Trump Staff Picks, Co-Conspirators and the Revolving Door of Departures

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is probably on his way out, undoubtedly to spend more time with his family.

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, other federal prosecutors violated the rights of Jeffrey Epstein's sex-crime victims, judge rules [CNBC]

New Accusations For Epstein As Some In South Florida Say 'Good Riddance' To Acosta [NY Times]


I was waiting to see if rareboy posted an updated bingo card, but I believe that Acosta is the 11th cabinet member to resign or be fired?

 

[rareboy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Don't have an updated card yet, but NYT has an article on the churn.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...eZggXlJQ8v4JGY5ZB5_0J7yj4sD4fLlzb7gJ5tLDUaGpY

 

[rareboy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

 

[rareboy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

"This was him not me because I’m with him. He’s a tremendous talent. He’s a Hispanic man. He went to Harvard. A great student. In so many ways I just hate what he’s saying now cuz I’m going to miss him."

—the 45th President of the United States on the "resignation" of Alexander Acosta, July 12th, 2019

 

[rareboy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Once again though, the next in line is just as dirty.

This tied to sweatshops and to Russian interests.

https://thesternfacts.com/trumps-la...sweatshops-and-russian-interests-65bfd9589c00

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Another great job of vetting. And another appointment with Pence's fingerprints all over it.

Matthew Scott ("Matt") Bowman is an attorney who was appointed by Trump to be the Principal Advisor to the Director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights. Between 1996 and 2001, Bowman had at least 14 arrests in Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida. The arrests were for harassment, assault, battery and stalking in conjunction with his protests at high schools, hospitals, private homes, Disney World and abortion clinics. Bowman, of course, was also a frequent protestor against gay rights- including protests against Disney World's Gay Days, which accounts for his arrest in Florida.

Bowman's legal degree is from Ave Maria School of Law, a institution created by Domino’s Pizza founder and conservative Catholic donor Tom Monaghan. Antonin Scalia helped develop the curriculum for Ave Maria School of Law. After graduation, he clerked for Samuel Alito.

Bowman has recently been a guest at George Mason University (of course), where he was a guest speaker at a lunch event at the The C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School.

Two Decades Ago, He Blocked Abortion Clinics and Dodged Police. Now He’s Helping Wage Trump’s War on Reproductive Rights. [Mother Jones]

A string of previously unreported arrests illuminate a top administration lawyer’s hard-held beliefs—and unlawful past.

Decades later, the résumé Bowman submitted to HHS seemed to allude to this period of his life, though he refrained from mentioning CALL or Operation Rescue, another extremist anti-abortion group that Bowman worked with at the time. Instead, the résumé says he was a “full-time pro-life volunteer” from 1997 to 2000 for a Madison, Wisconsin, group he identified as The Solidarity Project. State incorporation records reveal no trace of such entity, nor does a search of Wisconsin news coverage from the era.

Over those three years, Bowman had a dozen recorded encounters with Madison police while engaged in pro-life activism. Bowman told police during one such incident that local sympathizers funded his full-time advocacy, along with an anti-abortion organization that Bowman refused to disclose...

Since his appointment as HHS deputy general counsel in March 2017 by the Trump White House, Bowman has set to work turning pro-life legal arguments into federal policy. Last summer, for instance, he teamed up with White House health care policy adviser Katy Talento, a longtime anti-birth-control advocate, to craft the administration’s October 2017 rules gutting Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate.

One of his mugshots from the 1990s:

And a recent picture:

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Secretaries:

Secretary of the Interior
[STRIKE]Ryan Zinke[/STRIKE] - fired, under investigation
David Bernhardt

Well... if you thought that Zinke was bad...

The US House is investigating Interior Secretary David Bernhardt for pressuring government officials to grant the permit for a Trump donor to build golf courses and a residential development of 28,000 homes in the Arizona desert. The development was originally put on hold by the agency because of concerns about the limited water available and the impacts on endangered species in Arizona.

Bernhardt replaced Zinke, who resigned after his own scandals were unearthed in 2017. Bernhardt was confirmed by the Senate on April 11, 2019, by a vote of 56 to 41. Prior to his appointment by Trump, Bernhardt was a oil industry lobbyist.


Whistleblower says he was pressured by Trump administration to reverse environmental decision [CNN]

In the summer of 2017, Arizona developer Mike Ingram's proposed housing and golf course project in the desert was facing a road block because of a decision by the Department of the Interior.

A field supervisor for the US Fish and Wildlife Service had determined that it was "reasonably certain" that threatened and endangered species could be harmed.
But that decision suddenly changed following a secret breakfast meeting at a Montana hunting lodge between Ingram -- a donor to President Donald Trump and co-owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks -- and David Bernhardt, then the Trump administration's deputy Interior secretary.

Following the meeting, which did not appear in Bernhardt's official calendar and has not been previously reported, the field supervisor says he was pressured to reverse his decision, allowing the project to move ahead.

Bernhardt's conflicts of interest were catalogued by the press back in 2017 when he was originally nominated for the #2 position in the department under Zinke.

Zinke’s #2 has so many potential conflicts of interest he has to carry a list of them all [WaPo]

 

[gsdx]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Trump intends to nominate Eugene Scalia and Labor Secretary. I've not heard of him, but...

