#House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

[reading-writing-revolution]

#AmericanCollapse

April 22, 2020 (Wednesday)

I’m going to start tonight with an important story that slipped under the radar on a day when one outrageous performance after another grabbed headlines.

On its surface, the story doesn’t seem terribly important. A number of congressional committees have asked the Office of Personnel Management for updates on how the OPM is handling working conditions for federal employees during the coronavirus crisis. OPM is declining to answer the requests. “It has always been difficult to get information from this administration, but the refusal to provide Congress with a basic briefing during a pandemic is especially egregious,” said a Democratic Senate aide to Politico reporter Daniel Lippman. “We’ve never been denied a briefing like this before.”

But the story is actually very significant. The OPM oversees the 2 million workers in the federal government. In mid-February, after Republican Senators acquitted him in his impeachment trial, Trump set out to purge the federal workforce of civil servants, whom he sees as “snakes,” and replace them with political appointees loyal to him.

To head the Presidential Personnel Office, which recruits candidates for the executive branch, Trump brought in John McEntee, who had been fired from a former position in the White House by former chief of staff John Kelly over a security clearance. On March 17, McEntee forced the director of the Office of Personnel Management, Dale Cabaniss, who had significant personnel experience, to resign. Michael Rigas, formerly of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, took her place. (Phew. I know… but this is going somewhere important.)

The change from Cabaniss to Rigas at the head of OPM transpired just as the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the nation hard.

Rigas has said he believes the 1883 Pendleton Act is unconstitutional. Congress passed the Pendleton Act, also known as the Civil Service Act, after a mentally-ill office seeker shot President James Garfield in 1881. Until then, government positions had been handed out to political loyalists, regardless of their capacity to do the job, but the assassination created a public outcry. Charles Guiteau shot Garfield with the expectation that, once elevated to the presidency, Garfield’s vice president would give Guiteau the position his delusions made him think he deserved. The assassination built momentum behind the idea that government should be non-partisan, and that positions should be filled by people actually equipped to do the job. This sentiment has ruled the nation ever since.

Non-partisan civil service has proved a blessing to the nation in two ways. First of all, over time, as more and more positions came under the act, the government got much more efficient. Second, a non-partisan corps of officials has kept the nation stable since they give their loyalty to the country’s government, rather than to any particular president. Administrations come and go, but government bureaucrats keep the nation on an even keel.

Now, Rigas, the man at the head of the federal government’s 2 million workers, wants to get rid of that system and make all employees of the executive branch political appointees, loyal not to the country but to Trump. Rigas is working with McEntee at the PPO. As of a few weeks ago, agencies now have to submit job openings to the PPO to see if they have anyone they want in the position before they can submit their own choice for it. PPO is filling positions with keen regard for their loyalty: recently it has hired four college seniors to become administration officials.

OPM is the office that is refusing to tell Congress what it’s up to.

Today offered some guesses. Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, claimed that he was let go from his job for crossing Trump. BARDA is charged with protecting us from pandemic influenza and emerging infectious diseases (EID) and Bright is a specialist in those areas. He headed the federal agency developing a coronavirus vaccine, and refused to use the agency’s significant budget to promote hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug Trump has been pushing as a treatment for the coronavirus. Bright was transferred to a less central position at the National Institutes of Health, but has refused to resign his position at BARDA.

Bright and his lawyers say his removal is retaliation and that he will be filing a whistleblower complaint. “I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,” he said in a statement. “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”

Bright’s defense of science over politics got a boost with Tuesday’s news that hydroxychloroquine is not only ineffective against Covid-19, but possibly worsens the outcome for those who take it. A study of 368 patients at Veterans Affairs showed that those given the drug were more likely to die than those who weren’t. After much hyping of the drug, Laura Ingraham and other Fox News Channel personalities have suddenly gone quiet on it. Trump, who hailed the drug as a “game-changer” but who has stopped talking about it lately, said he did not know of the bad report, “but we’ll be looking at it.”

Demanding loyalty to Trump is about cementing the power of the president, and service to that power means he will sacrifice his loyalists whenever necessary to protect himself. People are noting that Trump tossed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp under the bus today over Kemp's reopening of certain Georgia businesses against the advice of public health officials. After a week of calling for states to reopen, Trump told reporters that he “disagree[s] strongly” with Kemp’s decision to start that process.

But Kemp and Trump have clashed before—Trump wanted Kemp to appoint key Trump supporter Doug Collins to the Senate seat that Kemp gave to Kelly Loeffler (now in trouble for insider trading)—so it’s not a huge surprise that Trump hung Kemp out to dry.

