FYI, the Benghazi fiasco occurred on 9/11, and Odumbo's absence has never been satisfactorily explained. Originally Posted by I B HankeringHillariousNoMore was "handling" it!
She so informed Chelsea by text.
- LexusLover
- 10-13-2019, 11:16 AM
She so informed Chelsea by text.
- lustylad
- 10-14-2019, 12:39 AM
Whistleblowers and the Real Deep State
Civil servants too often forget they work for the people and seek to impose their own policy agendas.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Oct. 11, 2019 6:23 pm ET
House Democrats are plowing ahead with an impeachment effort inspired by accusations from an anonymous “whistleblower.” The lawmakers may allow the witness to testify anonymously, sources who themselves remained anonymous told the Washington Post this week. It’s as if the whole effort is designed to confirm President Trump’s complaint that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage his presidency.
By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.
The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.
Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”
Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.
The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?
That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since. The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, made a study of Mr. Trump’s first 18 weeks in office. It found the administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.” Nearly 80% focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.” Unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a felony.
Employees also started using social media to “resist.” A National Parks Service employee used an official Twitter account to troll Mr. Trump, passing along a post that showed side-by-side comparison of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the larger one at Mr. Obama’s. Around the time of the Yates firing, someone in the Pentagon set up the Twitter account @Rogue_DOD, on which was posted a damaging opinion piece about Trump and internal documents about climate change. A former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up @viralCDC, with the description: “The unofficial ‘Resistance’ page of the CDC.” Its pinned tweet read: “If they choose to make facts controversial, the purveyors of facts must step into the controversy. #ScienceMarch #resist.”
These details come from a Jan. 31, 2017, Washington Post story, which reported that “180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.” The report added that some federal employees were in “regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees” about how to oppose the administration, while others were planning to “slow” their work if asked to focus on anything other than their policy “mission” as they understood it.
At the State Department, resisters organized a “cable” protesting Mr. Trump’s travel ban. It worked its way through dozens of U.S. embassies and ultimately had at least 1,000 signatures. The cable was part of a “dissent channel” that Foggy Bottom maintains to allow officials to disagree with policy, and it is meant to be confidential. The resisters made the letter public, bragging about the numbers of signers and anonymously slamming Mr. Trump. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed State Department official: “There is overwhelming disgust and shock at this executive order.”
A former Obama assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski, acknowledged sarcastically that such a protest was unprecedented. “Is it unusual?” he said to the Post. “There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.” (Mr. Malinowski is now a congressman from New Jersey.)
Many Obama holdovers have openly worked to cause mayhem in the new administration. Consider Walter Shaub, whom Mr. Obama appointed in 2013 to run the Office of Government Ethics. That office isn’t a watchdog. It doesn’t adjudicate, investigate or prosecute ethics violations or complaints. It was set up in 1978 to help the White House; its webpage notes it is there to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions.
Mr. Trump came to office with more such questions than most, and the Office of Government Ethics should have been a valuable resource. Instead, within weeks of the election, Mr. Shaub was mimicking the president-elect from an official Twitter account: “@realDonaldTrump OGE is delighted that you’ve decided to divest your businesses. Right decision!” “@realDonaldTrump Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!” When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance.
At one point Mr. Shaub sent one of his critical missives to hundreds of government ethics officials, every inspector general, and the chairmen and ranking members of numerous congressional committees. When administration officials began to call him out on his behavior, he loudly resigned and immediately landed a job at the liberal Campaign Legal Center.
Bureaucrats also began filing official internal complaints, demanding to get to define their own policies and programs. In July 2017, an Interior Department employee named Joel Clement published a Washington Post op-ed titled “I’m a Scientist. I’m Blowing the Whistle on the Trump Administration.” He began his piece: “I am not a member of the deep state.”
He explained that he had just filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal body that regulates and protects civil servants. For seven years Mr. Clement had worked at Interior, helping “endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate.” Now he, along with more than two dozen other senior career Interior employees, had been reassigned to working in fossil fuels. He claimed this reassignment was retaliation “for speaking out publicly about the danger that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.” He called himself a “whistleblower.” At least he put his name on the article.
Although the law protects civil servants from being fired, departments have broad authority to reassign them. Setting policy priorities wasn’t Mr. Clement’s job. Yet his complaint inspired eight Senate Democrats to demand an Interior inspector general investigation. Notably, that 2018 report did not find evidence of Mr. Clement’s charges of retaliation. As then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt noted, the department’s actions were entirely “lawful.” Mr. Clement in the fall of 2017 resigned with a much-publicized letter to then-Secretary Ryan Zinke: “Your agenda profoundly undermines the DOI mission and betrays the American people.” Mr. Clement is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists.
