You’re all in or you’re out
by Tom Sullivan
A senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has resigned, the Washington Post reported Thursday night. Michael McKinley had served as ambassador to Peru, Colombia, and Afghanistan as well as Brazil, most recently, over his three decades with the department. McKinley declined comment but is thought to have resigned over “rising dissatisfaction and plummeting morale inside the State Department over what is seen as Pompeo’s failure to support personnel ensnared in the Ukraine controversy.”
McKinley joins a “wider exodus” of career diplomats from the department during the Trump administration. When one of the department’s science envoys, Daniel Kammen, resigned in August 2017, he encoded the word IMPEACH into his resignation letter excoriating Trump’s attacks on “the core values of the United States.”
These officials left voluntarily. Others have been driven out.
The Post revealed Thursday that at least four national security officials raised concerns with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg before Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky:
At the time, the officials were unnerved by the removal in May of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, by subsequent efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to promote Ukraine-related conspiracies, as well as by signals in meetings at the White House that Trump wanted the new government in Kiev to deliver material that might be politically damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Seasoned Professionals Unwanted
Reports confirm U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was removed for being an obstacle to a scheme by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to find or fabricate such material for Trump’s reelection campaign. Federal authorities arrested Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two of Giuliani’s colleagues in the Ukraine effort, for campaign finance violations as they attempted on Wednesday to leave the country on one-way tickets. The pair were working with Giuliani and others to see Yovanovitch removed as part of a shadow foreign policy to advance Trump’s agenda. Removing seasoned policy professionals from decision-making in favor of Trump loyalists is a feature, not a bug, in the Trump White House.
The Wall Street Journal reports the White House sidelined career staffers at the Office of Management and Budget who questioned the legality of holding up Ukraine aid approved by Congress. Via Daily Beast:
After facing probing questions from career staff at the Office of Management and Budget, the White House shifted the authority to withhold nearly $400 million in aid to the Ukraine to a politically appointed official, The Wall Street Journal reports. OMB career civil servants are typically responsible for apportionment, the process of approving and releasing government funds; but the White House reportedly bucked this tradition, according to the newspaper, and instead gave the authority over funds earmarked for Ukraine to Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs in OMB. The shift to Duffey, previously a high-ranking Pentagon official and the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, was unusual, according to several former OMB officials.
The shift of authority to a political appointee provoked a Sept. 27 letter to OMB from House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), calling the move “unusual and seemingly unprecedented.” A senior administration official told Politico the acting head of OMB can delegate authority to anyone in the agency. Trump has bypassed the normal approval process for agency heads by appointing them in an acting capacity for lengthy periods. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, however, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February 2017.
Career professionals with experience and commitment to established, legal procedures are just sand in the gears of a White House that runs on presidential whims and one-way loyalty to the amateur-in-chief.