It's a Terrible Time To Have a Terrible Government

It's out this morning that SecState Mike Pompeo asked Trump to fire his department's inspector general, career official Steve Linick, and Trump was only too willing to do so. Linick was investigating Pompeo's frequent use of department resources for his personal comfort, like his frequent trips back to Kansas using State Department funds and aircraft, perhaps to explore a run for the US Senate, and like taking his wife with him on many official trips abroad, and like using diplomatic security personnel for personal errands. None of that appears to have caused the inspector general to open the investigation that got Pompeo's panties in a wad.

But this did: "...Mr. Linick had been looking into whether Mr. Pompeo improperly used a political appointee at the State Department to perform personal tasks for him and his wife." That's what we know. The details have yet to come out, which they will, and then maybe it'll be Mike Pompeo's turn to jump.

What am I saying! There is no accountability in this government, and no one takes personal responsibility. It's a corrupt government with corrupt people led by an evil, self-gratifying liar-in-chief.

The Body Count -- Steve Linick

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Being Pushed Off Luxury Liner Trump

President Donald Trump announced late yesterday that he was firing State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. The executive branch is required to notify Congress 30 days ahead of time if it intends to remove an inspector general.

Congressional insiders say that Linick had opened an investigation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said "Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation."

A Democratic congressional aide said Linick had launched an investigation into Pompeo’s alleged misuse of a political appointee to perform personal tasks for him and Mrs. Pompeo. The State Department did not respond to an inquiry about the allegation.

Linick played a minor role in the House of Representatives' impeachment proceedings against Trump, ferrying a trove of documents to lawmakers that had been provided to the State Department by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer.

A State Department spokesperson said that Amb. Stephen Akard, a former career Foreign Service officer and "an ally of Vice President Pence," will now lead the Office of the Inspector General at the State Department in an acting capacity.

One of the Good Guys -- Marie Yovanovitch

Photo Mikhail Palinchak--AP

A career State Department diplomat with 30+ years of experience under six different presidents. She was ambassador to Ukraine whose term was supposed to end this past August, but she was asked in May by Trump's State Department to extend her ambassadorship through August of 2020. That request was suddenly reversed less than two months later in July when Trump recalled her and exiled her to a desk in the Department of State.

Why?

Trump was about to call new Ukrainian President Zelensky about a little "favor" he wanted, and Yovanovitch might get in the way.

She had become inconvenient to the scheme that Trump and Guiliani had hatched to make dirt in Ukraine. Her personal honesty and integrity apparently did not mesh well with the business and political ambitions of not only Trump and Guiliani but of other guys like these two below, Parnas and Fruman, two Guiliani henchmen whose previous prospecting in Ukraine did not meet with Yovanovitch's approbation. (Why Parnas and Fruman had it in for her is outlined here. It was all about gas.)

“Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” she wrote in a statement she prepared for the impeachment joint committees.

She chose to testify despite Mike Pompeo's directive, at the direction of the president, that no State Department officials should cooperate with the impeachment inquiry because the Congressional Democrats wisely subpoenaed her early yesterday morning. Yovanovitch's welfare had already been implicitly threatened by Trump himself in his famous phone call with Zelensky: “She’s going to go through some things.” How chilling is that? Yet Yovanovitch is a model for bravery at a time when hundreds of otherwise powerful men have become cowards.

The Body Count -- Michael McKinley

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Off Luxury Liner Trump

Thanks to Karen DeYoung:

Michael McKinley, a career diplomat and senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has resigned his position amid rising dissatisfaction and plummeting morale inside the State Department over what is seen as Pompeo’s failure to support personnel ensnared in the Ukraine controversy.

A senior officer who has held a range of diplomatic posts, including ambassador to Afghanistan, Colombia and Peru, McKinley was serving as ambassador to Brazil last year when Pompeo recruited him as a policy adviser and a conduit between his office and the career service....