In December 2017, such acts of defiance led the Atlantic to celebrate the “Year of the Civil Servant.” The article hailed the bureaucracy for toiling through “the president’s chaotic first year in office.” It saluted those who had fought against an administration that had made it “nearly impossible” for them to “do their jobs.”
But the job of civil servants is to implement, not undermine, the policies established by elected officials. A government paycheck doesn’t entitle them to call the shots. The bureaucratic resistance has used its power to delay and undermine Trump proposals, leak government information, gin up controversies to run Trump cabinet heads out of Washington—and now provide an excuse for impeachment. Many call themselves whistleblowers, but that’s a bastardization of an honorable word. Whistleblowers expose government fraud; resisters sabotage policy and attempt to undermine an elected government’s legitimacy.
Government workers are a vital part of society. Yet voters have become deeply suspicious—and rightly so—of the federal bureaucracy. That’s damaging the country. Democrats insist they must remove Mr. Trump from office to save America’s institutions and restore its norms. Who’s doing the real damage to institutions and norms? The resistance should look in the mirror.
Ms. Strassel is the Journal’s Potomac Watch columnist. This article is adapted from her book, “Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America,” to be published Oct. 15
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whistle...te-11570832622
Civil servants too often forget they work for the people and seek to impose their own policy agendas.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Oct. 11, 2019 6:23 pm ET
House Democrats are plowing ahead with an impeachment effort inspired by accusations from an anonymous “whistleblower.” The lawmakers may allow the witness to testify anonymously, sources who themselves remained anonymous told the Washington Post this week. It’s as if the whole effort is designed to confirm President Trump’s complaint that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage his presidency.
By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.
The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.
Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”
Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.
The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?
That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since. The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, made a study of Mr. Trump’s first 18 weeks in office. It found the administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.” Nearly 80% focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.” Unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a felony.
Employees also started using social media to “resist.” A National Parks Service employee used an official Twitter account to troll Mr. Trump, passing along a post that showed side-by-side comparison of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the larger one at Mr. Obama’s. Around the time of the Yates firing, someone in the Pentagon set up the Twitter account @Rogue_DOD, on which was posted a damaging opinion piece about Trump and internal documents about climate change. A former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up @viralCDC, with the description: “The unofficial ‘Resistance’ page of the CDC.” Its pinned tweet read: “If they choose to make facts controversial, the purveyors of facts must step into the controversy. #ScienceMarch #resist.”
These details come from a Jan. 31, 2017, Washington Post story, which reported that “180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.” The report added that some federal employees were in “regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees” about how to oppose the administration, while others were planning to “slow” their work if asked to focus on anything other than their policy “mission” as they understood it.
At the State Department, resisters organized a “cable” protesting Mr. Trump’s travel ban. It worked its way through dozens of U.S. embassies and ultimately had at least 1,000 signatures. The cable was part of a “dissent channel” that Foggy Bottom maintains to allow officials to disagree with policy, and it is meant to be confidential. The resisters made the letter public, bragging about the numbers of signers and anonymously slamming Mr. Trump. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed State Department official: “There is overwhelming disgust and shock at this executive order.”
A former Obama assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski, acknowledged sarcastically that such a protest was unprecedented. “Is it unusual?” he said to the Post. “There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.” (Mr. Malinowski is now a congressman from New Jersey.)
Many Obama holdovers have openly worked to cause mayhem in the new administration. Consider Walter Shaub, whom Mr. Obama appointed in 2013 to run the Office of Government Ethics. That office isn’t a watchdog. It doesn’t adjudicate, investigate or prosecute ethics violations or complaints. It was set up in 1978 to help the White House; its webpage notes it is there to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions.
Mr. Trump came to office with more such questions than most, and the Office of Government Ethics should have been a valuable resource. Instead, within weeks of the election, Mr. Shaub was mimicking the president-elect from an official Twitter account: “@realDonaldTrump OGE is delighted that you’ve decided to divest your businesses. Right decision!” “@realDonaldTrump Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!” When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance.
At one point Mr. Shaub sent one of his critical missives to hundreds of government ethics officials, every inspector general, and the chairmen and ranking members of numerous congressional committees. When administration officials began to call him out on his behavior, he loudly resigned and immediately landed a job at the liberal Campaign Legal Center.
Bureaucrats also began filing official internal complaints, demanding to get to define their own policies and programs. In July 2017, an Interior Department employee named Joel Clement published a Washington Post op-ed titled “I’m a Scientist. I’m Blowing the Whistle on the Trump Administration.” He began his piece: “I am not a member of the deep state.”
He explained that he had just filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal body that regulates and protects civil servants. For seven years Mr. Clement had worked at Interior, helping “endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate.” Now he, along with more than two dozen other senior career Interior employees, had been reassigned to working in fossil fuels. He claimed this reassignment was retaliation “for speaking out publicly about the danger that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.” He called himself a “whistleblower.” At least he put his name on the article.
