It's increasingly looking like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had the State Department's own inspector general removed not for any one reason, but because the inspector general was probing numerous allegations of wrongdoing, rule-breaking, and potentially criminal acts by Pompeo and his subordinates.
From Slate's Fred Kaplan, we learn a little more detail about the extent of charges that Pompeo has been using his government underlings as personal domestic help. We already knew Pompeo allegedly was ordering lower-rankers to walk his dog, pick up his dry cleaning, and other tasks; Kaplan says there's even more to it than that.
From Kaplan: "A friend of the family told me that when Susan Pompeo visited her mother in Lafayette, Louisiana, security officials were ordered to pick her up at the airport. Last June, they were told to pack up the house in Lafayette and cart away boxes when her mother prepared to move to a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas."
He was using a security detail as a moving company? This isn't a joke—he really did that?
And with that, Pompeo immediately vaults into contention as the most pettily corrupt cabinet official Trump has ever hired. Having State Department security officials move your mother-in-law to a retirement home, packing and moving boxes so that Mike Pompeo doesn't have to hire someone else to do it, beats out inappropriate office decorating by a good chunk and is just so petty, compared to doing favors for your old lobbying firm clients or other acts of more substantive crookery.
So that is one of the things that now-fired inspector general Steven Linick was probing when Pompeo went to Trump with the request that Linick be removed. Trump did so without hesitation, possibly because every last person in the White House is a grifting sleazebag and none of them can possibly imagine being anything else.
There's still more, however, to suggest that State Department rules have been treated as highly optional by Pompeo and his associated political appointees. Politico reports on a just-ending inspector general investigation, this one of top Pompeo aide Cam Henderson. Henderson leads the department's Office of Protocol, a position she inherited after the previous boss, Sean Lawler, was—
—hang on, let's just take a moment to prepare ourselves here—
—pushed out for allegedly "intimidating and harassing his staffers, and even carrying a whip on the job."
Ah yes. As one does, in government offices.
The inspector general's office determined that Henderson had violated policy by not reporting allegations of "workplace violence" by her boss toward other State Department workers. (You know, the one carrying a fking whip to work while being allegedly belligerent to his staff.) The inspector general was, says Politico, awaiting a response to the report upon learning that he had been summarily fired.
Oh, and there are also questions about lavish dinners being hosted by Pompeo and his wife using State Department headquarters and resources. And who knows, by the time this is over we might learn that Pompeo has been using his position to demand each U.S. ambassador take turns waxing his wife’s cousin’s car.
So it seems that Pompeo has quite a few reasons to have sought immediate Trump relief from the questions being put to him by the State Department's official watchdog, all of them revolving around allegations of inappropriate conduct ranging from petty grifts to threatening government workers with home-brought weaponry.
Pompeo, in the meantime, is responding with yet more absolutely nonsensical lies—a character trait now well-known to those who have watched his forays onto the Sunday news shows—by claiming that he had "no sense of what investigations were taking place inside the inspector general's office," and could therefore not have retaliated against them.
It's a stupid and Trumpian lie, because we already know that at the least Pompeo was aware he was being investigated for the most serious charges against him: That he and Trump violated the law in their "emergency" acts to evade congressionally mandated arms limitations on Saudi Arabia after that country's targeting of civilians in Yemen. We know he was aware of that inspector general investigation because Pompeo refused the inspector general’s request to provide an interview related to it.
So what we seem to have here is Mike Pompeo going for some sort of Republican corruption bingo, with acts running the gamut between "using department staff as domestic help" to "violating the law to funnel illegal arms to war criminals." Yes, it's pretty clear now why Pompeo has been sniffing that he should have fired his department's legal watchdog long ago.
At one time, there was talk of ex-House Republican Mike Pompeo leaving his post to pursue a Senate bid. That ship would seem to have sailed; he seems more focused now on just treading water.
