Corruption is the beating heart of the Trump Administration
It’s really worth reading this NYT piece on today’s closed-door testimony by 33-year veteran diplomat, three-time ambassador, and former ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch:
The money quote, as it were, is this:
She warned that private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment, threatening to undermine the nation’s interests and drive talented professionals out of public service. And she said that diplomats no longer have confidence that their government “will have our backs and protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests.”
It is quite clear, and has been for some time, that “private influence and personal gain have usurped [career government officials’] judgment” — and actually are undermining the nation’s interest and actually have driven talented professionals out of public service throughout our government since Trump took office. The story of Marie Yavonovitch is the story of the country writ large under Trump: Trump has undertaken a wholesale usurpation and repurposing of the federal government — which is supposed to work in the public trust, for the public good, and is funded with public dollars — for the private benefit of Trump, his family, his cronies, and and their donors.
This usurpation has taken place across the entirety of our government, not only the State Department. It is true with respect to the the EPA — which under Andrew Wheeler and Scott Pruitt (who resigned in disgrace due to his massive ethics scandals) before him, has been transformed from an agency protecting the environment into an agency destroying the integrity of our water and air and land, firing and retaliating against scientists, suppressing evidence and reports about climate science and/or that do not favor industry, and allowing wholesale pollution, environmental degradation, and environmental destruction for the singular benefit of the polluting companies that he has spent his life representing. He has also politicized the Department, deploying it as a weapon to attack the country’s most populous state and its citizens, in retaliation for its not kowtowing to Trump’s attempts to accelerate the destruction of the planet for the benefit of the automobile industry — which doesn’t even want it.
When Trump refers to the “deep state”, it is code for career public servants to obey the rules and who are not supposed to be coopted by politics and subject to the whims and corruption of appointees. It is code for those who stand in the way of his and his appointees’ brazen corruption.
It is no different across other departments. We have seen the Department of Education transformed from an agency seeking to provide relief to beleaguered and defrauded victims of predatory for profit- colleges and lending agencies, into a vehicle for stymieing that relief. In fact she has violated a court order to stop collecting student debt — 16,000 times. She has privileged her personal desire to turn public schools from places where diverse students can thrive into religious institutions paid for taxpayer funded money — gutting programs designed to help and protect diverse students while supporting vouchers.
At DHS, international law is broken for profit, as children ripped from the parents are housed in cages and tent cities managed by for-profit private companies to whom the U.S. government now pays money. These companies are profiting off the misery and traumatization of children as U.S. policy. John Kelly, former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Chief of Staff to Trump, is now paid to sit on the board of one of those private companies whose contracts were made possible by the inhumane and disgusting child separation policies that Trump and Kelly helped put in place.
Ryan Zinke, who resigned in disgrace as Secretary of the Interior as a result of his massive conflicts of interest and inappropriate personal dealings, spent his time in office, when not personally enriching himself, doing all he could to undermine our public lands and national monuments and open them up to drilling and destruction by the extraction industries. His entire tenure was a favoring of corporations over conservation — private interests over public.
Former HHS Department Secretary also resigned in disgrace due to ethics scandals. (Do we see a pattern yet?) While there, he wreaked havoc with science directly affecting women’s health, promoting dangerous lies about contraception.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross have repeatedly violated financial disclosure and ethics rules — to the point where the U.S. ethics office took the unusual step of refusing to certify Mnuchin’s financial disclosure earlier this year. Meanwhile, Mnuchin has refused to comply with a Congressional subpoena for Trump’s tax returns and Ross has lied about his efforts to include a citizenship question on the census questionnaire for the purpose of diverting billions of dollars of tax dollars as well as Congressional representation away from blue-leaning cities and into and for the benefit of Trump-supporting rural areas.
Then there is Attorney General William Barr, a man who has embraced every conceivable appearance of politicization and impropriety — repeatedly refusing to recuse himself from inquiries in which he has expressed an interest or is a witness — as he transforms the U.S. department of justice into a disinformation- and lie-machine , personal re-election tool (not only refusing to find the Zelenskky solicitation a crime, but actively intervening to prevent Trump’s tax returns from being released), and retaliation arm on behalf of Donald Trump. His corrupt, unethical politicization has shocked and dismayed hundreds of career prosecutors on a bipartisan basis; they have written horrified editorials to no avail.
It is across the board. It is unremitting.
And so when the former Ambassador of Ukraine was discussing the hollowing out of the State Department under first, the incompetent and unqualified Rex Tillerson, and then, under the partisan Trump loyalist Mike Pompeo, she might as well have been speaking for the entire federal civil service. Our institutions are being gutted. This, unfortunately, was something many of us predicted when each of Trump’s thoroughly compromised appointees went through their confirmation processes — a number of them even lying under oath during their confirmations. How very sad it is that it has taken until now for someone to go on record under oath to state the danger to the country that Trump’s across-the-board corruption, condoned and carried out through his willing political accomplices, who also lie and cover for him, represents.
