The list of things that will have to be fixed if Donald Trump is kicked out of office in November is vast. But the ongoing corruption of the oversight regime is should be at the top of the list.
The Pentagon’s inspector general “could not definitively determine” whether the White House influenced the procurement process for a major cloud computing contract because senior Defense Department officials were barred from answering questions on the subject during interviews, according to a 313-page report released on Wednesday.
Department personnel who evaluated proposals and awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract were not pressured by any senior DoD leaders, the IG found. But investigators were unable to rule out whether the White House interfered with the contract award because DoD’s general counsel instructed senior DoD witnesses not to verbally answer questions about communications between the White House and Pentagon because of “the assertion of a ‘presidential communications privilege.’”
I would worry that Donald Trump’s henchmen on the federal courts would ensure that this non-partisan oversight is dead forever but since they are partisan hacks before ideologues, they will likely uphold oversight for a Democratic president if it comes to that. So that’s good. I guess….