Trump fired State Department Inspector General, Steve Linick, for investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s misuse of State Department employees.
Linick had been on the job since 2013 and had recently issued reports criticizing some Trump appointees of retaliating against career public servants. Democrats expressed outrage at his firing. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., accused President Trump of taking the action to protect Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo,” Engel said. “Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”
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A Democratic aide on Capitol Hill elaborated that “the OIG was looking into the Secretary’s misuse of a political appointee at the Department to perform personal tasks for himself and Mrs. Pompeo.”
Pompeo and his wife are accused of using government employees as their personal servants, which is against the law.
The broader picture is that Donald Trump is trying to remove every Inspector General because he wants to eliminate all oversight of his administration. Trump and his cronies want to be free to break the law with no on investigating them from within the Executive Branch.
In the middle of a pandemic and an economic collapse, Trump is consumed with carrying out his revenge campaign against oversight of his administration.
Trump and Pompeo’s actions are illegal, and the crime wave might not end until January 2021.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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