Across every government agency, Trump's Republican functionaries are making sure corporate corruption goes unchecked.
Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees.
The unwinding of the team has effectively killed investigations into possibly fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges where top hires of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had previously worked.
Well that does indeed look shady, but perhaps there's a misunderstanding here. Perhaps it is not a concerted effort to immunize for-profit colleges from widespread charges of fraud, but a coincidence.
During the final months of the Obama administration, the team had expanded to include a dozen or so lawyers and investigators who were looking into advertising, recruitment practices and job placement claims at several institutions, including DeVry Education Group.
The investigation into DeVry ground to a halt early last year. Later, in the summer, Ms. DeVos named Julian Schmoke, a former dean at DeVry, as the team’s new supervisor.
Got it, not a coincidence. The team doesn't just get reassigned, DeVos and team picked a dean from one of the schools facing the most serious charges to be in charge of investigating that from now on. And Schmoke isn’t the only new Education hire brought on from the ranks of the previously investigated. After the appointment of Schmoke the team dwindled in size to, now, only three remaining members, and according to the Times their mission has been “scaled back” to examining only “smaller” cases.
Donald Trump himself may not know what the hell is going on, on any given day, but the Republicans he signed to his team, across all of government, have been downright methodical in ending investigations into corporate malfeasance and undoing penalties assigned to corporations already found guilty of it. That doesn't happen by accident; his team had to try, hard, to find people willing to go that far. If there's one thing Trump's Republican hangers-on are certain of, across every federal department they have been installed into, it's that American consumers need a good, solid shin-kicking by any company willing to do it.