REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 PRESIDENT TRUMP NEARLY RUINED THE FUNCTION OF THE INSPECTORS GENERAL

 

…Jeff Bezos of Amazon lost out on a big contract award, because President Trump disliked “The Washington Post” owned by Bezos

 

The I.G.’s are the nation’s watchdogs, that Trump tried to replace with Trump loyalists

 

Almost as soon as she opened a politically charged investigation in 2019 into whether the Trump White House blocked hurricane relief to a devastated Puerto Rico, the internal watchdog at the Department of Housing and Urban Development ran into obstacles.

HUD demanded that their attorneys sit in on witness interviews, a tactic inspectors general said was unusual and could shape witness testimony. White House officials told top agency appointees to withhold their communications.  This was all shown by the documents and interviews. However, due to Trump’s meddling, other records took months to obtain.

Months after Donald Trump’s election loss, the Inspector General, Rae Oliver Davis, still hasn’t announced whether her investigators found that Trump inappropriately held up federal disaster aid from the island still reeling from a brutal hurricane.

This is far from the only politically sensitive work by these government watchdogs.  These laws are mandated by Congress to monitor federal agencies for waste, fraud and misconduct.  These issues faced roadblocks or otherwise were dragged out during the Trump era.

• Across the government, at least nine key oversight investigations were impeded by clashes with the Trump White House or his political appointees.  This is according to people familiar with inspector general offices and public documents show.

• Long-anticipated reports were released only last month on two senior Trump officials. One found evidence that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao may have misused her position by repeatedly deploying her staff on Chao’s personal business. A second report concluded that former White House physician Ronny Jackson bullied his staff and drank heavily while on the job.

This timing meant their damaging disclosures would only emerged after the former president left office and Jackson, a former Navy rear admiral, had been elected to Congress from Texas.

Tensions between federal watchdogs and the administration they monitor are not uncommon. But 11 inspectors general or their senior aides who served under Trump, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal government deliberations.  They said Trump’s hostility to oversight reached unprecedented levels during his time in office.

The result, they said, was that government hid wrongdoing from the public, and important reforms to improve government efficiency were ignored. With Trump now out of office, advocates for government accountability predict other damaging revelations would only now begin to emerge.

1. “IGs under Trump faced an angry, account-settling president who had no compunction about removing those who threatened to reveal bad things about him,” said Gordon Heddell, a former Inspector General at the Defense and Labor departments who served under both, Republican and Democratic presidents. 

However, the I.G. Rae Davis has declined to discuss her review of housing aid to Puerto Rico.

2. Other overdue reports include an inquiry by the Commerce Department’s inspector general into the Trump administration’s controversial decision to add a question to the U.S. Census about citizenship.

3. Two long-running ethics probes of Ryan Zinke, Trump’s first Interior Secretary, remain in limbo more than two years after the president forced him out. The Pentagon watchdog has not released the results of a two-year audit of a $400 million contract to build the border wall that was awarded, at Trump’s urging, to a politically connected North Dakota construction company.

4. And the General Services Administration inspector general has blamed slow-walking by agency leaders for a delayed review of how federal offices handled the coronavirus last year.

Administration lawyers used various maneuvers to hinder oversight.  This is according to documents, and inspectors general and attorneys representing federal agencies.

Lawyers invoked the power of the president and top agency officials to withhold their confidential communications. They insisted on a seat at the witness table, or blocked employee interviews altogether.  Documents were often released at the pace of dripping faucets, or not at all.

“There was a blatant attempt by the Trump White House to interfere with the work of IGs that we had not seen before,” said Nick Schwellenbach, an expert on the inspector general system at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan advocate for government reform.

Federal watchdogs oversee roughly 14,000 auditors and investigators across government, with a broad mandate that ranges from routine audits of operations and spending to probes of possible criminal activity.

Thirty-eight of the 75 inspectors general who monitor the government’s largest agencies are by law appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress. President Biden has not yet made any nominations for any of the 13 of the jobs that are vacant and are being filled in an “acting” capacity.

The offices the watchdogs lead, created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, have traditionally enjoyed political independence and wide powers to subpoena documents and interview employees to root out government wrongdoing. Inspectors general have no set term and many watchdogs serve for years, through multiple administrations.

The work of these internal monitors has led to criminal prosecutions, forced the ouster of corrupt officials, and identifies millions of dollars a year in wasteful spending.

But Trump chafed under the 40-year-old oversight system, particularly after several of his Cabinet secretaries and top aides came under investigation.  Last year Trump replaced five career watchdogs over two months, replaced with political appointees, starting with the intelligence community watchdog who had informed Congress of the whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.  Trump also forced out the long-serving watchdogs at the State and Defense departments.

5. Trump’s agency heads then followed Trump’s lead.  In a previously unreported incident, soon after he became secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2018, Robert Wilkie repeatedly implored the Trump White House to dismiss Michael Missal, his agency’s inspector general.

Wilkie claimed that the aggressive oversight was harming veterans who would be intimidated from coming forward with information about the agency’s shortcomings.

In a text message, Wilkie wrote that “the picture that the IG’s office consistently painted of VA was not the reality of the Trump VA but an effort to ignore our reforms by saddling us with responsibility for the shortcomings of the previous Administration.”  But it appears, the oversight was correct that there were a lot of shortcomings that were the agency’s fault.

6. Then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he requested that Trump fire his department’s veteran inspector general, Steve Linick, who was then ousted last year.  At the time, Linick’s office was investigating several allegations related to Pompeo, including whether he had used staff to perform personal tasks. Pompeo has said he was unaware of the probe and the firing was not retaliatory.

