Unaccountable: Trump declares war on the inspector generals

Like a mob boss, Donald Trump believes that he should never be held accountable for his actions by anyone, especially by those gumshoe government inspectors whose job it is to protect the public interest in the inspector generals office.

In recent days, Trump has declared war on the governments’ inspector generals, mostly because they are presenting facts and evidence that directly contradicts his self-aggrandizing propaganda that everything he does is “perfect” or “beautiful” and that his administration is the “best ever.” Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes invites Trump’s retribution, retaliation and revenge.

First a reminder: At the end of March, Trump Suggested He Can Gag Inspector General for Stimulus Bailout Program:

President Trump undercut a crucial safeguard that Democrats insisted upon as a condition of agreeing to include a $500 billion corporate bailout fund.

In a signing statement released hours after Mr. Trump signed the bill in a televised ceremony in the Oval Office, the president suggested he had the power to decide what information a newly created inspector general intended to monitor the fund could share with Congress.

Under the law, the inspector general, when auditing loans and investments made through the fund, has the power to demand information from the Treasury Department and other executive branch agencies. The law requires reporting to Congress “without delay” if any agency balks and its refusal is unreasonable “in the judgment of the special inspector general.”

[Democrats] insisted on stronger oversight provisions to ensure that the president and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin could not abuse the bailout fund. They feared that Mr. Trump, who has previously stonewalled congressional oversight, would do the same when it came to the corporate aid program.

But in his statement, which the White House made public about two hours after the president signed the bill, Mr. Trump suggested that under his own understanding of his constitutional powers as president, he can gag the special inspector general for pandemic recovery, known by the acronym S.I.G.P.R., and keep information from Congress.

“I do not understand, and my administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the S.I.G.P.R. to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision required” by a clause of the Constitution that instructs the president to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, the statement said.

What Trump was actually saying is that “I’m not going to allow an inspector general to go snitch on me to Congress.” He is clearly signaling that he and his associates in the Trump crime family intend to help themselves to some of that sweet $500 billion corporate bailout money in a “grab and dash” before voters can throw him out of office in November.

Now this: Politico reports today Trump removes independent watchdog for coronavirus funds, upending oversight panel:

A panel of inspectors general had named Glenn Fine — the acting Pentagon watchdog — to lead the group charged with monitoring the coronavirus relief effort. But Trump on Monday removed Fine from his post, instead naming the EPA inspector general to serve as the temporary Pentagon watchdog in addition to his other responsibilities.

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Fine’s removal is Trump’s latest incursion into the community of independent federal watchdogs — punctuated most dramatically by his late Friday ouster of the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

Trump has also begun sharply attacking Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, following a report from her office that described widespread testing delays and supply issues at the nation’s hospitals.

The Hill adds, Trump replaces Pentagon IG, removing him from coronavirus relief oversight panel:

Glenn Fine, who has served as acting Pentagon inspector general since 2016, will go back to being the principal deputy inspector general and will no longer lead the coronavirus relief oversight panel, his office said Tuesday.

“Yesterday, the president nominated Mr. Jason Abend for the position of DoD Inspector General,” Dwrena Allen, spokeswoman at the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, said in an email. “The same day, the president also designated Mr. Sean W. O’Donnell, who is the Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General (EPA IG), to serve as the Acting DoD IG in addition to his current duties at the EPA.”

The EPA IG’s office similarly told The Hill that O’Donnell “is filling both roles for now” and that “no changes are expected at the EPA OIG.”

Fine “remains focused and committed to the important mission of the DoD OIG,” Allen added.

The move also means that Fine is no longer on the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, she said.

The panel of inspectors general was created by the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill Congress passed last month to audit and investigate implementation of the bill.

Fine was appointed as chairman of the committee last week, a move that won praise across the political spectrum

“Glenn Fine has a good reputation as a tough federal prosecutor and former [Department of Justice] Inspector General, and must exercise his full oversight authority to ensure that the Trump administration implements the CARES Act as intended,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement last week.

The move follows several steps Trump has taken to combat oversight of the bailout fund … [L]ast week, he nominated one of his own White House lawyers, Brian Miller, for the special inspector general position.

Because the White House lawyers who serve at the pleasure of the president have done such an excellent job of holding him accountable (sarcasm). Have we already forgotten Don McGahn? Brian Miller is no doubt intended to be Trump’s new “fixer” who will look the other way when he helps himself to the cash.

On Friday, Trump fired the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who handled the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment.

The Washington Post editorialized, This is Trump’s vilest act of retribution yet:

[For doing his job], Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, a respected, nonpartisan public servant with a 17-year record, was fired late Friday night by Mr. Trump, who used the cover of night and the novel coronavirus pandemic to extend his purge of officials who cooperated with the exposure or investigation of his wrongdoing. It was the most blatant and shameful act of retribution yet by a president who has sought to shut down all independent checks on his behavior.

[L]ike inspectors general across the government, his job, as he put it in a statement he released Sunday, was to act “as an independent and impartial” auditor. “It is hard not to think that the president’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations,” Mr. Atkinson wrote.

Mr. Trump, whose autocratic impulses have been swelled by the abject failure of Congress to check them, did not pretend otherwise. “He did a terrible job,” he told reporters Saturday. “He took a fake report and brought it to Congress with an emergency, Okay? Not a big Trump fan, I can tell you.” He further complained that Mr. Atkinson “never came in to see me” before forwarding the whistleblower complaint.