Although the law protects civil servants from being fired, departments have broad authority to reassign them. Setting policy priorities wasn’t Mr. Clement’s job. Yet his complaint inspired eight Senate Democrats to demand an Interior inspector general investigation. Notably, that 2018 report did not find evidence of Mr. Clement’s charges of retaliation. As then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt noted, the department’s actions were entirely “lawful.” Mr. Clement in the fall of 2017 resigned with a much-publicized letter to then-Secretary Ryan Zinke: “Your agenda profoundly undermines the DOI mission and betrays the American people.” Mr. Clement is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists.
In December 2017, such acts of defiance led the Atlantic to celebrate the “Year of the Civil Servant.” The article hailed the bureaucracy for toiling through “the president’s chaotic first year in office.” It saluted those who had fought against an administration that had made it “nearly impossible” for them to “do their jobs.”
But the job of civil servants is to implement, not undermine, the policies established by elected officials. A government paycheck doesn’t entitle them to call the shots. The bureaucratic resistance has used its power to delay and undermine Trump proposals, leak government information, gin up controversies to run Trump cabinet heads out of Washington—and now provide an excuse for impeachment. Many call themselves whistleblowers, but that’s a bastardization of an honorable word. Whistleblowers expose government fraud; resisters sabotage policy and attempt to undermine an elected government’s legitimacy.
Government workers are a vital part of society. Yet voters have become deeply suspicious—and rightly so—of the federal bureaucracy. That’s damaging the country. Democrats insist they must remove Mr. Trump from office to save America’s institutions and restore its norms. Who’s doing the real damage to institutions and norms? The resistance should look in the mirror.
Ms. Strassel is the Journal’s Potomac Watch columnist. This article is adapted from her book, “Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America,” to be published Oct. 15
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whistle...te-11570832622
- dilbert firestorm
- 10-14-2019, 03:05 AM
Whistleblowers and the Real Deep State
Civil servants too often forget they work for the people and seek to impose their own policy agendas.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Oct. 11, 2019 6:23 pm ET
House Democrats are plowing ahead with an impeachment effort inspired by accusations from an anonymous “whistleblower.” The lawmakers may allow the witness to testify anonymously, sources who themselves remained anonymous told the Washington Post this week. It’s as if the whole effort is designed to confirm President Trump’s complaint that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage his presidency.
By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.
The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.
Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”
Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.
The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?
That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since. The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, made a study of Mr. Trump’s first 18 weeks in office. It found the administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.” Nearly 80% focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.” Unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a felony.
Employees also started using social media to “resist.” A National Parks Service employee used an official Twitter account to troll Mr. Trump, passing along a post that showed side-by-side comparison of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the larger one at Mr. Obama’s. Around the time of the Yates firing, someone in the Pentagon set up the Twitter account @Rogue_DOD, on which was posted a damaging opinion piece about Trump and internal documents about climate change. A former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up @viralCDC, with the description: “The unofficial ‘Resistance’ page of the CDC.” Its pinned tweet read: “If they choose to make facts controversial, the purveyors of facts must step into the controversy. #ScienceMarch #resist.”
These details come from a Jan. 31, 2017, Washington Post story, which reported that “180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.” The report added that some federal employees were in “regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees” about how to oppose the administration, while others were planning to “slow” their work if asked to focus on anything other than their policy “mission” as they understood it.
At the State Department, resisters organized a “cable” protesting Mr. Trump’s travel ban. It worked its way through dozens of U.S. embassies and ultimately had at least 1,000 signatures. The cable was part of a “dissent channel” that Foggy Bottom maintains to allow officials to disagree with policy, and it is meant to be confidential. The resisters made the letter public, bragging about the numbers of signers and anonymously slamming Mr. Trump. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed State Department official: “There is overwhelming disgust and shock at this executive order.”
A former Obama assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski, acknowledged sarcastically that such a protest was unprecedented. “Is it unusual?” he said to the Post. “There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.” (Mr. Malinowski is now a congressman from New Jersey.)
Many Obama holdovers have openly worked to cause mayhem in the new administration. Consider Walter Shaub, whom Mr. Obama appointed in 2013 to run the Office of Government Ethics. That office isn’t a watchdog. It doesn’t adjudicate, investigate or prosecute ethics violations or complaints. It was set up in 1978 to help the White House; its webpage notes it is there to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions.
Mr. Trump came to office with more such questions than most, and the Office of Government Ethics should have been a valuable resource. Instead, within weeks of the election, Mr. Shaub was mimicking the president-elect from an official Twitter account: “@realDonaldTrump OGE is delighted that you’ve decided to divest your businesses. Right decision!” “@realDonaldTrump Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!” When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance.