Linick’s ouster stunned advocates of independence for inspectors general, Heddell said. “It was devastating to the IG community.”

The State’s office is now on its third acting director in 10 months and, according to State Department records, at least a dozen senior positions are vacant or now filled by “acting officials”. The office is still conducting a number of investigations initiated while Trump was in office, spokesman Ryan Holden said.

Democrats in Congress have said that key oversight was ignored or squelched by Trump. Three Democrats last week introduced legislation to expand the power of inspectors general, and they have discussed new protections to shield the watchdogs from being fired by the president.

They also are been urging President Biden to rapidly fill vacancies in the inspector general ranks, reversing a trend of leaving positions open that dates to Barack Obama’s presidency.

“It is no surprise that several critically important reports about the behavior and decisions of multiple officials are only now becoming public,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in an email, lamenting that many Trump officials “escaped accountability while in office.”

Across Trump’s government, clashes delayed other oversight work.

At the Commerce Department, an inquiry into why the agency added a politically charged question on citizenship status to the U.S. Census was held up for months by disputes over whether senior officials could disclose information about their White House contacts in interviews, people familiar with the process said. Top Trump appointees ultimately were not interviewed.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration could not include the question on the once-a-decade population survey. The inspector general’s conclusions about the issue have still not been released.

“Although there is tension inherent in the oversight relationship, the efforts to include agency counsel in OIG interviews represents an improper and unwarranted intrusion into OIG operations and results in a chilling effect,” Inspector General Peggy Gustafson said in an email.

Similar disputes resulted in the long-delayed release in July of another politically damaging report from the Commerce watchdog.  This one concluded that political pressure from the White House shaped a 2019 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration statement that supported false claims from President Trump about the path of a hurricane. The NOAA statement backed President Trump’s erroneous claims that Hurricane Dorian would probably severely impact Alabama, the incident now known as “Sharpiegate.”

In that case, Gustafson publicly rebuked the agency for declaring “amorphous and generalized privileges” that prevented the document’s dissemination.  Ultimately, her office ignored the agency’s objections and issued the report without redactions.

Another sensitive report into Secretary Wilbur Ross’s finances, took 37 months to complete and was released in December, only weeks before Trump left office. It found that Ross made numerous inaccurate statements to federal officials about his assets and stock distributions before taking office but that they were not intentional.

Ross told Forbes that he was committed to the “highest standard of ethics” and the report had proved he did not violate conflict-of-interest statutes.

Gustafson said in an email that the Ross investigation had been “incredibly complex and time-consuming.” Even though the final report was published just as Ross left office, she said it should help educate the public and Congress about “weaknesses in the current system” and act as a reference to future officeholders “interested in serving with integrity.”

Two inquiries into the conduct of another former Cabinet member, Zinke, are stalled because of the involvement of the Justice Department. Prosecutors convened a grand jury in February 2019 to examine whether Zinke made false statements to investigators who were looking into his decision not to grant a petition to two Indian tribes hoping to operate a casino.

Later that year, people familiar with the matter have said that Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, a Trump appointee, deferred a recommendation from line prosecutors to move forward with charges, finding that prosecutors needed to gather more evidence. The criminal matter remains formally open, however, preventing Interior Inspector General Mark Greenblatt from releasing his report.

At the Pentagon, the inspector general’s office took the unusual step of complaining to Congress in its semiannual report last year that the department’s process for deciding whether to make communications with the White House confidential was slow and had prevented the office from concluding projects “in a timely manner.”

The complaint to Congress revealed that a contracting investigation was stymied after the White House refused to release emails with more than a dozen key Defense officials. Two people familiar with the matter said the dispute related to the audit of the border wall contract, which was launched in December 2019 at the request of Congress.

7. Pentagon investigators complained in another report published last April, that the White House had withheld communications that impeded their ability to definitively determine whether administration officials played a role in awarding a massive $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft.

The contract had been expected to go to Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post and was a frequent target of Trump’s ire.

Defense Department investigators also were forced to suspend their field work on Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician, for almost a year to address White House efforts to withhold confidential communications, according to the report issued earlier this month.

The report showed the administration also sought to place a White House lawyer at interviews of personnel who worked with Dr. Jackson. That case took three years to complete.  Dr. Jackson, who was elected to Congress in November with Trump’s backing, denied allegations that he mistreated staff or drank on the job.

An investigation exploring former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s work for foreign interests, long delayed by the criminal case against him, was completed and finally forwarded to Army leadership seven days after Trump left office.

8. At Transportation, Trump officials helped orchestrate an extraordinary behind-the-scenes push to remake the leadership of the Inspector General’s office, even as it pursued the particularly sensitive investigation of Chao.

When the longtime inspector general, Calvin Scovel, announced his retirement in January 2020, the probe of potential ethical violations by Chao, the powerful Cabinet secretary married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), was already underway.

For a time, administration officials pursued a highly unusual proposal to have a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Nashville serve simultaneously as the Inspector General at Transportation. Ultimately, when other federal officials concerned about the independence of inspectors general objected, the White House tabled the plan and tapped the head of the agency’s pipeline oversight agency instead.

Released this month, the report found evidence of potential ethical violations by Chao, concluding she asked government employees to perform personal tasks, some of which were meant to aid her father, James Chao.

The deputy Inspector General in December referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office and the Justice Department for prosecution, though they both declined, each within 24 hours, to open an investigation.

At HUD, officials said the long awaited report on aid to Puerto Rico should be completed soon.

Stung by criticism from local politicians, Trump repeatedly said he did not want to send more aid to the island after it was ravaged by Hurricane Maria in September 2017. He questioned the storm’s death toll and denigrated the territory as “one of the most corrupt places on Earth.”

Copyright G. Ater 2021