11 hours ago, Howl said:

Yet another "Acting" in a Cabinet level position. 

 

I think I know why they're all 'acting' cabinet members. None of them is qualified for the job or really knows what they're doing, so they're all playing make believe and acting as if they have a clue. 

Plus, who on earth would ever actually want to be a cabinet member in this administration? 

[CTRLZero]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

None of them is qualified for the job or really knows what they're doing, so they're all playing make believe and acting as if they have a clue. 

I keep thinking this administration will come to an end with Trump making a speech ala Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain:  "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."  I really do agree that no one knew what the hell they were doing, and the only things accomplished were being done by actors behind the curtain.  (No shade on Debbie Reynolds, however.)

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

Whoo, boy.  To have been a fly on the wall at the meeting yesterday....

Either she was told to not let the door hit her in the ass on the way out or this is her big FU.  

Or, in other words, a regular Monday under Trump, and the start of yet another glorious Infrastructure Week! 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

And another one gone....

"Secret Service Director Randolph ‘Tex’ Alles to leave Trump administration"

Quote

A former senior Customs official and retired Marine Corps general, Alles was the 25th director of the agency that is a part of the Department of Homeland Security. The announcement of his departure comes a day after the ouster of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

“Mr. Alles will be leaving shortly and President Trump has selected James M. Murray, a career member of the USSS, to take over as director beginning in May,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.

 

[Howl]

5 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Secret Service Director Randolph ‘Tex’ Alles to leave Trump administration"

Dayum.  Alles was head of Secret Service for two years. 

There is an actual purge going on at DHS, and it's being referred to as such by at least one person in the administration.   Secret Service reports to DHS.  WTAF? 

This is horrifying.  It's being reported by CNN that 

Quote

The President in recent weeks empowered Stephen Miller to lead the administration's border policies "and he's executing his plan" with what amounts to a wholesale decapitation or the Department of Homeland Security leadership, the official says.

and here are some others getting a boot in the bum from the Trumpy WH: 

Quote

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services director Francis Cissna and Office of the General Counsel's John Mitnick are expected to be gone soon, and the White House is eyeing others to be removed.

This leads me to believe that Stephen Miller is getting ready to put in place some truly draconian immigration policies, much, much worse than what we've seen.  

It also speaks to the amount of raw power Miller has accrued in the West Wing.  There's something about the guy that just isn't right and that's probably why Trump leans on him.  It's terrifying to think that as Trump becomes progressively more unhinged, Miller is his go-to guy for hatchet jobs. 

 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump relies on acting Cabinet officials more than most presidents. It’s not an accident."

Spoiler

By now, we’re used to the pattern. President Trump appoints a staffer to a position, lavishing the person with praise and often implying that no better person could have been chosen. Over time — sometimes a lot of time, sometimes not — cracks start to appear. Reports of Trump growing frustrated with the person and/or reports of other administration officials growing impatient. Often Trump will come out and rebut those claims, but, inevitably, there’s then a tweet.

As there was on Sunday, when it was Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s time.

In the next tweet, Trump announced Nielsen’s temporary replacement, Kevin McAleenan, who will become acting head of the department.

Just by considering Trump’s history, it’s fairly obvious that he’s comfortable with acting agency heads. Including the first several months he was in office when some nominees were awaiting confirmation, more than a fifth of Trump’s presidency has seen departments run by acting heads. (Specifically, 21 percent of the days that one of the 15 consistent Cabinet positions could have had a director, there was an acting director in place.)

But we don’t need to infer that Trump appreciates acting department heads. He’s said as much.

“I like acting because I can move so quickly,” Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in February. “It gives me more flexibility.”

That’s obviously true. Trump can slot someone in without having to have the person confirmed by the Senate, a move he used at the Justice Department last year after he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump may not have the modern record for the most days with an acting Cabinet chief in a year, a title owned by Barack Obama in 2013.

But if you look at cumulative days with acting department heads over the course of Trump’s presidency, his administration stands out. (If Jan. 1 saw an acting director at State and Agriculture, for example, that would count as two days on this metric.)

