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Trump Fired Inspectors General Who Identified $183.5 Billion in Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

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There have and will be a slew of lawsuits in response to Trump’s attack on government. But this lawsuit, from eight of the Inspectors General that Trump fired on January 24, has been much anticipated. [docket]

That’s partly because Congress just strengthened the laws protecting Inspectors Generals, in response to Trump’s firing of some in his first term, as the suit lays out.

63. Congress responded in 2022 by further amending the IG Act. The Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, see supra ¶6, enacted by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress, procedural protections before an IG can be removed or placed on nonduty status, designated that a “first assistant” would automatically replace an IG in the event of a vacancy, and required the President to communicate reasons for not making a formal nomination to fill an IG vacancy after a certain period of time.

64. The 2022 amendments also strengthened the procedural safeguards on removing an IG. Prior to the amendments, the IG Act had required the President to provide 30 days’ notice to both houses of Congress and “reasons for any such removal.” The 2022 amendments require the President to provide 30 days’ notice to both houses of Congress, including appropriate congressional committees, and to “communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons, for any such removal.” 5 U.S.C. §403(b). With the 2022 amendments included, the relevant provisions now reads as follows:

An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including to the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal.

65. These procedural provisions ensure that Congress or members of Congress can, if it or they deem it appropriate, seek to persuade the President not to go forward with a noticed removal. Indeed, the legislative history of the Inspector General Reform Act indicates that Congress added the notice requirement to “allow for an appropriate dialogue with Congress in the event that the planned transfer or removal is viewed as an inappropriate or politically motivated attempt to terminate an effective Inspector General.” See S. Rep. No. 110-262, at 4 (2008)

If Congress has any power to limit how the President fires someone, then this suit will uphold that power (a large team from Wilmer Cutler, led by former Solicitor General Seth Waxman, are representing the plaintiffs).

But it’s also because the plaintiffs in this suit embody everything Trump claims he wants to do with DOGE. Elon Musk claims he’s hunting for waste, fraud, and corruption in government agencies he’s wildly unfamiliar with. These civil servants have been doing this, some of them, for four decades.

Indeed, one thing the suit lists, for each of the plaintiffs, is how much material impact they have had in their role (with one exception, exclusively in the IG position from which they were fired, which the report explains is:

“Monetary impact” describes the estimated financial savings or losses that could result from implementing recommendations made in an IG’s audits, inspections, or evaluations, essentially quantifying the potential cost-benefit of addressing issues like waste, fraud, and abuse in a government agency or program. See CIGIE, Toolkit for Identifying and Reporting Monetary Impact, at 1 (June 18, 2024), https://www.ignet.gov/sites/default/files/files/Toolkit%20for%20Identifying%20and%20Reporting%20Monetary%20Impact.pdf.

Some monetary-impact estimates reported herein also consider monetary benefits associated with IG investigations.

And while there’s some inconsistency in the reporting (for example, Sandra Bruce included stuff from when she was Acting IG during Trump’s first term whereas some of the others left out susbstantial terms in other IG roles, Larry Turner’s number — for Department of Labor — seems quite high, and Mike Ware does not include $30 billion seized or returned pursuant to investigations he oversaw), the Inspectors General describe identifying $183.5 billion in material impact.

As noted in this post, that includes substantial work cleaning up after COVID relief rolled out by Trump, particularly from Mike Ware, work which lead DOGE Treasury Official Thomas Krause relied on to suggest that DOGE could be effective. In Ware testimony to Congress that Krause cited, Ware described up to $200 billion in fraud just in Small Business related relief alone.

Using OIG’s investigative casework, prior OIG reporting, advanced data analytics, and additional review procedures, we estimate SBA disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs and PPP loans. This estimate represents approximately 17 percent of disbursed COVID-19 EIDLs and PPP funds — specifically, more than $136 billion COVID-19 EIDLs and $64 billion in PPP funds. Since SBA did not have an established strong internal control environment for approving and disbursing program funds, there was an insufficient barrier against fraudsters accessing funds that should have been available for eligible business owners adversely affected by the pandemic.

That’s what Trump did by firing Ware and the others: halt proven efforts to do what DOGE is incapable of — and only pretending — to do.

Which is another reason to keep an eye on this lawsuit.

Who Needs Intelligence Sharing?

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On January 27th, an AP story appeared on the news website Military.com with the headline “Intelligence Sharing by the US and Its Allies Has Saved Lives. Trump Could Test Those Ties.” On the surface, it reads like one of those analysis pieces that come out when the White House changes from one party to the next, with the added twist of knowing what the first Trump administration was like.

The Associated Press spoke with 18 current and former senior European and U.S. officials who worked in NATO, defense, diplomacy or intelligence. Many raised questions and concerns about Trump’s past relationship with America’s spies and their ability to share information at a time of heightened terror threats and signs of greater cooperation between U.S. adversaries.

The importance of trust

The U.S. and its allies routinely share top-secret information, be it about potential terror threats, Chinese cyberattacks or Russian troop movements. America’s closest intelligence partners are New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain, and it often shares with other nations or sometimes even adversaries when lives are at stake.

[snip]

Cooperation particularly between the U.S. and the U.K. is “strong and robust enough to withstand some turbulence at the political level,” said Lord Peter Ricketts, former U.K. national security adviser and current chair of the European Affairs Committee of the upper chamber of the British Parliament.

However, any strong intelligence relationship is underpinned by trust, and what if “trust isn’t there?” Ricketts said.

Ricketts’ question is no longer a hypothetical. This is the reality faced by intelligence services who in the past have been friendly with the US intelligence community. The AP put out their story on January 27th, and that seems like years ago. Today this reads like a warning.

