The Trump administration refuses to respect boundaries. It’s almost as if the president believes that just because Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, comes over and does the Trump’s family laundry that everyone is available to do house chores.
Steve Linick, “the quasi-independent watchdog whose job it was to expose waste and malfeasance within the agency,” was reportedly getting to the bottom of whether or not “a staffer for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was performing domestic errands and chores such as handling dry cleaning, walking the family dog and making restaurant reservations” when he was abruptly let go Friday night, the Washington Post reports.
The president was reportedly pissed to learn that an independent watchdog was not a lapdog, aka South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and reminded everyone that he has the authority to fire folks who work at his command.
The White House claims that Trump’s late-night firing came at the request of Pompeo, “a decision that has prompted criticisms from Democrats and some Republicans as a threat to good governance and oversight,” the Post reports.
The Post also noted that “Inspector generals serve as internal government watchdogs conducting oversight of federal agencies. They are political appointees, but their independence is supposed to be protected. Linick’s firing amounted to the fourth such ouster in recent weeks.”
But firing people has always been Trump’s thing. Never forget that he made a whole career uttering the phrase “You’re fired” during his only successful stint in his life as a reality television show villain. Since then, no one has been able to convince the president of the United States, whose Secret Service code name is “Booger,” to stop firing people. Booger has reportedly fired seven peonies, two toilets and this kid who was working for free.
Trump replaced Linick with some asshat who is a trusted ally of Vice President Pence-bot and made him take a blood oath with ketchup because of the coronavirus.
The Washington Post notes that Trump has a habit of firing inspector generals on Fridays as he usually waits until the day is done and he’s gotten his last bit of work out of them before canning them right around the time that reporters are wrapping up their work week. Out of the five IGs that he’s fired since taking office, four have been fired on Fridays.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) received a letter from Trump, which he surely didn’t write, on Friday explaining the sudden urgency to fire the IG who was looking into Pompeo’s violations of church and “fuck you mean walk your fat ass dog?”
“It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General,” the letter that Trump didn’t write but added his name to read. “That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General.”
Of course, Democrats had something to say about this bullshit.
“We unalterably oppose the politically motivated firing of inspectors general and the President’s gutting of these critical positions,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Democrat, Robert Menendez (N.J.), who’ve launched a joint investigation into Linick’s firing, wrote Saturday.
Engel and Menendez also added in their sternly worded email letter to the White House that they wanted all records related to Linick’s firing to be preserved and handed over to their committees, the Post notes.
Trump told Carson once he was done washing the dishes to grab a stack of his presidential doodles, staple them together and write “records” across the top and send them over to Engel and Menendez before he retires to the slave quarters.