One small caveat: As the graph at the bottom shows, the Cabinet is larger these days than it used to be.

On average, though, Trump’s agencies have spent much more time being led by acting directors. He’s had 388 days on average in each of the years of his presidency in which a department was led by an acting director.

Why? Two reasons. The first is that Trump’s also seen more turnover than past presidents. Over the course of his first two years in office, nearly two-thirds of his leadership team left or took a new position, according to data compiled by the Brookings Institution’s Kathryn Tenpa

But Trump has also been slow to fill positions across the agencies, not just at the top. As of writing, Washington Post-Partnership for Public Service data suggests that at least 12 agencies still see a quarter or more of their Senate-confirmed positions unfilled.

In some cases, there are nominees waiting to be confirmed, something that Trump has often complained about. In many cases, though, there aren’t.

While Trump has a lot of acting directors now, he doesn’t really have an exceptional number of them. It’s not uncommon for a president to see several positions open in recent years, especially at the beginning of his term or after an election.

What is uncommon is his willingness to embrace acting directors as a good-enough solution. Why have a political fight in the Senate, he seems to think, unless it’s absolutely necessary? The Senate’s supposed to have an advise-and-consent role in the process, but if a president weren’t looking for advice and didn’t feel he needed consent, what then?

 

[fraurosena]

There should be a limit to how long someone in the administration is allowed to be in an 'acting' capacity, before an official member is appointed. If no one is nominated, then Congress should have the power to appoint someone. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Kirstjen Nielsen’s attempt to suck up to Trump ended badly. It always does."

Spoiler

“I have determined,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen wrote in her resignation letter Sunday night, “that it is the right time for me to step aside.”

And how did she come to this determination?

Well, maybe it was that her boss, the president, had just demanded her resignation and then tweeted news of her ouster to his nearly 60 million followers.

This was vintage Nielsen: boldly asserting the dubious in the face of the obvious. During her rocky tenure, she secured the homeland against facts and decency alike as she struggled in vain to suck up to President Trump and thereby keep her job.

It ended badly. It always does. Trump publicly mocked Attorney General Jeff Sessions before firing him. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reportedly fired while sitting on the toilet. Trump changes Cabinet secretaries like suits and will soon have temporary appointees in half a dozen Cabinet-level jobs. An honest help-wanted ad for a Trump Cabinet position would go like this:

“Flailing administration seeks Cabinet secretary willing to sacrifice dignity for employer’s vanity. No relevant experience needed. Successful candidate must be morally flexible. Familiarity with abusive personalities a plus. Willingness to be publicly humiliated required. Employee will be fired in about 12 months and thereafter be permanently unemployable. Non-disclosure agreement mandatory. Interested candidates should contact the prison warden.”

Yet the 46-year-old Nielsen, who reportedly never supervised more than 15 people before taking over the 240,000-person department, thought she’d be different. And in a sense she was: Nobody debased herself quite as often as Nielsen did in her quest to keep the job, defending Trump after the “s---hole countries” and Charlottesville scandals, enduring frequent rebukes from Trump and leaks about her imminent firing, embracing his incendiary language and enduring his extralegal instincts, swallowing her moral misgivings to embrace the family-separation policy (while denying any such policy existed), and implausibly claiming that children weren’t being put in cages. Excerpts from a hearing last month:

Lawmaker: “Are we still using cages for children?”

Nielsen: “Sir, we don’t use cages. . . .”

Lawmaker: “I’ve seen the cages. I just want you to admit that the cages exist.”

Nielsen: “Sir, they’re not cages. . . .”

Another lawmaker: “What is a chain-link fence enclosed into a chamber on a concrete floor? . . . Is that a cage?”

Nielsen: “It’s a detention space.”

By that time, Nielsen had already made her famous counterfactual assertion: “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” She later stood next to Trump as he signed an order rescinding the policy they supposedly didn’t have.

When multiple witnesses described a meeting at which Trump said he wanted more immigrants from Norway and called Haiti and African nations “s---hole countries,” Nielsen, who attended the meeting, said, “I don’t recall him saying the exact phrase.”