The takeover of USAID that has played out this past week is *not* just a battle over who runs offices in DC. The bulk of USAID’s staff work overseas, alongside their local partners. When phone calls from these overseas missions back to DC go unanswered, and when US staffers abroad are told to stand down, all those local partners are going to get very, very nervous, and not just because their paychecks stop. They’re going to talk to others in their government, trying to find out what it going on. At the same time, they will be providing input (either directly or indirectly) to their own country’s intelligence service, as their spooks add it to whatever they are learning from elsewhere. In the US, folks worry about those who are losing their jobs; overseas, these fights will result in people dying, like those who don’t get the clean water, medical care, or disease prevention measures like malaria nets. Those other countries are watching with horror the stories of Musk’s minions breaking into sensitive databases, over the objections of trusted career people, and wonder what of their own information is now in the hands of a privateer, and if the same this is (or will be) going on at the CIA, DIA, and other US intelligence agencies.

I guarantee you that all these other countries are watching the battle over USAID much more carefully than folks in the US.

Or look at the targeting of General Mark Milley, widely respected by his counterparts among our allies and within their intelligence services. OK, Biden pardoned him to protect him, but Trump withdrew his security clearance, and also his personal security detail. On January 29th, newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched a process to investigate Milley, seeking to strip him of at least one star, cut his retirement pay, and punish him further. Given what the US attorney for DC is doing by going after DOJ attorneys for investigating the rather noticeable break-in of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, it’s not hard to imagine that Hegseth’s henchmen will be rather thorough in their work and ruthlessly push aside anyone who gets in their way.

Now imagine you are a member of a foreign intelligence service — perhaps the head, or perhaps a mid-level staffer whose specialty is the US. You see the USAID invasion. You see the public decapitation of the FBI. You see the targeting of career DOJ officials. You see Hegseth paint a target on the back of Milley (and others, like John Bolton and John Brennan). You see all this, much of it in the bright light of public reporting. You hear more from your contacts, who paint more detailed pictures of these purges and fights. You see all this, and you ask yourself two questions, over and over again.

1) Are the things we shared with the US intelligence community in the past safe from being revealed in public, and thus causing us harm?
2) Can we trust the US intelligence community with information we might share with them in the future?

Given what we’ve seen over the last week, the answers to these questions are becoming more and more clear: 1) no and 2) no.

I haven’t talked to those “18 current and former senior European and U.S. officials who worked in NATO, defense, diplomacy or intelligence” to whom the AP spoke. The AP headline was hypothetical – “Trump could test those ties” – but now on February 3rd, it’s real. Trump has been f’ing around with those intelligence service ties, and he’s about to find out what happens.

The short answer is becoming clear, as Trump’s vision of America First becomes America Alone.

 

 

If You Can’t Stand the Hypotheticals, Get Out of the Cabinet

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Pete “Don’t Ask Me Any Hypotheticals” Hegseth, nominee to be Secretary of Defense

First it was Pete Hegseth who said it, followed 24 hours later by Pam Bondi. In the days ahead, I am sure we will hear the same from Tusli Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., Marco Rubio, Kash Patel . . . et cetera, et cetera. et f-ing cetera: “Senator, I am not going to talk about a hypothetical.” Implied in the body language and tone of voice is the unstated addition “. . . and how dare you ask me about mythical future possibilities, rather than focus on the here and now.” Though to be fair, sometimes, as with Bondi’s exchange with Adam Schiff, that “how dare you” is spoken out loud.

But here’s the thing: the job description of every member of the Cabinet, and every senior leader of a federal agency, is centered on hypotheticals.

The Department of Defense is certainly focused on hypotheticals. The senior leadership — the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the various regional commanders, and a host of others — spend a huge amount of energy imagining hypothetical situations, and then planning on how to address those situations. “What would we do, if Iran successfully lobs a bomb at Israel?” or “How would we react to China sending a fleet up and down the coast of New Zealand, at the same time that they run ‘war games’ around Taiwan?” or “How would we respond to a North Korean missile that appears headed to strike Japan?” Senior DOD folks fear one thing above all: something happens that they never even imagined would happen.

The State Department and the Intelligence agencies operate with much the same fear. Every one of them dwells on hypotheticals every day, both reactive (“What do we do if they do X?”) and also proactive (“How might we game out a path to Z, knowing how others would react to our actions?”) None of these national security leaders want to have to face the question “How could you have missed this?” Lower level staffers put together voluminous briefing books for senior leaders, trying to prepare them for all the hypothetical situations they might encounter on a foreign trip, or when meeting with a foreign counterpart here in the US.

Lawyers — like the Attorney General — play with hypotheticals all the time as they plot out investigative paths, map the steps toward indictments, and game out strategy for trials. “If they say X, how do we respond? . . . If we want a judge to grant us a search warrant, what do we need to show, without fully tipping our hand for all the world to see? . . . If we want the jury to agree with us, how to we move them in that direction?” The legal cliche “Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to” is the logical advice that emerges in a profession that thrives on hypotheticals.

If Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi hate talking about hypotheticals, they are angling for the wrong jobs. The jobs for which they are nominated require that they embrace hypotheticals, not reject them.

But it’s not just these national security positions. Look at a department as benign as the Department of Transportation. How many times has Pete Buttigieg’s day been turned upside down by a bridge collapse, a railroad derailment, or a computer glitch that screws up the aviation industry? The Department of Transportation has all kinds of folks who spend their days imagining hypotheticals and preparing for how to react if they come to be, or (even better) how to prevent them from taking place in the first place. If you can’t imagine something happening, you can’t imagine how to prevent it or react to it.

Or think of the Department of Agriculture. What would the Department do, if a hot dry summer kills off crops across the Great Plains? What if a hard freeze hits the entire southeast, killing off the citrus industry? What would the Department do, if an epidemic of bird flu hits chicken producers and processors, and then appears in the dairy industry?

Oh, wait. That last one isn’t a hypothetical.