Dead Man Walking

I'm no defender of SecState Rex Tillerson. The poor rich sap signed on to the Ship of Fools and will walk the plank soon as one of the shortest serving SecStates in history. I can almost feel his pain. But he did call Trump "a fucking moron" in front of people, so he has my respect as a man who both recognizes reality and experiences regret.

It's the dude who everyone says will replace Tillerson at State that we need to watch, Mike Pompeo, the Kansas congressman who accepted Trump's appointment to head the CIA and who looks very much like the ass-kisser who has Trump's number. Pompeo has paved his path upward by delivering the CIA's "daily briefing" personally to the president, and Trump has evidently come to love the news --  "doings out at Langley" -- so long as its laced with indulgence and flattery. Pompeo has demonstrated total slavish loyalty to Trump.

1. Pompeo obeys Trump's whims. Trump's consuming need to deflect on the subject of Russian money/influence became an everyday gripe session with Pompeo. Trump latched onto an alternate theory of how the hacking/leaking/publication of DNC stolen emails could have happened -- a conspiracy theory promoted by a former National Security Agency official. It wasn't the Russians! It was someone on the inside of the DNC who did it. The entire intelligence apparatus of the US, including not just CIA analysts but analysts from other spy agencies, had conclusively agreed that the hack was Russian. But Pompeo was more than ready to indulge Trump's deflection. So under orders,

Pompeo, with Trump.
Photo AP/Andrew Harnik

Pompeo met with the DNC inside job theorist and apparently swapped slobbers.

2.  Pompeo publicly proclaimed in October and in front of cameras that “the intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election.” Pompeo neglected to say that the intelligence community never said any such thing.  The intelligence assessment had found, rather, that the Russian operation was unprecedented in its scale, and it concluded that Moscow’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and help elect Donald Trump. It took no position whatsoever on whether the infiltration actually influenced voting numbers in the election. (As Russian manipulation of Facebook users continues to unfold, the direct impact of Russian meddling on voting statistics seems more certain every day.)

3. Again on orders from Trump (obviously), Pompeo was put on the phone to reporters from the WashingtonPost and The Wall Street Journal to try to knock down a story out that very day in the New York Times, headlined "Trump Aides Had Contact With Russian Intelligence: U.S. Officials Tell of a Flurry of Phone Calls Intercepted Before the Election." Pompeo reportedly told the reporters that the story wasn't true but refused to offer any substantiating detail of how it was untrue.

4. In August, Greg Miller reported, "Mike Pompeo has taken a special interest in an agency unit that is closely tied to the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, requiring the Counterintelligence Mission Center to report directly to him." Hmmm. Good place to be -- directly in charge of agents doing work you don't want them to do successfully. But, also, are you freaking kidding me?

All Eyes on Kansas Tonight

Maybe Republican Ron Estes, Kansas state treasurer, will win the special election today in the 4th Congressional District to replace Mike Pompeo (who's become Trump's CIA director), and maybe not.

The Republican National Committee is suddenly pumping all kinds of money into southern Kansas to try to save Estes. His Democratic opponent, James Thompson, is just a whisker behind him in some polls. In other polls, he's a whisker ahead.

So Vice President Mike Pence cut a robocall for Estes. So did Trump, signaling panic: “Ron Estes needs your vote and needs it badly.” Sen. Ted Cruz did a fly-in. The Kansas 4th District is home to Koch Industries, so you would think....

According to David Weigel, "Estes rarely mentions Trump," and that alone tells us a great deal about Republican panic in this year of His Orangeness. Every special election this year for Republican Congressional seats -- and there are about to be four of those, starting with the Kansas 4th District -- is going to be a virtual referendum on Trump.

Ron Estes

Among other things hurting Estes, despite his rugged good looks, is the deeply unpopular Republican Governor Sam Brownback, polling below 25%. That's gotta hurt Republican turn-out.

Even if Thompson loses, the near-death experience for Estes might provide a sobering prophecy for Republicans who allowed Trumpism to take them over.