At a hearing, a senator asked her rhetorically, “Norway is a predominantly white country, isn’t it?”

“I actually do not know that, sir,” Nielsen replied, though allowing she could “imagine” that to be true.

Another thing Nielsen professed not to know: the conclusion by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to boost Trump. “I’m not aware of that,” she said. At another point, she said she did not know how many children had been detained at the southern border. Yet another time, she declined to contradict Trump’s false claim that there were “never so many apprehensions ever in our history” at the border as there are now.

So dedicated was Nielsen to avoiding any contradiction of Trump that she echoed his view that there were “very fine people” on both sides in Charlottesville. “I think what’s important about that conversation is, it’s not that one side is right, one side is wrong,” Nielsen said of the white supremacists and counterdemonstrators.

No amount of public disgrace could deter her from serving the president’s whims. During the family-separation imbroglio, she dined at a Mexican restaurant, where hecklers pounced. Nancy Pelosi called her actions “morally reprehensible.” Even her high-school classmates called for her resignation.

The indignities piled up. Inside the White House, Stephen Miller, 33, and Jared Kushner, 38, reportedly agitated for her ouster. Anonymous officials repeatedly spread word that her firing was imminent. Trump let her twist in the wind, saying in November he’d make a decision about her “shortly.” Nielsen redoubled her suck-up efforts.

A month ago, Politico reported success: Her relationship with Trump had “turned a corner,” and “cabinet colleagues and Republican allies now describe her as a rising star” who has “managed to forge a stable relationship with Trump.” Said one source: Everything “has totally calmed down.”

Totally.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[Howl]

OK, if we're not scared now, we should be. CNN:  Barr says spying on Trump campaign 'did occur,' but provides no evidence

So of course, he's opening an investigation.  

So, my take on this is that the unredacted Mueller Report is pure dynamite kryptonite for the Trump Crime Family and Associates and there is no action that is too bizarre, too crazy, too unconstitutional to counteract that. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"If Trump has his way, this major federal agency is on the way out"

Spoiler

The White House is moving to do what no president has accomplished since World War II: eliminate a major federal agency.

If the Trump administration succeeds at dismantling the Office of Personnel Management, the closure could be a blueprint for shuttering other departments as it tries to shrink government.

The agency would be pulled apart and its functions divided among three other departments. An executive order directing parts of the transition by the fall is in the final stages of review, administration officials said, with an announcement by President Trump likely by summer. OPM employees were briefed at a meeting in March.

For Trump, the breakup of the 5,565-employee federal personnel agency would offer a jolt of bureaucratic defibrillation to a slow-to-change workforce that the president and his top aides have targeted as a symptom of a sluggish, inefficient government.

The experiment will be closely watched not just on Capitol Hill, but also by other agencies that could be next.

“It’s a big, exemplary step,” Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget and acting OPM director, said in an interview. She characterized the agency created to oversee the civil service in 1978 as “fundamentally not set up for success, structurally.”

For Democrats and their allies in the labor movement, the effort to abolish the agency and redistribute its functions is a power play in defiance of Congress.

“Does anyone really think that if tomorrow the president said, ‘I’m dismantling DOD, and I think Ben Carson over at HUD can handle procurement and Betsy DeVos over at Education can handle the Army,’ that it would fly through?” asked Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of a House Oversight Committee panel on government operations.

He has sent Weichert a lengthy request for details of the plan and is scheduling a hearing this spring “so you can make your case.”

Watchers of the federal government say they cannot remember a stand-alone department of OPM’s scope being dismantled since the World War II era. The Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that carried out public works projects, was dissolved in 1943. Congress abolished the Community Services Administration in 1981 and folded its functions into the Department of Health and Human Services, a closure faulted by congressional auditors as poorly handled. OPM, with a $2.1 billion annual budget, is bigger and more multifaceted.

“We’re very good at creating new entities,” said John Palguta, a retired career executive with the Merit Systems Protection Board, “but we haven’t abolished very much. I haven’t seen this kind of wholesale dismantlement of an independent, executive branch agency.”