Then, of course, there are agencies like the CDC, NIH, and FDA. Their whole reason for being, at the top of a public health system that goes down to local health departments, is to get ahead of diseases. Two questions drive every bit of their work: (1) How can we slow and stop a disease from spreading? and (2) How can we prevent an outbreak from starting in the first place? Both of those questions require imagining hypotheticals, so that hypothetical strategies can be developed. When folks in the early 20th century asked “Are there actions that can be taken to reduce the spread of disease?” they realized that things like public sanitation matter. Get clean water into every home. Keep trash from piling up in the streets, and thus keep rats and other disease-spreaders at bay. At the same time, researchers looked at strategies aimed at individuals, like improved nutrition, vaccines, and therapies of all kinds. Good research scientists ask “what if . . . ” every day of their professional lives, and those who support and guide these scientists do the same.

The more these Trump nominees express their refusal to examine hypotheticals, the more some Senator needs to point out that the jobs they are selling their souls for are filled with these things they hate.

How Right Wingers Rushed to DEI Hire Pete Hegseth

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Pete Hegseth is wildly unqualified to run DOD. He described yesterday the most people he had ever supervised was 100. The non-profit budgets that went broke under his stewardship were in the $10 million range. He has never supervised an audit yet claims he’ll be the guy who finally ensures the Pentagon passes one.

Roger Wicker seemed certain that Hegseth wasn’t man enough to withstand a second round of questioning — a concession that Hegseth is weaker than Hillary Clinton, I guess, since she once sat for 11 hours of questioning.

As such a manifestly unqualified candidate, his increasingly certain confirmation to be Defense Secretary is the quintessential DEI hire, someone hired for his culture and identity rather than his qualifications. The hiring of someone for who he is and not any qualifications he might have is precisely what right wingers have been leading jihads against for years. And yet the entire MAGA world is rushing headlong to install a guy with no qualifications to run DOD.

To be sure, Hegseth is qualified for a few things Trump wants from him. He made it clear yesterday he’ll implement unlawful orders from Trump, including to use the military to support Trump’s mass deportations or to shoot protestors. And he’ll defend those service members who implement those unlawful orders loudly and shamelessly. That’s what Trump saw Hegseth doing on Fox News. That’s why he got hired.

The how of all this — which Rebecca Traitster laid out here — matters.

Sure, Hegseth has worked on cultivating the three women Senators who might oppose him: Joni Ernst, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski. In her statement announcing she will support him, Joni Ernst listed the concessions on women in the military — and that audit Hegseth has no qualifications to deliver.

After four years of weakness in the White House, Americans deserve a strong Secretary of Defense,” said Senator Joni Ernst. “Our next commander in chief selected Pete Hegseth to serve in this role, and after our conversations, hearing from Iowans, and doing my job as a United States Senator, I will support President Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense. As I serve on the Armed Services Committee, I will work with Pete to create the most lethal fighting force and hold him to his commitments of auditing the Pentagon, ensuring opportunity for women in combat while maintaining high standards, and selecting a senior official to address and prevent sexual assault in the ranks.

After a campaign threatening unlimited donations to ouster her, Hegseth has given Ernst the cover she’ll need to take a vote that she must know is an abdication of her constitutional duty to advise and consent.

But Hegseth pointedly did not meet with any Democrat but Ranking Member Jack Reed (who excoriated his lack of qualifications in an opening statement).

When Democrats asked Hegseth about allegations of sexual misconduct or alcohol abuse, Hegseth never denied any of it; he simply said those were anonymous smears (even when Tim Kaine and Mark Kelly noted there are names attached to some of these allegations)

When Kelly asked Hegseth if he had been under oath when providing those answers, Hegseth again attacked the claims.

When Democrats asked Hegseth if such behavior would disqualify him — which should have elicited a commitment that if and when he is proven to be a drunk or a philanderer going forward, he’d have to step down — he refused to answer.

Tammy Duckworth asked a number of pointed questions (including about whether he had led an audit), including what international negotiations the Secretary of Defense conducts and whether he could name an ASEAN country (apparently Hegseth was so poorly prepared to answer Democrats’ questions, no one thought to warn him Duckworth might ask questions about Thailand, where she was born to an American service member father). Hegseth could only think of South Korea, Japan, and Australia among our allies in the region, none of which is in ASEAN.

Republicans dismissed his bumbling responses by noting that ASEAN is not a military alliance. Democrats did not note, in return, that that nevertheless betrays ignorance about the Philippines, a country at the center of our conflict with China, something that Hegseth (and every Republican on the committee) claim is a paramount concern.

 

With just a few exceptions, though, Democrats failed to do what they needed to do to create a video confrontation the likes of which might make an effective response to ads (above) already running in Iowa that might dissuade Republicans from supporting him or — when and if his incompetence blows up and harms the US — holds them accountable for their abdication of duty.

WSJ’s editorial board, which would love to find a way to get someone more competent, deemed Tim Kaine’s questioning about Hegseth’s lack of transparency about a sexual assault allegation documented in a police report to be the most effective.

The most effective Democratic questioning came from Virginia’s Tim Kaine, who wanted to know why Mr. Hegseth didn’t disclose to the Trump team a settlement he paid to a woman who accused him of sexual assault. Mr. Hegseth kept saying he was “falsely charged” but never answered the question.

This is right: Democrats need to focus their opposition in a way that it would incur a cost for Republicans. Painting Hegseth as a guy who kept secrets from Trump is a more effective way of hitting his transparency failures than painting the public as a victim. And when they asked about Hegseth’s more fundamental disqualifications — his unwillingness to back the Geneva Conventions, for example — Democrats failed to explain the impact of that, an invitation for others to torture American service members.

Kaine also released the most effective summary of the hearing — a screen cap showing a Republican prop complaining about lowered standards purportedly tied to diversity that misspelled military.

Republicans claim to oppose “DEI” because it lowers standards. At the same time, at a time when DOD increasingly has to rely on a second chance program that Hegseth endorsed to qualify (disproportionately male) candidates with physical, educational, or legal disqualifications, they’re rushing to install someone whose disqualifications may do real damage, even assuming America’s adversaries don’t find a way to use them to compromise the Defense Secretary.

And now, having capitulated to Trump’s demand to install someone who is so obviously unqualified to lead DOD, it’ll make it easier for Republicans to confirm Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. You’ve already put the good of the country behind loyalty to Trump.

