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

[TX-Beau]

The Judge should order her to personally pay the fed back for all of those loans, then make her live in a studio apartment somewhere in the ghetto for a few years - with no access to her bank accounts.

 

[KaraBulut]

The Judge should order her to personally pay the fed back for all of those loans, then make her live in a studio apartment somewhere in the ghetto for a few years - with no access to her bank accounts.

I'd be happy if she had to pay for her absurd security costs that the taxpayers are getting stuck with. One thing about prison- taxpayers would have to cover her healthcare and room/board costs but at least we would be saving the $19.8 million that we're paying now.

U.S. Marshals Service spending millions on DeVos security in unusual arrangement [NBC (Nov, 2018)]

The cost to taxpayers could be as much as $19.8 million through next year, according to figures provided to NBC News.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos began receiving around-the-clock security from the U.S. Marshals Service days after being confirmed, an armed detail provided to no other cabinet member that could cost U.S. taxpayers $19.8 million through September of 2019, according to new figures provided by the Marshals Service to NBC News.

While it remains unclear who specifically made the request, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions granted the protection on February 13, 2017, a few days after DeVos was heckled and blocked by a handful of protesters from entering the Jefferson Academy, a public middle school in Washington. DeVos was confirmed as education secretary on February 7 of that year.

 

[rareboy]

Someone else in the Trump Administration could be orange...

Is Betsy DeVos Going To Jail? [Forbes]

Lock. Her. Up.

 

[KaraBulut]

Well, Trump can claim at least one statistic that is bigger than other Administrations:

41% of top Trump officials appointed in his first year have left [Axios]

President Donald Trump has lost 41% of the Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries and under secretaries he appointed in his first year in office, new data from the Partnership for Public Service‘s Center for Presidential Transition shows.

Why it matters: This far outpaces the turnover rate for recent predecessors at the same stage of their presidencies — and underscores the challenges Trump may face in recruiting and retaining a new stable of top officials if he wins re-election.

 

[KaraBulut]

Let's pause for a moment and consider how sad the bottom of the barrel for candidates for Trump appointed positions has become.

After going through FOUR Department of Homeland Security Secretaries and Acting Secretaries, Trump is having to get an DHS Undersecretary position confirmed so that he can make that new Undersecretary the Acting Secretary of DHS. It's so bad that Trump is out of appointees that are eligible to be Acting DHS Secretary that he has to add an Undersecretary so that he can have an Acting Secretary.


Senate starts clearing path for DHS designee Wolf [Politico]

The Senate Thursday advanced the nomination of Chad Wolf to be a policy undersecretary at the Homeland Security Department, a necessary step toward Wolf becoming acting DHS secretary.

The move, a filing of a cloture motion to end debate, means that Wolf‘s nomination could come up for a Senate floor vote Tuesday. Confirming Wolf to the undersecretary post, which he's held on an acting basis since February, is required under federal vacancy law if Wolf is to succeed Kevin McAleenan as acting secretary.

We've now reached the "Chad" level of candidates. Guys who use Brylcreem and apparently don't own razors.

 

[rareboy]

I thought that his cabinet was the bottom of the barrel, but time has proven me wrong again and again.

I just can't imagine how this can go on for another year.

 

[KaraBulut]

And the sad sad tale of General Jeff Sessions. This 72 year old racist homophobe is going to run for the US Senate in the Alabama Republican primary....against Roy Moore, the other racist homophobe who likes him some young teenage girls.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

This video is probably more appropriate for a "I love humiliation" thread in the fetish forum...

 

[rareboy]

If we are lucky, maybe he and Moore will destroy one another.

 

[gsdx]

Does anyone know how many positions are still empty? Not just the ones that are empty because the people quit or were fired, but have been empty since Trump took office.

 

[KaraBulut]

Does anyone know how many positions are still empty? Not just the ones that are empty because the people quit or were fired, but have been empty since Trump took office.

This one is like the Trump Lie Tracker that some media outlets keep.

