So Much to Hide

If there is one word the application of which is missing from this administration’s resume, it is transparency. The message of “drain the swamp” has in reality been a replacement of that swamp with a further degraded swamp, filled with additional polluted waters and toxic inhabitants. Cronies and loyalists have replaced trained and experienced specialists. I find it fascinating that Trumpers hate educated elites, a proclivity that has given rise to thoroughly unprepared senior administration officials – Mike “anti-science” Pence and son-in-law Jared “I wasn’t good enough to get into any Ivy League school until Daddy paid $2.5 million to buy me a place at Harvard” Kushner – to be those principally responsible to supervise the federal government’s COVID-19 response. Wow! The more that local and state governments have followed the Trump coronavirus agenda, the less effective their battle against COVID-19 has been. Consistently! How many have died as a result?

Trump has pushed responsibility for supplying medical basics on to state governors, telling us that the feds are not “shipping clerks.” For all of recent history, federal stockpiles of emergency supplies have been maintained to provide what’s needed where it’s needed as quickly as possible. George W Bush may have stumbled during the Hurricane Katrina debacle, but he was at least trying. Not this administration.

“‘The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our [federal] stockpile; it's not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use,’ Kushner said Thursday [4/2]. He also claimed that members of Congress who were seeking to ensure sufficient supplies of equipment (such as ventilators) before their districts were running low on them were ‘asking for things that they don't necessarily need at the moment.’

“However, since at least December 2018, the stockpile's mission statement on its HHS-run web site explained that it was available ‘when state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts’ in order to ‘ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.’

“Now, instead of the explanation of how states could request access to the stockpile in an emergency, the website says that its role is ‘to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies,’ and notes that ‘many states have products stockpiled as well,’ with the federal stockpile meant to be ‘a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.’

“Kushner became the latest senior White House official to attempt this bait-and-switch during Thursday's [4/2] White House press briefing, moments after his father-in-law claimed that individual states should have built their own stockpiles of supplies instead of relying on the federal stockpile established to support states during an emergency.” Newsweek, April 3^rd. They literally changed a long-standing website to conform to Kushner’s speech? Wow! Andrew Cuomo’s New York doesn’t need ventilators?! Our stockpile?!

Does this come as shock to you? From a President who is the only president in modern history not to disclose his taxes? From the President who ordered his Attorney General (William Barr) to issue a “summary” of the Mueller Report, which Trump categorized as a “total exoneration,” only to discover later that Barr’s summary was wildly inaccurate at every material level? From a President who directed that all federal agencies not cooperate with Congressional inquiries of his administration? From a President, who with help from a GOP Senate majority, absolutely avoided presenting a single second of testimony in his impeachment “trial”? A president who issued a “summary” of his coercive telephone call with the Ukrainian president that casually omitted pressures that were overheard by others? Think of all the administration officials/close supporters who have been convicted of federal crimes. Simply put, “truth” and any media that tries to report truth is the enemy, unless it is Trump’s “truth,” turning Fox News and Breitbart into the President’s implementing propaganda ministry.

Indeed, Trump has been culling every government official wherever he can who in any way complied with Congressional inquiries. The message is out to anyone in federal government: do nothing to upset the president or your livelihood could vaporize. As the governors of Washington and Michigan have also learned, criticizing the President could result in mysterious shipment delays of essential coronavirus supplies. As the CEO’s of General Motors and 3M have discovered, if you have a personal feud with Donald Trump, his only use of his powers under the Defense Production Act has been against such vociferous critics.

Trump cronies have tried to blame the current state of federal misdirection on the impeachment trial as a distraction that prevented the President from focusing on disease preparedness. Yet somehow, Trump had found the time to end the federal pandemic preparedness program, cut the CDC budget by 16% and totally defund US participation an international cooperative to detect and prevent global pandemic outbreaks. In the middle of the deadliest pandemic to hit the United States since the Spanish Flu (1918-20), Trump is still firing officials he found disloyal to him during the impeachment inquiry and installing loyalists whose principal function seems to be to make sure future Trump-directed misdeeds will never be detected. Trump is a man obsessed!

“With the nation focused on the pandemic, Trump signaled that he still nurtured grudges from his recent impeachment. Late Friday night [4/3], he notified Congress that he would fire Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies who last year disclosed to lawmakers a whistleblower’s complaint against the president… ‘This will be the end of oversight if Trump gets away with this,’ Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, said of Atkinson’s firing. ‘What whistleblower is going to come forward if this is how everything plays out?’…

“Separately, Trump said he would nominate Brian Miller, a White House lawyer [and former GSA Inspector General], as the special inspector general for overseeing how the Treasury Department disperses $500 billion in emergency loans to corporations. The role is one of several that Congress mandated to ensure accountability for $2 trillion in coronavirus aid signed into law by Trump…

“‘To nominate a member of the president’s own staff is exactly the wrong type of person to choose for this position,’ Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. ‘Given this administration’s total disregard for the rule of law and basic ethics, strong oversight is more important during the Trump presidency than at any other time in American history.’

“Although every president has squirmed under the microscope of independent oversight, Trump has fought back in an especially bitter fashion, equating attempts at accountability with personal insults. He described both the investigation of Russia’s role in his election and the impeachment process as “witch hunts” and already has applied that moniker to plans by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) for a bipartisan committee to scrutinize his administration’s response to the coronavirus.

“‘Here we go again,’ Trump said during a White House briefing on Thursday [4/2]. ‘You see what happens. It’s witch hunt after witch hunt after witch hunt.’… ‘We support full transparency,’ [said Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin]. ‘Taxpayers should understand how we’re going to support this economy and jobs.’… Yet when the president signed the relief law, he issued a statement asserting that he could limit how much information the Treasury’s newly created special inspector general for pandemic recovery could share with lawmakers.

“The law said Congress must be informed ‘without delay’ if administration officials refuse to provide information. But in his signing statement, Trump said, ‘I do not understand, and my administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the [inspector general] to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision required.’” Los Angeles Times, April 5^th.

The President will appoint Atkinson’s replacement in the immediate future, but given Trump’s dispute with his own intelligence agencies, significantly over Russian interference in our elections, does anyone have any doubt that the crony-appointee will further stifle our necessary but Trump-leaguered federal intelligence agencies? What’s happening to our country, our system of checks and balances?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and as bad as this mounting evidence of Trump administration corruption might be, it never ceases to amaze me how so many of his supporters are locked into a messianic belief of all things Trump such that nothing, even death all around them, seems to alter their distorted beliefs.