Trump and his allies bullied the Senate into backing a DEI Christian Nationalist, one who himself backs DEI for (ha!) fat men with criminal records.

The dynamic needs to be laid out clearly: When pushed, Republicans did precisely what they claim to oppose. They chose to make the US less secure because Trump demanded personal loyalty over loyalty to country.

Update: I made a picture to explain why Hegseth’s utter ignorance about ASEAN matters.

Chuck Grassley Says the FBI Must Combat Sexual Misconduct But the Senate Can Whitewash It

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In a piece billed as “analysis” describing why Kash Patel likely faces little Republican opposition, the NYT’s Catie Edmondson chose to quote one after another Republican making false claims about bias from the Bureau:

  • Thom Tillis falsely claiming Patel’s nomination fulfilled Trump’s promise to “enforce our laws equally and fairly”
  • Chuck Grassley lying that the “unprecedented raid of President Trump’s home in Florida” was “to serve a warrant for records” and not conduct a search necessitated by Trump’s earlier obstruction
  • Joni Ernst imagining that Kash’s nomination would “create much-needed transparency at the F.B.I”
  • John Cornyn asserting that “no one should have to go through what President Trump went through by a partisan Department of Justice and F.B.I.,” which he falsely portrayed as a retribution tour launched by Jim Comey
  • Markwayne Mullin imagining that Kash might “actually get them focused on mission, rather than politics”

What the NYT describes but does not factually label is that most of the Republican party either parrots or truly believes Donald Trump’s manufactured claims of victimhood. But unless you describe that those claims that poor Donald Trump has been targeted are false, then you simply participate in the propaganda, blindly performing the same ritual of obeisance the Republican Senators are.

NYT quotes, but does not link, the letter in which Grassley issued his rant. Fact checking the letter (sent the day before Chris Wray announced he would resign, as Grassley demanded) might have provided a way to demonstrate the pile of false claims on which this impression of the FBI was built.

Oh sure, this particular journalist might not have had time to point out that on December 10, Alexander Smirnov answered any questions about the bribery claim he made up against Joe Biden by signing a plea deal (which the NYT wrote up yesterday, but buried), which Grassley complained about this way:

Consistent with that FBI failure, yet another glaring example of FBI’s broken promises under your leadership is its inexcusable failure to investigate bribery allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden, while strictly scrutinizing former President Trump. You’ve repeatedly claimed you would ensure the FBI does justice, “free of fear, favor, or partisan influence.”25 The FBI under your watch, however, had possession of incriminating information against President Biden for three years until I exposed the existence of the record outlining those allegations, but did nothing to investigate it.26 This record, known as an FD-1023, documented allegations of bribery between and among then-Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian officials.27 The FBI confidential human source (CHS) behind this FD-1023 was on the FBI’s payroll during the Obama administration, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, was given permission to violate the law, and the information he provided was used in prosecutions. The FBI called this CHS “highly credible,” and Deputy Director Abbate publicly testified in response to the FBI’s refusal to remove obstructive redactions from that document that “[w]e often redact documents to protect sources and methods…the document was redacted to protect the source as everyone knows, and this is a question of life and death, potentially.” 28 Then after the FD-1023 was made public – which didn’t include the source’s name – DOJ not only publicly named him, but indicted him, calling into question the truthfulness of Deputy Director Abbate’s testimony and his refusal to be transparent.29 Still, to-date, the DOJ and FBI have neither answered whether they investigated the substance of the FD-1023, nor have they provided an explanation for any effort undertaken to obtain the financial records and other pieces of evidence referenced within the document. This sounds a lot like Director Comey’s leadership of the FBI, which was nothing short of shameful.

As I noted on the Senate floor on February 27, 2024, if a highly regarded source had alleged President Trump accepted a bribe, the FBI would pursue this information without keeping it stored away in one of its dusty closets for three years.30

Even before Smirnov’s plea agreement, though, there was plenty in the indictment (like reference to all the travel records that disprove Smirnov’s claims) that not just debunk Grassley’s claims, but make clear that the scandal here was that Scott Brady falsely insinuated to Congress that Smirnov’s travel records corroborated his claims, when they did the opposite.

There’s a far, far bigger problem though: Grassley’s claims about how FBI would respond to a claim of bribery if one implicated Trump are ridiculous.

When FBI (in reality, the decisions here were repeatedly made by DOJ, not FBI, which returning SJC Chair Grassley should be expected to know) got credible claims Trump had been paid by Egyptian spooks, first Robert Mueller (probably Rod Rosenstein), then Bill Barr prevented investigators from obtaining the financial records to pursue the case, a version of which story NYT published in August.

There’s the tip that — the NYT described — the Italians gave Barr and John Durham in 2019 about “suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump,” a detail Durham chose to exclude from his final report.

There’s the $2 billion investment that Saudis made with Jared Kushner after Trump’s son-in-law finished his nepotistic service in the White House; as the NYT laid out, even the Saudis had doubts that Kushner had the expertise to invest that money. A NYT follow-up showed that Kushner’s firm has pocketed $112 million in fees without showing any profit from investments. Democrats have called for a Special Counsel to investigate that, but the Special Counsel-happy Merrick Garland has not done so.

And since the election, a Chinese national whom the SEC has accused of fraud, Justin Sun, effectively just sent Donald Trump $18 million (here’s a less direct NYT story on the how cryptocurrency creates real opportunity for corruption). Where’s your call for fairness, Chuck?

But there were alternative ways to debunk Grassley’s lies other than pointing to the six NYT stories that disproved his claims that FBI ignored a bribery allegation about Biden but chased them with Trump. Consider his most justified complaint, the one with which he begins his rant: The FBI has not explained whether it has pursued allegations of sexual misconduct within its own ranks fairly.

