As unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf’s official nomination goes in front of a Senate committee today (he should be resigning, not getting rewarded), NBC News reports that the consulting firm where his wife works as an executive was awarded DHS contracts worth millions the year after he joined one of the department’s agencies. Drain the swa—HAHAHAHAJAJAJAJA.
“Although the company has a long history of federal contracts, it did not do work for DHS until after Wolf became the TSA's chief of staff in 2017,” Julia Ainsley reports. “A DHS spokesperson said Wolf was not aware of the contracts until he was contacted by the media.” Oh, so just like when he claimed he wasn’t aware that the naturalization stunt he helped carry out was going to be broadcast as part of the Republican National Convention? Sure, Chad.
Ainsley reports that Hope Wolf’s consulting firm, Berkeley Research Group, was awarded the contracts in question beginning in September 2018, when Chad Wolf was still working as former Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen’s chief of staff. Wolf would replace Nielsen the following year. “Kyle Herrig, founder and president of Accountable.US, a left-leaning watchdog group, said the $6 million in contracts may be a conflict of interest,” Ainsley reports.
We’ll say. "After Mr. Wolf joined DHS, it began pumping millions of dollars into his wife's firm, which also happens to be his largest financial asset," Herrig told NBC News. "The arrangement is highly problematic and warrants congressional scrutiny." But there’s little that Unlawful Chad has helped carry out for the Trump administration that doesn’t warrant scrutiny from Congress.
In a statement released prior to Unlawful Chad’s Wednesday appearance before senators, immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice notes that from defying the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to authorizing the federal thugs who carried out the state-sanctioned kidnappings of Americans in Portland, he should be resigning, not getting rewarded.
“Wolf was a behind-the-scenes player during the systematic separation of thousands of children from their parents earlier in the Trump era—one of the darkest chapters of this or any other presidency,” the organization said. “More recently, under Wolf’s acting leadership, DHS and ICE have sought to reinstitute family separation by forcing moms and dads into an impossible choice: either staying together as a family in facilities that endanger their lives or allowing their children to be ripped away and released on their own with uncertain prospects of ever being reunited.”
The administration has continued to refuse to release these kids and their parents together from dangerous immigration prisons in the middle of a pandemic.
“The horrifying allegations of forced hysterectomies at an ICE detention facility in Georgia represents the type of demonization and abuse that must be exposed, repudiated and punished and that has flourished during Wolf’s time at DHS,” America’s Voice continued. “From ICE facilities lacking rudimentary health care to allegations of sexual abuse to a disturbing pattern of deaths in custody, the entire detention system and their leaders deserve investigation—not promotion or Senate confirmation.”
But the Trump administration seeks to promote Unlawful Chad not just because it’s scrambling to try to protect the policies he’s unlawfully signed into place while unlawfully leading the department, but because his priority has been to secure Donald Trump’s presidency, not the “homeland.” Another example: During his “State of the Homeland Address” at DHS headquarters this month, Unlawful Chad ignored actual white supremacist terror threats facing the nation to instead spew anti-immigrant garbage for his boss. Unlawful Chad’s nomination must be blocked, and he must go.