Tracking how many key positions Trump has filled so far [WaPo]

Worth noting: the departments with the most dysfunction have the most unfilled positions. Homeland Security is at the bottom of the list with a 59% vacancy rate as of Monday 4-Nov.

 

[gsdx]

This one is like the Trump Lie Tracker that some media outlets keep.

Tracking how many key positions Trump has filled so far [WaPo]

Worth noting: the departments with the most dysfunction have the most unfilled positions. Homeland Security is at the bottom of the list with a 59% vacancy rate as of Monday 4-Nov.

^ Thanks for that. I looked at the graph and it's certainly telling where Trump's priorities lie.

Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, Justice, and Homeland Security are 52% and less.

 

[KaraBulut]

Re: Trump Staff Picks

I heard Dr. Shulkin interviewed on NPR this morning.... A major issue within the VA is the privatization of services provided to veterans. During his tenure, outsourcing to private sources had increased about 20%, but political appointees in the organization wanted to move much faster.

Shulkin has a book out- "It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country". The book has a lot of details about the chaos in the Trump Administration.
Former VA secretary details dysfunction, chaos within the Trump administration [Military Times]

He also wrote an opinion piece for Time magazine detailing the chaos of his "job interview" that should sound familiar to anyone who has worked for a disorganized impatient ADHD executive who cannot process details:
I Ran the VA Under President Trump Until He Fired Me. Our First Trump Tower Meeting Was a Job Interview Unlike Any Other [Time]

Kushner and Conway were having a side conversation, which they took outside. Then Trump turned to me and asked, “So what’s the best hospital in the city?”

“Well, Mr. Trump, I think it depends on—”

“You know, I used to think well of this one place, but I know a guy who went in there feeling okay, and they just chopped his thing right off! They chopped it off! I wouldn’t go there for anything now.”...

“We have to fix this thing. It’s a mess. Do you think we can fix it?”

“We’ve been making big improvements on the wait times. We’ve developed same-day access, and we’re getting more veterans —” He cut me off again.

“I want our veterans to get the best.” Then he repeated, “They really created a mess here. Can we fix it?”

Once again, I assured him that I was committed to doing just that.
 Trump ruffled through a few papers on his desk and then looked up. “The VA’s an important place, but there are some good ones and some bad ones. But I’ll tell you what’s messed up. They come back with PTSD. You know what’s really bad? They come back and their wives or girlfriends didn’t wait for them.”

 

[KaraBulut]

Senior Trump official embellished résumé, had face on fake Time cover [NBC]

A senior Trump administration official has embellished her résumé with misleading claims about her professional background — even creating a fake Time magazine cover with her face on it — raising questions about her qualifications to hold a top position at the State Department.

An NBC News investigation found that Mina Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations, has inflated her educational achievements — like claiming, falsely, to be a Harvard grad — and exaggerated the scope of her nonprofit's work.

Whatever her qualifications, Chang had a key connection in the Trump administration. Brian Bulatao, a top figure in the State Department and longtime friend of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, attended a fundraiser for her nonprofit in Dallas and once donated $5,500 to her charity, according to a former colleague of Chang's.

Chang, who assumed her post in April, also invented a role on a U.N. panel, claimed she had addressed both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and implied she had testified before Congress.

Let's see how much longer, Ms Chang's bio is up on the State Department website.

Mina Chang, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations April 29, 2019 - Present
and Stabilization Operations (CSO).

Prior to joining the Bureau, DAS Chang served as the Chief Executive Officer of an INGO. Applying insights gleaned from a broad range of civilian and military data sets, data analytics, social science and geo-spatial intelligence capabilities to identify and assist vulnerable communities, the organization worked to isolate root drivers of instability, and direct development initiatives to address critical vulnerabilities that non-state actors exploit to further their agenda.

She has extensive on the ground experience in conflict areas such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, and the Philippines. She has been an advocate for proactive stabilization as a strategic tool of foreign engagement and an investment in a stronger America abroad.