One of the most egregious examples is the FBI’s failure to provide basic information I requested more than two years ago related to the FBI’s ongoing mishandling of sexual harassment claims made by the FBI’s female employees. This request was not pulled out of a hat. It was based on credible whistleblower disclosures alleging hundreds of FBI employees had retired or resigned to avoid accountability for sexual misconduct. 5 Whistleblowers also alleged the FBI had disciplined senior officials less severely than their subordinates for this misconduct.6 In November 2022, I released internal FBI documents corroborating these disclosures.7 I and my staff ever since have asked repeatedly for information sufficient to determine how FBI handled these serious claims and how widespread the problem really is. The FBI, for its part, told the media it would provide the information to me.8 You personally told me at a December 5, 2023, Judiciary Committee hearing, when I confronted you with the FBI’s blatant inaction, that you would check with your team and then follow up with me.9 Your Deputy Director, Paul Abbate, also publicly stated the FBI is serious about removing officials for sexual misconduct. 10 After a year since you made that pledge, over three years since Deputy Director Abbate’s public comments, and after many more requests to FBI to provide this information, neither of you have followed up or followed through. This inexcusable delay and obstruction by you and Deputy Director Abbate has prevented Congress and the Judiciary Committee from addressing the shocking sexual misconduct at the FBI. This is a promise made and broken, on an issue of utmost importance.

Chuck Grassley says FBI’s failure to deal with credible claims of sexual misconduct is “an issue of utmost importance.”

Huh.

Grassley has not yet weighed in on the nominations of Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, or Kimberly Guilfoyle — all of whom have been implicated in sexual harassment or assault, but his comments about RFK Jr thus far have focused on, “educating him about agriculture,” rather than the assault of a nanny RFK admitted to. Other Senators, though, have suggested that Hegseth’s accusers should not enjoy the same protections that Grassley has fiercely defended for FBI whistleblowers, and have brushed off how Hegseth’s accuser could testify publicly given the nondisclosure agreement he paid her to sign.

More curiously, when he was asked about the sexual misconduct allegations against Matt Gaetz, Grassley falsely claimed his committee, “did a very thorough job following up on every accusation made against (Supreme Court) Justice Kavanaugh and nothing ever materialized.” Grassley said that after Sheldon Whitehouse issued a report showing that the FBI had forwarded all tips to the White House, rather than chasing them down.

On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came in through the FBI’s tip line. Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information.

Whitehouse’s report describing the whitewash FBI did quotes now-debunked claims Grassley made about the thoroughness of the investigation several times.

“These uncorroborated accusations have been unequivocally and repeatedly rejected by Judge Kavanaugh, and neither the Judiciary Committee nor the FBI could locate any third parties who can attest to any of the allegations.”

[snip]

Then-Chairman Grassley said that the FBI “decided” which individuals to contact,98 that the FBI’s investigation was being conducted “in accordance with the agency’s standard operating procedures,” that “the career public servants and professionals at the FBI know what they’re doing and how best to conduct a background investigation,” and that the FBI’s investigation “should be carried out independent of political or partisan considerations.”

If you want to talk about FBI’s inadequate response to sexual misconduct allegations, then surely its whitewash of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh should be included? Want to complain about the FBI? Complain about how they deprived you, Chuck Grassley, of treating misconduct claims against Brett Kavanaugh as “an issue of utmost importance.”

But doing so would expose Grassley’s crass double standard, refusing to exercise the same due diligence with sexual misconduct allegations that, he complains, the FBI has not done in his own job, exercising advice and consent with Donald Trump’s nominees.

How Jeff Bezos Smothered Pete Hegseth News because Hunter Biden Was Pardoned of Already Declined Charges

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When I went to bed last night, the WaPo was feeding me the following stories at the top of its digital front page.

WaPo has since added a story about Biden’s attempt to surge weapons to Ukraine before Trump cuts them off.

There was not and is not any story dedicated to Kash Patel’s promises to target Trump’s enemies at FBI — a story that not only is more urgent than any of the seven Hunter Biden pardon stories, but is fundamentally tied to the how and why of the Hunter Biden pardon.

There was not and is not any story on Jane Mayer’s report about how Pete Hegseth,

was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

Even as Hegseth made visits with the Senators whose vote he would need to be confirmed (definitely watch this video), the rag owned by defense contractor Jeff Bezos chose to litter its front page with seven stories and columns about Hunter Biden’s pardon rather than report out that Hegseth has a history of failing to manage the budgets of even just two medium-sized non-profits.

And it’s not just that Bezos’ rag buried far more urgent news about Trump’s nominees.

It’s that (with the exception of this column explaining the risks and difficulty of seizing weapons from addicts) the Hunter Biden stories were not all that useful.

Will Lewis has again chosen to platform Matt Viser’s dick pic sniffing about Joe Biden, this time trying to drive the controversy about the pardon; as far as I’m aware, Viser still has not disclosed to WaPo’s readers that an error in his own reporting caused a false scandal about Hunter’s art sales.

Viser’s 1800-word post includes 22 words that address, with no specifics, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel’s promise to persecute Trump’s enemies: “His picks for attorney general, Pam Bondi, and for FBI director, Kash Patel, have urged retribution against Trump’s political adversaries and critics.” It does, however, float an inaccurate quote also included in this Aaron Blake piece (as well as these Betsy Woodruff and Ken Vogel stories), claiming that Hunter’s pardon is broader than any since Nixon’s pardon.

Former Pardon Attorney Margaret Love hates this pardon and she’s not afraid to mislead reporters to criticize it, as when she told Woodruff that Nixon was the only precedent.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.

“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.

Love’s claim conflicts with what she herself laid out to Politico, the very same outlet, when Mike Flynn was pardoned four years ago.

“Pardons are typically directed at specific convictions or at a minimum at specific charges,” said Margaret Love, former pardon attorney for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who now leads the Collateral Consequences Resource Center. “I can think of only one other pardon as broad as this one, extending as it does to conduct that has not yet been charged, and that is the one that President Ford granted to Richard Nixon.”

“In fact, you might say that this pardon is even broader than the Nixon pardon, which was strictly cabined by his time as president,“ Love said. “In contrast, the pardon granted to Flynn appears to extend to conduct that took place prior to Trump‘s election to the presidency, and to bear no relationship to his service to the president, before or after the election.“ [my emphasis]

And I believe even then, Love misstated the intended scope of Flynn’s pardon.