It’s not easy to wipe out a federal department, especially one that serves 2.1 million employees across the government. The White House is short on details even as it prepares to move employees out of OPM’s headquarters in downtown Washington. Officials were not able to estimate the short- or long-term savings of the closure.

The White House is attempting to dismantle the agency in several stages, with some steps beginning now and other changes delayed pending congressional approval.

But by starting the process, the administration hopes to claim a win on a major government reorganization plan that has languished without buy-in from Congress.

The plan envisions a smaller, more consolidated government in line with the president’s campaign promise to “cut so much your head will spin.” Wiping out the federal personnel agency could be Exhibit A as Trump’s reelection campaign assembles a list of victories to take to voters, from deregulation and tax cuts to trade tariffs.

Weichert acknowledged that the administration would need Congress to approve the transfer of two of OPM’s core functions, the employee retirement and health-care systems, and plans to ask lawmakers to introduce legislation in coming weeks.

The White House is taking steps now to parcel out many of the other responsibilities by the fall. The agency’s massive background investigation operation will migrate first to the Defense Department. The General Services Administration, the federal real estate agency, will absorb OPM’s human resources role, including training, pay and hiring, workforce planning, and the inspector general’s office.

The Office of Management and Budget would take over high-level policies governing federal employees, a plan that advocates and unions are decrying as a backdoor ploy to politicize the civil service by installing political appointees close to the White House.

The administration is asking Congress for $50 million in fiscal 2020 to carry out the reshuffling. Weichert said the administration does not intend to lay anyone off but instead will shrink the workforce through retirements and unfilled vacancies.

The mandate to manage a merit-based civil service goes back to the 1883 Pendleton Act, a law designed to end the “spoils system” of rewarding political supporters with government jobs. Federal appointments had to be based on skills and qualifications.

Congress created OPM out of the Civil Service Commission in 1978, the last time lawmakers voted to establish hiring, employment and management practices for the federal workforce.

Today the agency is widely viewed as slow and ineffective, though, with a long-lingering backlog of background investigations and risk-averse leadership that has failed to respond to calls for faster hiring and recruiting for a changing workforce.

“In order to really ramp up the mission around people, we need to have an infrastructure for people management that is really world-class,” Weichert said.

The plan has raised suspicions from federal employees, who have watched the administration attempt to freeze their pay, weaken the power of their unions, and move to clear a faster path to discipline and firing.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, with 750,000 members, is calling the idea “Trump’s Dangerous Plan to Abolish OPM” and predicting a “disastrous” result if policy for federal employees moves so close to the White House.

Federal employees “would be forced into a fight for the pay and benefits they’ve earned every time an administration decides they want to free up money for a pet political project,” the union said.

Breaking up OPM is not a Republican idea, though. The Obama administration discussed internally whether to do it, and so did Hillary Clinton’s team in 2016, civil service experts said. And the agency drew bipartisan fury in 2015 when U.S. officials alleged Chinese hackers stole millions of personnel records by hacking through the agency’s weak security system.

Plenty of federal departments have found themselves on conservatives’ wish lists for elimination over the years. President Ronald Reagan wanted to abolish the Energy and Education departments, for example. A few dozen agencies have shut down since the mid-1800s as Congress decided that they had outlived their mission.

The little-known Bureau of Efficiency, for example, formed in 1916 under President Woodrow Wilson to devise a filing system for federal offices, closed in 1933. The U.S. Metric Board existed from 1975 to 1982 to promote the metric system. The Interstate Commerce Commission folded in 1995 with 400 employees, down from 2,000 during its heyday regulating interstate business in the 1970s.

More recently, two small Treasury Department offices dissolved in 2011, casualties of a restructuring following the financial crisis. And Trump’s budget has proposed gutting 22 small departments for three years running, plans that were dead on arrival.

But the personnel agency has a government-wide central management role, which makes abolishing it attractive to the Trump administration.

“It’s a mid-sized agency with outsize impact,” said Donald F. Kettl, a public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the civil service. “It touches every part of the government.”

