WASHINGTON, May 16, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Donald Trump’s move to fire a
government watchdog reportedly investigating Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo amounted to a potentially illegal act of retribution, according
to senior Democrats leading an angry backlash Saturday.
Trump notified House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi late
Friday that he planned to dismiss State Department Inspector General
Steve Linick.
It was his third abrupt dismissal of an official tasked with
monitoring governmental wrongdoing since April.
Democrats denounced it as part of what they said was a troubling
pattern of the president undermining the traditionally independent
watchdogs.
Eliot Engel, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he
had learned that Linick had opened an investigation into Pompeo.
“Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this
is an unlawful act of retaliation,” the congressman said in a
statement.
A Democratic congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said Linick was probing complaints that Pompeo misused a political
appointee to perform personal tasks for himself and his wife, Susan
Pompeo.
CNN, citing a senior State Department official, reported that it was
Pompeo himself who had recommended the firing and who hand-picked
Stephen Akard, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, to succeed
Linick.
By law, the administration must give Congress 30 days’ notice of its
plans to formally terminate an inspector general, in theory giving
lawmakers time to study and potentially protest the move.
But previous such firings have gone through unimpeded, and
inspectors general previously dismissed have been replaced by
political allies of the president.
Pompeo, Washington’s top diplomat, has raised eyebrows for
frequently traveling the world on his government plane with his wife,
who has no official role.
CNN reported last year that a whistleblower had complained that the
Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which guards US missions overseas as
well as the secretary of state, had been assigned questionable tasks
for the Pompeos, such as picking up takeout food or tending to the
family dog.
The State Department confirmed Linick’s firing but did not comment
on the reason or on whether Pompeo was under investigation.
A State Department spokesperson also confirmed that the new
inspector general would be Akard, an attorney who served as a foreign
affairs advisor to Pence when the latter was governor of Indiana.
Akard since last year has led the State Department’s Office of
Foreign Missions, which handles relations with diplomats in the United
States.
Pelosi said Linick was “punished for honorably performing his duty
to protect the Constitution and our national security.”
“The president must cease his pattern of reprisal and retaliation
against the public servants who are working to keep Americans safe,
particularly during this time of global emergency,” she said.
– Trusted presence for Trump –
Pompeo is one of Trump’s most trusted aides — and a rare one never
to come publicly into the crosshairs of the mercurial president.
In recent months Pompeo, 56, has moved US foreign policy forcefully
to the right — encouraging a drone strike that killed a top Iranian
general and promoting a theory, discounted by mainstream scientists,
that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese laboratory.
Linick, a longtime prosecutor, was appointed in 2013 by Trump’s
predecessor Barack Obama to oversee the $70 billion juggernaut of US
diplomacy.
He played a small role in Trump’s impeachment saga last year,
handing to Congress documents by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani with
unproven claims about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and
Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump removed as the US ambassador to Ukraine.
Trump repeated the charges to Ukraine’s president and pressed him to
dig up dirt, with his administration freezing military aid to the ally
which is battling Russian-backed separatists.
Since his acquittal by the Senate, Trump has fumed against a “Deep
State” he sees as out to get him.
He has removed or demoted inspectors general for the Pentagon, the
intelligence community and the Department of Health and Human
Services, as well as a senior health official who questioned Trump’s
promotion of unproven drug therapies for COVID-19.
Such actions, critics said, attacked an important underpinning of a
functional democracy.
“Another independent IG fired. Trump wants no oversight from IGs,
reporters, Congress or voters. A threat to our Constitution,” tweeted
Jill Wine-Banks, a lawyer who served as a prosecutor in the Watergate
scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.