The disregard for truth and the rule of law laced through that rant is breathtaking. First, as a number of Republican senators subsequently acknowledged, the complaint that Mr. Atkinson forwarded was not fake but an accurate description of the pressure Mr. Trump placed on Ukraine’s president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden. Contrary to the president’s suggestion, Mr. Atkinson’s duty was not to consult him about the whistleblower complaint — much less to be a “Trump fan” — but to determine whether the allegation was credible and, if so, forward it to Congress while protecting the whistleblower.

Mr. Atkinson did that, scrupulously. His reward was to have his career upended by a president who regards the U.S. government as his personal satrapy [a subordinate: henchman].

Politico continues:

Trump’s targeting of Atkinson drew an unusual rebuke from Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Justice Department who also oversees a council of inspectors general. Horowitz said Atkinson handled the whistleblower matter appropriately and defended the broader IG community.

“The Inspector General Community will continue to conduct aggressive, independent oversight of the agencies that we oversee,” he said in a statement after Atkinson’s ouster.

On Monday, Trump railed against HHS principal deputy inspector general Christi Grimm, who authored a damning report on shortages of supplies and equipment at hospitals, as well as prolonged wait times to get coronavirus testing results.

The Daily Beast reports, Trump Rages Over Watchdog Report on ‘Severe’ Hospital Shortages:

President Donald Trump went after the acting inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at his daily coronavirus briefing on Monday, raging over a recent report highlighting “severe shortages of testing supplies” in some hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Give me the name of the inspector general,” Trump said at one point. “Could politics be entered into that?”

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Pressed further on the report that came from his own government, Trump repeatedly demanded reporters give him the name of the inspector general—and painted a rosy picture of his administration’s much-criticized handling of the pandemic.

“We’ve done more testing and had more results than any country anywhere in the world,” Trump declared. “They’re doing (an) incredible job.”

CNN reports, Fact Check: Trump baselessly disputes HHS IG report, repeats several other false claims at Monday’s coronavirus briefing:

Fact checking Trump’s claims on the HHS IG report

At Monday’s briefing, Fox News correspondent Kristin Fisher asked the President about a recently released report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General which details challenges facing hospitals in responding to the coronavirus pandemic, including shortages of supplies and equipment, as well as prolonged wait times to get testing results.

In response, Trump said, “It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word ‘inspector general,’ really? It’s wrong.”

When pushed on the fact that the report was released by his own administration, Trump suggested the findings were politically motivated, asking, “Well where did he come from, the inspector general? What’s his name?” Trump later added, “So give me the name of the inspector general. Could politics be entered into that?”

Facts First: There’s no evidence to suggest anything about the report is wrong, or that it was somehow politically motivated. The report was independently launched by the HHS OIG and based on interviews conducted between March 23 and 27 with administrators at more than 300 hospitals across 46 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. The report found hospitals faced testing shortages and longer than usual wait times for coronavirus test results.

The report’s findings of shortages at key hospitals also corroborated previous press reports from hospitals in New York and elsewhere, which are facing severe shortages of vital medical equipment. According to the HHS report, its purpose is to provide a snapshot of hospitals’ experiences amid a growing number of coronavirus cases and doesn’t serve as a review of the department’s response to the outbreak.

The senior HHS OIG officials who oversaw this watchdog report are both women: Ann Maxwell, the assistant inspector general for evaluation and inspections, and Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general. Grimm, whose name is on the report, is a career official who entered her current role in January but has been with HHS since 1999, serving under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Moreover, the Associated Press independently verified the shortages noted by the HHS OIG report. US ‘wasted’ months before preparing for coronavirus pandemic:

After the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment.

A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.

By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile. That federal cache of supplies was created more than 20 years ago to help bridge gaps in the medical and pharmaceutical supply chains during a national emergency.

Now, three months into the crisis, that stockpile is nearly drained just as the numbers of patients needing critical care is surging. Some state and local officials report receiving broken ventilators and decade-old dry-rotted masks.

“We basically wasted two months,” Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary during the Obama administration, told the AP.

At this same briefing, Trump blew up at the reporter who asked about the HHS IG report that hospitals lack coronavirus testing, saying that her question was horrid and she should be complimenting him for the job he is doing. “You’re a third-rate reporter”: Trump lashes out in response to questions about damning IG report (excerpt):

[W]hen Fox News reporter Kristin Fisher attempted to ask Trump specifically about the report’s finding that hospitals are working with a “severe shortage” of testing materials, Trump unloaded on her.

“You should say ‘congratulations, great job,’ instead of being so horrid in the way you ask a question,” he said.

Fisher wasn’t alone in being on the receiving end of Trump’s abuse. Trump also bashed ABC’s Jon Karl because Karl didn’t tell Trump that Grimm had served under President Obama when he asked a question about the IG report — as though Grimm’s experience under a previous administration destroyed her credibility.

“You’re a third-rate reporter. What you just said is a disgrace,” Trump said to Karl. “You will never make it.”

Trump regularly attacks reporters who dare to ask him a question that reflects poorly upon him. Because such questions run counter to his propaganda that everything he does is “perfect” or “beautiful” and that his administration is the “best ever.” “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The facts are catching up to him as the Trump body count mounts from the coronavirus pandemic — Axios Coronavirus Dashboard for U.S.: Total confirmed cases as of 4 p.m. ET: 386,800 — Total deaths [i.e., Trump body count]: 12,285 — Total recoveries: 20,191] — the man who once bragged back in February that “[W]hen you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done” is melting down.