Mr. Scalia, 55 years old, has devoted almost a decade to representing corporate clients fighting rules put in place by the Obama administration that were designed to protect employees in the workplace and toughen restrictions on Wall Street firms.

As head of the Labor Department Mr. Scalia could help draft a new set of rules that would have a broad impact on the country’s workers and their relationship to their employers, including rules on overtime pay and workers employed jointly by two employers. He declined to comment.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/labor-...-has-strong-antiregulation-record-11563555638

One more attempt to write Obama out of the history books.

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks

She's baaaaaaaack....

From 16-Jan-2017:

So even though Melania's plagiarism is okey dokey...apparently it is a no go for Monica Crowley who gets shunted off to Billy Bush like infamy and career failure now that she's withdrawn from the rat pack list of staff picks.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/inaugura...nues-twitter-assault-084748177--election.html

Treasury pick Monica Crowley spread Obama smears: 'Can he be both loyal to Islam and loyal to the United States?' [CNN]

President Donald Trump's pick for the top spokeswoman job at the Treasury Department repeatedly spread conspiracy theories that suggested then-President Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim who was sympathetic to America's enemies.
Monica Crowley, who was appointed by Trump last week as assistant treasury secretary for public affairs, made multiple comments spreading these false claims on her personal blog and in at least one tweet between 2009 and 2015, according to a review by CNN's KFile team.

Crowley also endorsed a story claiming Obama was an "Islamic community organizer" trying to conform the United States to Sharia law and claimed conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate were "legitimate concerns." ...

Crowley wrote that Obama had loyalties to Islam and questioned if he could support both Islam and the United States.

 

[rareboy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

It is interesting how they keep floating back up to the top of the cesspool.

We are definitely at the bottom tier of picks for posts in the government.

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

...We are definitely at the bottom tier of picks for posts in the government.

And disturbing how much of the looney Right has been auditioning on Fox and getting nominated for their efforts.

There's two different streams of appointees coming out of this administration and you can tell whether it's a Pence pick or a Trump pick by their audition.

If they're from one of the Koch-funded think tank or a conservative action group, it's a Pence nominee. They're coming on board to gut an agency or rewrite Rules to satisfy some big donor.

If they look good on camera at Fox and they don't criticize the Administration, they're a Trump nominee. I keep expecting Trump to nominate the guy on those catheter commercials for Secretary of HHS.

 

[rareboy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Or at least Surgeon General.

 

[Dystopian]

Re: Trump Staff Picks

no she's just giving trump a blow job----slut that she is---but will be paid well lol
It doesn't matter who he picks----Hillary has 2 million more votes---so it's a minority government he's forming. what a crazy system.

Not even Donald is that hard up.

 

[smokeshadow]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Many experts and those in the intelligence community are furious that the Donald is replacing the respected Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, with 3-term Texas Congressman, John Ratcliff. He's the former mayor of Heath, Texas (population 8,440 as of 2016) just Northeast of Dallas, TX. Many are not even sure that Ratcliff meets the qualifications of the position

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmoveme...d-over-pick-to-replace-venerated-intel-chief/

 

[gsdx]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Many are not even sure that Ratcliff meets the qualifications of the position

I think we would be hard pressed to find even 1 person in Trump's administration who is even minimally qualified. He just seems to appoint the people who have 'ASS KISSER' stamped on their foreheads.

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Many experts and those in the intelligence community are furious that the Donald is replacing the respected Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, with 3-term Texas Congressman, John Ratcliff. He's the former mayor of Heath, Texas (population 8,440 as of 2016) just Northeast of Dallas, TX. Many are not even sure that Ratcliff meets the qualifications of the position

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmoveme...d-over-pick-to-replace-venerated-intel-chief/

Last week, during the testimony of Mueller, Rep Ratcliff did catch my ear because he was making very "lawyerly" arguments... or more accurately, arguments from Sean Hannity that had been dipped in legalese and presented in a more stentorian tone. He is an attorney and he was a "comes with" when Texas Governor Bush became President Bush in 2000.

He did serve in the Department of Justice, first as Chief of Anti-Terrorism and National Security for the Eastern District of Texas and later as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. But that was a decade ago. He hasn't been involved in intelligence work (literally or figuratively) for a decade.

This was his audition and apparently his only qualification:

The Republican Senate is just a rubber stamp these days. He'll be confirmed. God help us.

 

[Sausy]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Coats was conservative but professional... he really was trying to do the best he could to make sure the best intelligence info available could be gathered and shared with the President. A professional is NOT what Trump wants, as KB makes out pointedly with the clip. He wants a loyalist, a true believer, a partisan.... and of course I agree he'll get through... if Collins/Murkowski vote for his confirmation, I wouldn't be surprised in the least. But there won't be any other defections on the Republican side... and we can't get past 50(with the plus one vote from VP Mike Pence in case of a tie) to begin with to block it.

 

[johaninsc]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

they want to kill the counter-intelligence investigation...and hide what it may have found

intercepts?

I imagine Coats, as well as others, may have prepared for this

 

[frankfrank]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Many are not even sure that Ratcliff meets the qualifications of the position

Since when does THAT matter in Absurdistan these days?

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks and Revolving Door of Departures

Since when does THAT matter in Absurdistan these days?

Lack of expertise, knowledge, experience and competency is the qualification... unless the objective is for the appointee to dismantle the agency.