The White House has left many details of its plan vague, including whether the number of political appointees would shrink and whether there would still be a need for an agency head. Some observers are puzzled by the administration’s recent decision to nominate a new agency director if there would be no agency to run.

Jeff Pon was forced out in the fall after just seven months because he opposed the breakup and authorized his general counsel to write a 17-page memo to the Justice Department asking how it could be done legally, according to several people familiar with the document. It is unclear if the Justice Department responded.

Some vocal supporters of smaller government question the White House’s approach.

“Is there any advantage in consolidating federal bureaucracies into larger federal bureaucracies?” asked Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He described the plan as a consolidation of “dysfunctional federal bureaucracies.”

Edwards noted that congressional auditors have criticized the GSA for years for weak management of its inventory of federal buildings. “If the GSA can’t manage buildings very well, why would we think it could manage people with the addition of OPM?”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course: "Treasury says it will miss Democrats’ deadline for turning over Trump tax returns, casts skepticism over request"

Spoiler

Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said his department will not meet the Wednesday deadline set by congressional Democrats to turn over copies of President’s Trump tax returns, escalating a clash between the White House and Congress.

Mnuchin said he was consulting with the Justice Department as to the constitutional questions raised by the Democrats request and appeared deeply skeptical of the lawmakers intentions. He did not flatly reject the notion that he might ultimately comply, but the letter suggested that Mnuchin would not hold himself to any timeline.

In a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee, Mnuchin wrote, “The Committee’s request raises serious issues concerning the constitutional scope of congressional investigative authority, the legitimacy of the asserted legislative purpose, and the constitutional rights of American citizens.”

Mnuchin’s letter appeared to closely track the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyers in a letter last week in response to the demand made by Ways and Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.). Even though Neal addressed his letter to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig, Mnuchin said he would personally oversee the review. The IRS is part of Treasury.

House Democrats had requested the president’s tax records from 2013 to 2018, as well as information related to a trust that controls more than 100 other businesses in Trump’s empire.

The request cited a 1924 federal law that states the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the records at the request of lawmakers tasked with tax oversight.

“We have completed the necessary groundwork for a request of this magnitude, and I am certain we are within our legitimate legislative, legal and oversight rights,” Neal said last week.

But, Mnuchin said Wednesday, “[t]he legal implications of this request could affect protections for all Americans against politically-motivated disclosures of personal tax information, regardless of which party is in power.”

Trump declined to release his records while running for president in 2016, breaking with decades of precedent.

The tax returns would give the public a new look into the president’s sprawling business empire and alleged conflicts of interest, information that could come out during Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.

House Democrats are expected to soon send an second letter to the Treasury Department again requesting the returns, according to a congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The committee could also send subpoenas to Mnuchin and Rettig, demanding the returns be divulged. If the administration continues to deny the request, House Democrats could also file a lawsuit in federal court to try to enforce it, said Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

It’s not clear how long the subsequent court fights would take.

Democrats may also choose to request the documents from New York state, given that federal taxes are often included as attachments in state tax returns. New York’s legislature is currently considering legislation that would allow Congress to request the president’s tax returns from the state’s Department of Taxation and Finance.

“I think it’s likely to go to the D.C. circuit, but does the Supreme Court want to get into this? That’s really hard to predict,” Hemel said. “I’d be surprised if [Chief Justice] John G. Roberts Jr. wants to resolve this dispute, but it is an important inter-branch dispute.”

Trump says he cannot release the tax returns because he is under audit, and the administration has put up a united front aimed at blocking the documents from being released.

Both Rettig and Mnuchin are Trump appointees.

In a 2016 column in Forbes, Rettig, then a private attorney, said no “experienced tax lawyer” would advise Trump to publicly release his tax returns during an audit.

Mnuchin revealed in testimony earlier this week that Treasury lawyers had consulted with White House attorneys about the possible release of the returns. Mnuchin described the discussions between the White House and Treasury officials as purely “informational,” though he wouldn’t provide more details. White House officials similarly would not offer more information about the discussions.

Democrats cried foul, saying any White House involvement in Treasury’s decision-making raised the risk of improper political involvement. The reason federal law says the treasury secretary “shall furnish” tax returns requested by Congress is because they are designed the system to block any involvement from the White House.