Like Hunter’s pardon, Flynn’s pardon excused the crimes included in his charging documents (false statements, including false statements about being an unregistered agent of Turkey). While Hunter’s pardon specifically invoked the conduct in his Delaware and Los Angeles dockets, Flynn’s pardon excused conduct reviewed in two jurisdictions, DC and EDVA. Like Hunter’s pardon, which would cover the false statements referral from Congress, Flynn’s pardon would have covered the contradictory sworn statements he made as he tried to renege on his plea deal. But Flynn’s pardon also covered,

any and all possible offenses arising out of facts and circumstances known to, identified by, or in any manner related to the investigation of the Special Counsel,

This pardon attempted to excuse any crime based on a fact that once lived in Robert Mueller’s brain or case files.

As I laid out here, that certainly would have covered referrals from Mueller elsewhere (including to DOD), it might have attempted to pardon crimes in process, if (for example) Flynn’s relationship with Russia developed into something more in the future. Flynn’s pardon, unlike Hunter’s didn’t have an end date, and as a result, if Congress wants to continue to harass Hunter about stuff he just accepted a pardon for, he’ll have less protection than Trump intended Flynn to have.

And while Republicans might argue that Hunter’s allegedly false claim to Congress — regarding how he cut Tony Bobulinski out of a deal with CEFC to protect his family’s name — served to protect his father, even the most feverish Republican fantasies would amount to three Biden men profiting from a Chinese company after Biden left the Obama Administration and before he decided to run again. Flynn’s conflicting claims about whether “The Boss is aware” of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, including regarding undermining sanctions, served to protect Trump’s actions as incoming President. (Another thing WaPo decided was less important than seven pieces about Hunter’s pardon was that Chinese national Justin Sun, who has been charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million.) That is, you can measure the pardon in terms of familial closeness to the President granting it (none of these stories mention Charles Kushner, much less his nomination to be Ambassador to France); you can also measure the pardon in terms of the silence or lies about the guy giving the pardon it buys. And any one of about ten pardons from Trump, including the Flynn one, were far more corrupt by that measure.

But here’s the other reason why Blake’s piece, one of the seven pieces littering the front page instead of stories about Kash Patel or Hegseth’s unfitness, is not useful. Here’s how Blake introduces the scope of Hunter’s pardon.

Biden didn’t just pardon his son for his convictions on tax and gun charges, but for any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024.”

That’s a nearly 11-year period during which any federal crime Hunter Biden might have committed — and there are none we are aware of beyond what has already been adjudicated — can’t be prosecuted. It notably covers when he was appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014 all the way through Sunday, well after the crimes for which he was prosecuted.

Hunter Biden hasn’t been charged for his activities with regard to Burisma or anything beyond his convictions, and nothing in the public record suggests criminal charges could be around the bend. Congressional Republicans have probed the Burisma matter and Hunter Biden extensively and could seemingly have uncovered chargeable crimes if they existed, but haven’t done so.

Blake glosses over a great deal with his reference to things that have “already been adjudicated,” and in doing so, ignores the problem. Yes, both prosecutors and Republicans in Congress looked long and hard for something to hang a Burisma charge onto; yes, none of them found it. But — here’s the important bit — they still want to pursue one anyway.

The investigation into Hunter Biden started six years ago, based off a Suspicious Activity Report tied to a payment to a sex worker. Investigators tried to turn that into a criminal investigation based on the same Burisma focus that Rudy Giuliani was chasing; in fact, investigators first got data from Apple on the day Trump released the Perfect Phone Call, a transcript that may or may not have expunged a specific reference to Burisma. According to Joseph Ziegler, his supervisor at the time documented the problem of chasing a tax investigation that tracked Trump’s public demands for dirt on the Bidens related to Burisma.

You can actually trace how investigators cycled through one or another potential FARA violation — Burisma, Romania, CEFC — each time, with even the disgruntled IRS agents conceding they couldn’t substantiate those FARA cases (not least because Hunter was pretty diligent about not doing influence peddling himself, at bringing in others to do any of that kind of lobbying). Tips from Gal Luft — awaiting extradition on foreign agent charges — and Alexander Smirnov — awaiting trial on false statements — were key elements of that investigation.

But we know that in the precise period when someone was leaking to try to pressure prosecutors to bring certain charges, David Weiss had decided not to charge 2014 and 2015. Here’s how Gary Shapley wrote up the October 7, 2022 meeting that set him off.

In 2022, David Weiss told Shapley he would not charge 2014 and 2015, which is one thing that led Shapley to start reaching out to Congress to complain.

Prosecutors included more detail in Hunter’s tax indictment.

a. The Defendant timely filed, after requesting an extension, his 2014 individual income tax return on IRS Form 1040 on October 9, 2015. The Defendant reported owing $239,076 in taxes, and having already paid $246,996 to the IRS, the Defendant claimed he was entitled to a refund of $7,920. The Defendant did not report his income from Burisma on his 2014 Form 1040. All the money the Defendant received from Burisma in 2014 went to a company, hereafter “ABC”, and was deposited into its bank account. ABC and its bank account were owned and controlled by a business partner of the Defendant’s, Business Associate 5. Business Associate 5 was also a member of Burisma’s Board of Directors. The Defendant received transfers of funds from the ABC bank account and funds from the ABC bank account were used to make investments on the Defendant’s behalf. Because he owned ABC, Business Associate 5 paid taxes on income that he and the Defendant received from Burisma. Starting in November 2015, the Defendant directed his Burisma Board fees to an Owasco, PC bank account that he controlled.

One reason Hunter wasn’t charged for 2014 and 2015 is because Devon Archer was paying taxes in that period.

But the point is (as reflected in Blake’s note this was all adjudicated), a prosecutor made that decision. And Republicans in Congress and, specifically, Kash Patel, squealed about the injustice of not charging Hunter because the evidence didn’t merit charges.

