The chief of Office of Special Counsel’s Hatch Act unit has agreed to open an investigation into top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership possibly (sarcasm) using their government positions to unlawfully campaign for impeached president Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, following a request from independent federal watchdog American Oversight this week.
“The timing and location of numerous recent DHS events and publicity efforts in recent weeks—located in competitive electoral battlegrounds shortly before the fast approaching election—strongly suggest that DHS leadership may be directing the department to take action with the intent to affect the outcome of the election,” the group said, “and investigation is warranted to determine whether that is the case.”
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DHS and its Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies have always been in the tank for the impeached president, but within the past few days have been shamelessly brazen, behaving as a taxpayer-funded Trump super PAC and holding “at least four public events in states that are closely contested in the presidential election,” American Oversight wrote in its request to Special Counsel Henry Kerner and DHS Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari.
Just one recent stop was a photo op in Texas, where unlawfully appointed acting DHS Sec. Chad Wolf and acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan (always, always acting) signed a plaque commemorating 400 miles of Trump’s stupidly expensive border fencing paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Totally normal stuff here by normal government officials, all. And like in a previous stop in Arizona, they barely tried to hide their political campaigning.
Officials “attacked the policy proposals” of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, The New York Times reported, with Morgan saying that “policies embraced by Mr. Biden would prompt a migrant ‘invasion,’” using the same racist wording as the white supremacist terrorist who went to El Paso last year to kill Latinos.
Morgan also disgracefully used the wording on his official Twitter account, an action condemned by El Paso Rep. Veronica Escobar. “After seeing this tweet identifying migrants as an ‘invasion,’ I reached out to him, asking that he recognize the connotations of the word ‘invasion’ and delete it,” she tweeted. “Morgan refused saying we can't ‘cancel’ the word ‘invasion’ b/c of sensitivities around its use.”
Morgan in the end was more upset about Twitter apparently taking action against his violent and racist rhetoric than about sounding like a white supremacist terrorist. And this guy is leading a major government agency (even if it’s in an acting capacity). Of course, it’s not just Unlawful Chad and Morgan, American Oversight said.
“On October 28, less than one week before Election Day,” newly-installed acting ICE Director Tony Pham (yet another acting) “held a press conference in the swing state of Minnesota to announce enforcement actions that had taken place in multiple states across the Midwest,” the organization said. “Just three days prior, the president’s reelection campaign had announced that it would be pouring new money into a ‘tightening race’ in Minnesota.” And don’t forget ICE has also used taxpayer funds to plaster anti-immigrant propaganda on billboards in other swing states like Pennsylvania.
After asking the Special Counsel Henry Kerner and the DHS inspector general to open an investigation into whether these campaign surrogates officials carried out these campaign stops press conferences or ordered any department employees to carry out official actions “for the express intent of influencing the result of the upcoming election,” American Oversight confirmed the OSC’s Hatch Act unit is opening a case file into the complaint.
Whether any accountability follows is another question. However, it does continue to shine an important light on the fact that this is a criminal cabal that must be swept out of office. Once again, this isn’t the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a Trump super PAC—and we’re the ones paying for it.