Today’s more significant underbussing was that of Alex Azar, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who was skewered in a piece in the Wall Street Journal for what appears to have been extraordinarily inept handling of the coronavirus crisis. My guess is that he is shortly going to be out of a job, taking the blame for the White House’s poor response to the pandemic.

Considering that Trump’s OPM wants to remove qualified civil servants from the government in favor of political cronies, the piece of the Azar story that has attracted the most outrage is ironic. Azar tapped a key aide with little experience or education in public health, management, or medicine to head up the response of Health and Human Services to the coronavirus crisis.

Before going to work for Azar, the aide, Brian Harrison, was a dog breeder who specialized in labradoodles.

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also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

If Trump wins, everyone else loses.

[bountyofbeads]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2019/10/the-full-case-for-trump-impeachment.html?__twitter_impression=true

The (Full) Case for Impeachment

A menu of high crimes and misdemeanors.

By Jonathan Chait | Published October 14, 2019 | New York Magazine | Posted October 15, 2019 |

The crimes for which impeachment is the prescribed punishment are notoriously undefined. And that’s for a reason: Presidential powers are vast, and it’s impossible to design laws to cover every possible abuse of the office’s authority. House Democrats have calculated that an impeachment focused narrowly on the Ukraine scandal will make the strongest legal case against President Trump. But that’s not Trump’s only impeachable offense. A full accounting would include a wide array of dangerous and authoritarian acts — 82, to be precise. His violations fall into seven broad categories of potentially impeachable misconduct that should be weighed, if not by the House, then at least by history.

I. Abusing Power for Political Gain

Explanation: The single most dangerous threat to any democratic system is that the ruling party will use its governing powers to entrench itself illegitimately.

Evidence: (1) The Ukraine scandal is fundamentally about the president abusing his authority by wielding his power over foreign policy as a cudgel against his domestic opponents. The president is both implicitly and explicitly trading the U.S. government’s favor for investigations intended to create adverse publicity for Americans whom Trump wishes to discredit.  (2) During his campaign, he threatened to impose policies harmful to Amazon in retribution for critical coverage in the Washington Post. (“If I become president, oh do they have problems.”) He has since pushed the postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, and the Defense Department held up a $10 billion contract with Amazon, almost certainly at his behest. (3) He has ordered his officials to block the AT&T–Time Warner merger as punishment for CNN’s coverage of him. (4) He encouraged the NFL to blacklist Colin Kaepernick.

II. Mishandling Classified Information

Explanation: As he does with many other laws, the president enjoys broad immunity from regulations on the proper handling of classified information, allowing him to take action that would result in felony convictions for other federal employees. President Trump’s mishandling of classified information is not merely careless but a danger to national security.

Evidence: (5) Trump has habitually communicated on a smartphone highly vulnerable to foreign espionage. (6–30)  He has reversed 25 security-clearance denials (including for his son-in-law, who has conducted potentially compromising business with foreign interests). (31) He has turned Mar-a-Lago into an unsecured second White House and even once handled news of North Korea’s missile launch in public view. (32) He gave Russian officials sensitive Israeli intelligence that blew “the most valuable source of information on external plotting by [the] Islamic State,” the Wall Street Journal reported. (33) He tweeted a high-resolution satellite image of an Iranian launch site for the sake of boasting.

III. Undermining Duly Enacted Federal Law

Explanation: President Trump has abused his authority either by distorting the intent of laws passed by Congress or by flouting them. He has directly ordered subordinates to violate the law and has promised pardons in advance, enabling him and his staff to operate with impunity. In these actions, he has undermined Congress’s constitutional authority to make laws.

Evidence: (34) Having failed to secure funding authority for a border wall, President Trump unilaterally ordered funds to be moved from other budget accounts. (35) He has undermined regulations on health insurance under the Affordable Care Act preventing insurers from charging higher rates to customers with more expensive risk profiles. (36) He has abused emergency powers to impose tariffs, intended to protect the supply chain in case of war, to seize from Congress its authority to negotiate international trade agreements. (37–38) He has ordered border agents to illegally block asylum seekers from entering the country and has ordered other aides to violate eminent-domain laws and contracting procedures in building the border wall, (39–40) both times promising immunity from lawbreaking through presidential pardons.

IV. Obstruction of Congress

Explanation: The executive branch and Congress are co-equal, each intended to guard against usurpation of authority by the other. Trump has refused to acknowledge any legitimate oversight function of Congress, insisting that because Congress has political motivations, it is disqualified from it. His actions and rationale strike at the Constitution’s design of using the political ambitions of the elected branches to check one another.