Attorneys for the president have argued Neal’s request risks using the IRS for partisan political aims, arguing House Democrats are engaged in a “gross abuse of power” that infringes on taxpayer privacy. These arguments have been echoed in House hearings by congressional Republicans.

White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has said that Democrats would never obtain Trump’s tax returns.

“The requests for [Trump’s] private tax information are not consistent with governing law, do not advance any proper legislative purpose, and threaten to interfere with the ordinary conduct of audits,” said William S. Consovoy, Trump’s attorney, in a statement. “We are confident that this misguided attempt to politicize the administration of the tax laws will not succeed.”

Last week, Consovoy sent a letter to the Treasury Department urging it to not release Trump’s tax returns until it had received a formal legal opinion on the matter from the Justice Department.

Presidential candidates since the Nixon administration have released their tax returns, but Trump has refused to do so. Trump has promised to release the returns after a conclusion of an audit, although independent legal experts have said that an audit would not bar him from doing so.

Democrats may be forced to prove in court that their request is part of Congress's oversight or legislative responsibilities, according to tax experts.

In 2016, the New York Times published Trump’s 1995 income tax records, showing he claimed a large loss that could minimize his tax burden.

Mark W. Everson, who served as the IRS commissioner under President George W. Bush, said there is little dispute that Congress has the authority to receive Trump’s tax returns. He also said he was alarmed by Mulvaney’s comments denying Democrats would ever get the returns.

“I understand the stakes are significant, because it involves a president. But I am disturbed that the White House, through the chief of staff, would appear to be calling the shots on a matter that is fully within the purview of the Treasury Department,” Everson said. “I think the law is clear on this matter.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I know it's a parody, but this made me laugh:

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

I'm pretty sure that none of these nitwits understand that the internet is forever, and NEVER forgets.  And brilliant take down; these guys are such  predictable liars that the interviewer had the clips cued up and ready. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo editorial board: "Trump shouldn’t complain about slow confirmations when he nominates people like this"

Spoiler

MORE THAN two years after President Trump took office, the State Department remains critically understaffed. Only four of its nine top positions are filled; overall, according to the Partnership for Public Service, 38 percent of key positions are vacant. This month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the administration’s belated choices for ambassadors to Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but there are still no nominees for such important posts as Pakistan, Honduras, Jordan and Brazil.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Republican senators frequently blame Senate Democrats for obstructing the filling of positions. So it’s worth reviewing, as the ranking Foreign Relations Committee Democrat, Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), did in a recent floor speech, some of the people Mr. Trump has nominated — and, in some cases, renominated — for ambassadorships or senior positions in Foggy Bottom.

One, Christine Toretti, was issued a restraining order in 2008 after she allegedly placed a bullet-riddled target on the office chair of a doctor, according to CNN. Another, Ronald Mortensen, once claimed that then-Sen. John McCain was rolling out the “welcome mat for ISIS on America’s southern border.” A third, Leandro Rizzuto Jr., disseminated crackpot conspiracy theories, such as that the wife of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was, as Mr. Menendez put it, “part of a sinister cabal seeking to combine the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States.”

Then there is Doug Manchester, who, after being nominated by Mr. Trump as ambassador to the Bahamas, told senators that the country was a “protectorate ” of the United States, even though it is not and never has been. The Post also reported that multiple women said they felt uncomfortable or demeaned by Mr. Manchester when he was the owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Like a number of Mr. Trump’s ambassadorial nominees, Mr. Manchester was a heavy donor — to the amount of $1 million — to the president’s inaugural committee, according to reporting by NBC News. Another big donor, John Rakolta, was nominated as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, though he has no diplomatic experience. Lydia Blanchard, whose husband gave $553,500 to the inaugural fund, posted fake news stories about Democrats on her Facebook page, including one suggesting Bill and Hillary Clinton were responsible for murders. She was nominated as ambassador to Slovenia.