This decision and the backlash with those dissatisfied by it dictates the lengthy period of Hunter’s pardon. Not just because they want to charge Burisma whether or not there’s evidence of a crime. But because the five year statute of limitations for FARA and the six year SOL on tax crimes, to charge anything related to Burisma, they’d have to apply crimes — like Espionage or certain kinds of Wire Fraud — that have ten year statutes of limitation.

Kash Patel and Republicans in Congress have already said they want to charge Hunter Biden regardless of whether there’s evidence to do so. When David Weiss first offered a plea deal, Trump posted that Hunter should instead have gotten a death sentence.

These people have made it clear they want to prosecute Hunter regardless of what the evidence supports. They have said that over and over. That’s what dictates the pardon, not any corruption by Biden. And to flip that on its head — to flip Trump and Kash Patel’s demand for prosecutions regardless of evidence — on its head is to cooperate in Trump’s assault on rule of law.

This is a point reflected by experts quoted in Vogel’s piece (and expanded by Kim Wehle in her own post).

Mr. Morison, who worked for years in the Office of the Pardon Attorney before going into private practice, added that the Bidens may have seen risk in crafting the pardon grant more narrowly.

“I assume that Hunter’s lawyers were worried that an especially vindictive Trump DOJ would have looked for something to charge him with if they were too specific, so they asked for a blanket pardon, subject only to a fairly broad date range,” he wrote in an email.

Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, predicted that if Mr. Trump’s Justice Department were to charge Hunter Biden, he would raise the pardon in a motion to dismiss the case.

Ms. Wehle, the author of a recent book detailing how the lack of constraints on presidential clemency powers invite abuse, said in an email that it was Mr. Trump — not President Biden — who initiated “the norm-violating behavior” by pledging to use the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies.

“This is not a corrupt pardon,” she said in an email. “It’s about taking care of a family member knowing what Trump will do otherwise.”

The reason you have to pardon broadly is because Trump has demanded an outcome divorced from evidence. And to get to his desired outcome, he would have to do something expansive, something that could not be foreseen by the scope of the existing investigation that (as Blake notes) has already been adjudicated.

You can tell this story about how broad the pardon is — structured very similarly to the Mike Flynn one.

But if you leave out the story of how this investigation from the start paralleled Trump’s extra-legal effort to gin up dirt on Joe Biden’s son, if you leave out the fact that even in his first term, Trump’s DOJ solicited information from at least one Russian spy and a Chinese agent to pursue dirt on Hunter Biden, then you are flipping the matter of justice on its head. That’s what Trump did already, in his desperation to find something to hang on Hunter Biden. And particularly given his picks of Bondi and Patel (the latter of whom played a role in extorting a foreign country for such dirt, too), there’s no telling what Trump will do in a second term.

That’s what dictates the terms of this pardon. A prosecutor issued a declination for charges related to 2014 and 2015, and almost the entire Republican party said, we’re going to find something anyway. And if you hide that detail, you’re burying the most crucial information, just like you’re burying detrimental information about Hegseth and Patel below a seventh post on Hunter Biden.

This is what a captive oligarch press looks like: Burying detrimental information on the guy who might oversee Jeff Bezos’ defense contracts, while hiding the reasons why the Hunter Biden pardon looks like it does.

Yes, Trump Plans to Flush NATO, But It’s Part of a Larger Whole

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Note, 1:40 ET: Folks, I know this is bad timing, but in about 20 minutes, I’m going to temporarily shut down comments here, as we’re going to do some planned maintenance. Hopefully it won’t take too long. 

When Donald Trump announced he had selected Matt Whitaker as his Ambassador to NATO, a bunch of people rushed over here to hear me say Big Dick Toilet Salesman* again.

Like most of Trump’s other nominees, Whitaker is wildly unqualified for the role. Actual diplomats may be able to exploit his inexperience. Likely, he’ll wander around Europe like Gordon Sondland did, doing personal errands for Trump, often involving grift. Unlike most of Trump’s nominees, Whitaker has at least been able to get and sustain security clearance in the past.

But I really think BDTS is not where our attention should focus.

Yes, there are reasons to focus on Trump’s five most outrageous nominees, but not always for the main reasons they’re wildly unqualified.

It matters that Russia keeps calling Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to lead the entire Intelligence Community, their girlfriend. But just as important, Nikki Haley has made an issue of Tulsi’s nomination — focusing on Iran, not Russia.

It matters that RFK Jr would pursue policies that would kill more children, just like he did in Samoa. But it’s worth recalling that RFK made more pointed attacks on red states than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris ever did.

Pete Hegseth is unqualified both because of his Christian nationalism and the NDA he got with a woman who told police he had raped her (his attorney, Tim Parlatore, says the sex was consensual). But it matters just as much that Hegseth hid the alleged assault from Trump’s flimsy vetting process, raising questions among Trump’s team about his candor.

She said Hegseth took her phone and blocked the door with his body when she tried to leave. She told police she said “no” repeatedly. She said she was next on a bed or a couch and Hegseth was on top of her, with his dog tags hovering over her face. Hegseth, she said, ejaculated on her stomach.

Even the focus on evidence of Matt Gaetz’ alleged sex trafficking — something likely to be aired anyway in two month’s time, not least because JD Vance’s disclosure that Trump plans to replace Chris Wray means Wray will have no incentive to refuse Democratic Senators’ requests for more information on the investigation — distracts from the larger effort, focusing on sordid Venmo payments rather than Gaetz’ willingness to sustain conspiracy theories that have been debunked.

Donald Trump’s wildly inappropriate nominations taken one by one, like Nancy Mace’s grotesque attack on Sarah McBride (and Fox News’ lies that McBride, not Mace, started the fight), serve to distract from the larger issue: Trump’s wholesale effort to dismantle the Federal government’s commitment to serve Americans not named Donald Trump or African immigrants named Elon Musk — or Russians named Vladimir Putin.