Mina is an alumna of the Harvard Business School, a graduate of the United States Army War College National Security Seminar, a Harvard John F. Kennedy Senior Executive in National and International Security and a former International Security Fellow at New America. Ms. Chang has been published in CNN, Fortune, Foreign Policy Journal, Forbes, Defense One and The Hill, writing on issues of policy, humanitarian aid, development, the application of emerging technologies and data science capabilities by the sector and its role in the context of national security and global stability. She has addressed the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, as well as the United Nations, and served as a Fellow with the Center for the Study of Civil-Military Operations at United States Military Academy at West Point, assisting in the development of academic programs tied to humanitarian and disaster response.

Served as Civil-Military UN-CMCoord Advisor contributing to the current Common Humanitarian Civil-Military Coordination Standards. Appointed by the United Nations to serve on the Expert Panel for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Humanitarian Response.

 

[TX-Beau]

...liars and rapists and crooks, OH MY!

 

[Sausy]

I have to give her credit, THAT is first class gumption on her part. First class incompetence on the Trump administration's part, mind you... but Donald Trump deserves to be played like this.

 

[TX-Beau]

I have to give her credit, THAT is first class gumption on her part. First class incompetence on the Trump administration's part, mind you... but Donald Trump deserves to be played like this.

I suspect he knew and that was why he hired her.

- - - Updated - - -

That and the rack she thrust at him.

 

[KaraBulut]

There's a separate thread about this issue but it's worth documenting here since he's a current Trump adviser and also a former Jeff Sessions and Michele Bachmann staffer.

This is one of Trump's most trusted advisers and he was a major architect of the "American Carnage" speech that Trump gave at the inaugural. Can anyone really say that Trump isn't a white supremacist and racist now?

Democrats want Stephen Miller to resign after report exposes emails promoting white nationalism [WaPo]

A slew of House Democratic leaders called on White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to resign Thursday after a report that he promoted white nationalist ideas and championed xenophobic rhetoric through the conservative website Breitbart before the 2016 election.

The report, released Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, analyzed more than 900 emails Miller purportedly sent to former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh in 2015 and 2016. The report’s author said that after reviewing the emails — which were provided to the SPLC by McHugh — he was “unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.”

And the next time one of your friends is lamenting that they can never find a partner, point out that even a horrible human being like Stephen Miller can find someone.

Trump's immigration czar Stephen Miller is apparently getting married [The Week]

Stephen Miller, President Trump's lead adviser on immigration policy, and Katie Waldman, now press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence, announced their engagement on Sunday.

 

[rareboy]

There's a Magda out there for every Goebbels....

 

[KaraBulut]

Now's lets see if the Trump campaign hires her, too.

State Department staffer resigns after allegations she inflated her resume [Politico]

Mina Chang, a high-ranking State Department staffer who vaulted into the public spotlight after NBC reported she had inflated her resume, has resigned from her position.

Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations, was accused of overstating her academic credentials and creating a fake Time magazine cover with her face on it. Chang has rebutted NBC’s story, arguing that her academic statements were not misleading and that she did not commission the doctored Time cover.

 

[KaraBulut]

Secretary of the Navy has been forced to resign by the latest Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Spencer's letter of resignation had a handwritten date on the type-written letter. Spencer had survived the Trump Administration for 2 years.

Navy secretary 'fired' for proposing 'secret agreement' with White House in SEAL case, senior defense official says [CNN]

In an extraordinary move, the Pentagon chief "fired" the Navy secretary for going outside his chain of command by proposing a "secret agreement with the White House," according to a senior defense official.

The agreement that led to Defense Secretary Mark Esper forcing Navy Secretary Richard Spencer's resignation involved the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. The official said Spencer had proposed to the White House a review with a secret guarantee that Gallagher would be allowed to keep his status as a SEAL. That would go counter to the ongoing review underway by the Navy to take away Gallagher's status.