Mr. Menendez maintains that Democrats have moved administration nominees who were properly vetted. But, he said, “when the White House, either though negligence or incompetence, sends us un-vetted, unqualified nominees, incapable and oftentimes offensive, my staff and I must exercise due diligence on behalf of the American people.” Indeed they must.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Interior’s watchdog opens an ethics probe into Bernhardt four days after his Senate confirmation"

Spoiler

The Interior Department’s internal watchdog opened an investigation into ethics complaints against former oil and gas lobbyist David Bernhardt on Monday, four days after the Senate confirmed him as the agency’s secretary.

A spokeswoman for Interior’s inspector general’s office, Nancy DiPaolo, said the probe is “based on requests from multiple lawmakers and others.” At least eight senators who chastised Bernhardt during his confirmation hearing, including Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), called for an investigation. Numerous conservation groups also submitted demands for inquiry into potential conflicts of interest.

In a letter to the executive director of one of the groups, the Campaign for Accountability, Inspector General Mary L. Kendall wrote that her office “received seven complaints, including yours, from a wide assortment of complainants alleging various conflict of interest and other violations by then deputy secretary of the interior, David Bernhardt."

“We are continuing to gather pertinent information about the complaints and have opened an investigation to address them,” Kendall added. “We will conduct our review as expeditiously and thoroughly as practicable."

Throughout his confirmation process, Bernhardt and his allies in the Senate maintained that he has complied with the agency’s ethics guidelines and has hired additional ethics officers to strengthen them.

“It is important to note that the department ethics office has already conducted a review of many of these accusations at Mr. Bernhardt’s request and determined that [he] is in complete compliance with his ethics agreement and all applicable laws,” Faith Vander Voort, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement sent by email.

Vander Voort included a list of actions Bernhardt took as acting secretary before his Senate confirmation, such as elevating the ethics office as a division that reports to the solicitor, hiring more full-time ethics professionals and giving them the power to raise concerns “more quickly and more directly.”

But as a deputy to former secretary Ryan Zinke, who departed office in December under a cloud of internal investigations, Bernhardt played a pivotal role in policy changes that stood to benefit his former clients.

Months after he was confirmed as a deputy in 2017, Bernhardt guided decisions to roll back endangered species protections enforced by the Fish and Wildlife Service, open massive acreage of public lands to more gas drilling, and weaken safety rules for ocean oil production platforms.

A year later, Interior reinterpreted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in a way that took that teeth out of enforcement. The department issued guidance to wildlife police who enforce the law that an individual or group cannot be held liable for killing birds under many circumstances.

As an example, it said, “all that is relevant is that the landowner undertook an action that did not have killing of barn owls as its purpose.” But farmers reckoning with barn owls pales in comparison to operations with oil pits that kill multitudes of birds. In addition, Interior decided to no longer bill offshore oil and gas operations for leaks that kill birds under the act.

Lawmakers in the House also expressed concern about Bernhardt’s transparency in documenting his daily meetings with staffers and people outside the department.

Bernhardt has so many potential conflicts of interest from his time as a lobbyist that he carries a card to remind himself what parties to avoid to stay in compliance with ethics rules.

Yet his staff adopted a practice of preparing “a daily card” with Bernhardt’s detailed schedule on a Google document in a way that withheld information from the public. A detailed accounting of his meetings as acting secretary was prepared the evening prior to the following workday. But that document was erased each day when it was overwritten to reflect his appointments for the following day.

The practice is a significant departure from that of his predecessors, who kept more-detailed calendars that identified those with whom they were meeting and when, and made the information available to the public on the agency’s website.

Reps. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) demanded more transparency from Bernhardt.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

Yeah, no surprise.  Blatant scumbaggery, because the entire administration indulges in blatant scumbaggery and they can get away with it.  

"Why did you leave those meetings off the official calendar?"

"The official calendar?"

"Yeah, the official record of who the Secretary meets with." 

"Oh, THAT calendar. Um...we just include a record of other government officials that he meets with.  That's why it's called 'official', right? We don't put anything on the calendar when he informally meets with heads of businesses regulated by the agency because it's not, by definition, you know, like, um, 'official' business."