That’s why Musk is an exception to my claim of distraction. Thus far, I am far less intrigued by claimed tensions around Musk than others like Gaetz — I think it is too early to tell whether Musk has enough leverage over Trump to withstand complaints that he is stealing the thunder from the boss. It doesn’t hurt to play them up, but I have a hunch they won’t work like they normally would. But Musk’s conflicts most readily convey the looting that is at the core of this effort. It should be easy to show how the selection of Brendon Carr as FCC head will not only pose a risk to the First Amendment in the US, but would also provide specific, personalized benefits to Musk’s Starlink. It should be easy to use Musk as an exemplar of the point of all this, which has nothing to do with “woke” or bathrooms or “free speech,” but is, instead, about looting.

Taken individually and as a whole, Republicans — at least the Senators — are in an awkward spot. They are being asked whether they support America, or whether they will irretrievably stop serving their constituents as their President dismantles decades of government benefits. Each instance of discomfort created by Trump’s picks, whether it is Trump’s own team’s belief that Hegseth hid something or Haley’s attack on Tulsi from the right or generalized loathing of Matt Gaetz, provides a discomfort that may lead Republicans to stand up. Each instance of an incompetent crony (and I include Whitaker in that list) being placed in a position where he’s more likely to seek personal benefit he’ll have motive to protect by dutifully implementing whatever Trump orders should be a way to show that Senators have sold out their constituents.

But thus far, Trump has brilliantly done what he always does: used a series of distractions to drown out any coherent discussion of the whole.

It is usually a good bet to assume Republicans will fail to exhibit the integrity or self-preservation when it most matters. But the stakes are too high not to do everything we can to try to change that.

And that starts by maintaining focus on the whole rather than the endless series of new outrageous distractions.

*Note, I did not make up this nickname, though it’s a good one. I merely helped popularize it.

Litmus Tests Likely Explain Who the Fuck is Pete Hegseth

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Yesterday, Donald Trump picked a Fox News pundit, Pete Hegseth, to lead the largest military in the world.

Before I discuss that, note that Kaitlan Collins described that Trump has yet to pick an Attorney General nominee, candidates for which include people like Matt Whittaker, Senator Mike Lee, and Mark Paoletta. According to Collins, that’s because none of the candidates checks all the boxes for Trump. Paoletta already issued a manifesto about forcing the career employees to bend to Trump’s will, and yet he apparently is missing something for which Trump is looking.

That may be how Trump skipped over people like former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, longtime Trump national security aide Keith Kellogg, and Representative Mike Rogers, who were considered candidates. And tellingly, we know that Miller was willing to check the litmus test in place when he was picked in 2020: a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act.

There’s something else that Hegseth is happy to do that the others are not. The possible choices are gutting the military of women, people of color, LGBTQ soldiers, launching nuclear first strikes, committing war crimes, and treating leftists as terrorists — all are things he has espoused before.

Today, Senate Republicans will vote for Majority Leader. I expect John Thune and John Cornyn will split the non-crazy vote and give the race to Rick Scott. But the race will presume Trump’s demand to allow Trump to install these candidates via recess appointment.

A Hegseth appointment is precisely the kind of pick that would test the Senate’s willingness to provide some kind of pushback to Trump. But if all three aspiring Majority Leaders have already given away advice and consent, that won’t happen.

Washington Post Tries to Ram Petraeus Down Our Throats Again

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No. In the name of God, Thor, Zeuss, Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, no. There are few people who personify the vapid, amoral fetid swamp of Washington politics and defense policy more than David Petraeus. Taking a huge part of the blame for propelling Petraeus from a solely military into an entirely political career is the Washington Post, which gave Petraeus a prime op-ed slot in September 2004, where he spewed wildly optimistic numbers on his accomplishments while training Iraqi troops. Petraeus further told us how victory was just around the corner, implying that if only Americans would re-elect George W. Bush, his plan would achieve full fruition. Active military personnel are not supposed to engage in politics, but Petraeus became political with that op-ed and Washington overlooked it, because that’s what Washington does and that’s what the Washington Post does.

Bush rewarded Petraeus for his role in the election by putting him in charge of US troops in Iraq. Petraeus didn’t impress his immediate superior, Admiral Fallon, who termed Petraeus an “ass-kissing little chickenshit” after their first meeting. Once in charge, Petraeus quickly established death squads. Things didn’t go all that well in Iraq, in part because everything Petraeus does fails miserably while he is busy explaining to us what a good job he is doing. By 2007, the Kagan brain-trust came up with the idea of the surge to “save” Iraq. Washington politics and defense policy prostitute Michael O’Hanlon was brought onto the job of helping to sell the surge. In the fall of 2007, an orchestrated  Washington event, complete with a sideshow purchased in the New York Times for the “General Betrayus” ad, gave us Congressional hearings that resulted in approval for the surge. Completely overlooked at that time was the inconvenient fact that a major part of the Iraq plan moving forward from that point involved a total restart of training Iraqi troops because Petraeus failed spectacularly in his previous attempt at training. But Washington and the Washington Post did not call out Petraeus for that failure, because that’s what Washington and the Washington Post do.

Petraeus was next promoted by Bush in late 2008 to Fallon’s previous position in charge of CentCom.  It was quite clear to Barack Obama once he took office that Petraeus had his sights set on becoming president, so Obama made a very interesting move when he sent Petraeus down in rank to take command in Afghanistan after Petraeus’ protege Stanley McChrystal was fired for insubordination in July of 2010. Because lying about training had worked in advancing his career in Iraq, it appears that fudging the numbers on ANSF capabilities was one of the first things Petraeus did once in charge in Afghanistan. He was caught in this by the GAO, who pointed out that criteria for ANSF readiness were being changed to increase the number of troops qualifying for the most advanced classification, but it appears that only SIGAR and I care about those lies. Washington and the Washington Post ignored those dishonest moves by Petraeus, because that’s what Washington and the Washington Post do.

After Petreaus had been in charge in Afghanistan for six months or so, political handlers stepped into the picture to try to burnish his image for a future run for president. Read more →