Evidence: (41) Trump has refused to abide by a congressional demand to release his tax returns, despite an unambiguous law granting the House this authority. His lawyers have flouted the law on the spurious grounds that subpoenas for his tax returns “were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage.” Trump’s lawyers have argued that Congress cannot investigate potentially illegal behavior by the president because the authority to do so belongs to prosecutors. In other litigation, those lawyers have argued that prosecutors cannot investigate the president. These contradictory positions support an underlying stance that no authority can investigate his misconduct. (42) He has defended his refusal to accept oversight on the grounds that members of Congress “aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” (43) The president has also declared that impeachment is illegal and should be stopped in the courts (though, unlike with his other obstructive acts, he has not yet taken any legal action toward this end).

V. Obstruction of Justice

Explanation: By virtue of his control over the federal government’s investigative apparatus, the president (along with the attorney general) is uniquely well positioned to cover up his own misconduct. Impeachment is the sole available remedy for a president who uses his powers of office to hold himself immune from legal accountability. In particular, the pardon power gives the president almost unlimited authority to obstruct investigations by providing him with a means to induce the silence of co-conspirators.

Evidence: (44–53) The Mueller report contains ten instances of President Trump engaging in obstructive acts. While none of those succeeded in stopping the probe, Trump dangled pardons and induced his co-conspirators to lie or withhold evidence from investigators. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress that Trump had directed him to lie to it about his negotiations with the Russian government during the campaign to secure a lucrative building contract in Moscow. And when Cohen stated his willingness to lie, Robert Costello, an attorney who had worked with Rudy Giuliani, emailed Cohen assuring him he could “sleep well tonight” because he had “friends in high places.” Trump has publicly praised witnesses in the Russia investigation for refusing to cooperate, and he sent a private message to former national-security adviser Michael Flynn urging him to “stay strong.” He has reinforced this signal by repeatedly denouncing witnesses who cooperate with investigators as “flippers.” (54–61) He has exercised his pardon power for a series of Republican loyalists, sending a message that at least some of his co-conspirators have received. The president’s pardon of conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza “has to be a signal to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,” Roger Stone told the Washington Post. “The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the president has even more awesome powers.”

VI. Profiting From Office

Explanation: Federal employees must follow strict rules to prevent them from being influenced by any financial conflict. Conflict-of-interest rules are less clear for a sitting president because all presidential misconduct will be resolved by either reelection or impeachment. If Trump held any position in the federal government below the presidency, he would have been fired for his obvious conflicts. His violations are so gross and blatant they merit impeachment.

Evidence: (62) He has maintained a private business while holding office, (63) made decisions that influence that business, (64) and accepted payments from parties both domestic and foreign who have an interest in his policies. (65) He has openly signaled that these parties can gain his favor by doing so. (66) He has refused even to disclose his interests, which would at least make public which parties are paying him.

VII. Fomenting Violence

Explanation: One of the unspoken roles of the president is to serve as a symbolic head of state. Presidents have very wide latitude for their political rhetoric, but Trump has violated its bounds, exceeding in his viciousness the rhetoric of Andrew Johnson (who was impeached in part for the same offense).

Evidence: (67) Trump called for locking up his 2016 opponent after the election. (68–71) He has clamored for the deportation of four women of color who are congressional representatives of the opposite party. (72) He has described a wide array of domestic political opponents as treasonous, including the news media. (73–80) On at least eight occasions, he has encouraged his supporters — including members of the armed forces — to attack his political opponents. (“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”) (81) He has threatened journalists with violence if they fail to produce positive coverage. (“If the media would write correctly and write accurately and write fairly, you’d have a lot less violence in the country.”) (82) There have been 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the defendant invoked Trump’s name in connection with violence; 29 of these cited him as the inspiration for an attack.

[wargiry584]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[albertfrost65720bt-blog]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[wassible196258]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/politics/kushner-security-clearance-democrats.html

[lloydfoster48212o]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[harriesatgarth]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[derekbowman06921f]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[hughrosales24825cg]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[kathleesanmoore]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[andrewjennyve]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[yvonnsaebrown]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2ILIWgY

[wargiry584]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2VBL6RZ

[albertfrost65720bt-blog]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2VBL6RZ

[wassible196258]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/politics/democrats-clearances-kushner-white-house.html

[lloydfoster48212o]

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances After the revelation that President Trump had ordered that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a top-secret clearance, two committees are now seeking documents and interviews with officials. https://ift.tt/2VBL6RZ