At one point Mr. Shaub sent one of his critical missives to hundreds of government ethics officials, every inspector general, and the chairmen and ranking members of numerous congressional committees. When administration officials began to call him out on his behavior, he loudly resigned and immediately landed a job at the liberal Campaign Legal Center.
Bureaucrats also began filing official internal complaints, demanding to get to define their own policies and programs. In July 2017, an Interior Department employee named Joel Clement published a Washington Post op-ed titled “I’m a Scientist. I’m Blowing the Whistle on the Trump Administration.” He began his piece: “I am not a member of the deep state.”
He explained that he had just filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal body that regulates and protects civil servants. For seven years Mr. Clement had worked at Interior, helping “endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate.” Now he, along with more than two dozen other senior career Interior employees, had been reassigned to working in fossil fuels. He claimed this reassignment was retaliation “for speaking out publicly about the danger that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.” He called himself a “whistleblower.” At least he put his name on the article.
Although the law protects civil servants from being fired, departments have broad authority to reassign them. Setting policy priorities wasn’t Mr. Clement’s job. Yet his complaint inspired eight Senate Democrats to demand an Interior inspector general investigation. Notably, that 2018 report did not find evidence of Mr. Clement’s charges of retaliation. As then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt noted, the department’s actions were entirely “lawful.” Mr. Clement in the fall of 2017 resigned with a much-publicized letter to then-Secretary Ryan Zinke: “Your agenda profoundly undermines the DOI mission and betrays the American people.” Mr. Clement is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists.
In December 2017, such acts of defiance led the Atlantic to celebrate the “Year of the Civil Servant.” The article hailed the bureaucracy for toiling through “the president’s chaotic first year in office.” It saluted those who had fought against an administration that had made it “nearly impossible” for them to “do their jobs.”
But the job of civil servants is to implement, not undermine, the policies established by elected officials. A government paycheck doesn’t entitle them to call the shots. The bureaucratic resistance has used its power to delay and undermine Trump proposals, leak government information, gin up controversies to run Trump cabinet heads out of Washington—and now provide an excuse for impeachment. Many call themselves whistleblowers, but that’s a bastardization of an honorable word. Whistleblowers expose government fraud; resisters sabotage policy and attempt to undermine an elected government’s legitimacy.
Government workers are a vital part of society. Yet voters have become deeply suspicious—and rightly so—of the federal bureaucracy. That’s damaging the country. Democrats insist they must remove Mr. Trump from office to save America’s institutions and restore its norms. Who’s doing the real damage to institutions and norms? The resistance should look in the mirror.
Ms. Strassel is the Journal’s Potomac Watch columnist. This article is adapted from her book, “Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America,” to be published Oct. 15
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whistle...te-11570832622 Originally Posted by lustylad
if you can't do your job honestly and follow the presidents orders, you should quit or get fired! stuff like leaking or sabotaging policy objectives should get you fired!!!
the non-political professional civil class that was created in 1870's is broken. what we have here now is a "reverse" spoils system.
- LexusLover
- 10-14-2019, 07:37 AM
Adam Shitface is now (yesterday) touting the "story" that the Whistelblower won't be called to testify so as to conceal his identity .... he's "protecting" the Whistelblower from perjury charges? The "investigation" doesn't need facts ... only rumors and innuendos. ALA...
- eccielover
- 10-14-2019, 08:11 AM
Adam Shitface is now (yesterday) touting the "story" that the Whistelblower won't be called to testify so as to conceal his identity .... he's "protecting" the Whistelblower from perjury charges? The "investigation" doesn't need facts ... only rumors and innuendos. Originally Posted by LexusLoverYeah, that was about right on time yesterday. Their narrative with the whistleblowers is quickly falling apart, so pretending they don't matter or exist is just up their alley.
Yanovich is quickly turning into a failure as well.
- dilbert firestorm
- 10-14-2019, 11:15 AM
looks like covering up Obama's corruption is getting harder and harder...
Tsk, tsk....
Tsk, tsk....
- nevergaveitathought
- 10-14-2019, 04:08 PM
the term "deep state "I think was first used about the intrigues of Turkey's government's functionaries
in the united states the idea of a deep state, in hindsight, might be seen in general, then president, Dwight Eisenhower and his warnings about the military-industrial complex, one might even harken back to our very first president, ol' george himself, warning about foreign entanglements.
the left actually, not the right, began in earnest the belief in a dark aspect of the American intelligence community
they accused the u.s. intelligence community of driving the us into an ever deepening war in vietnam
there was a book written by a college professor titled "deep politics and the death of jfk", ....haven't read that book nor vouching for it, just giving the history of the term
even in popular culture, movies like the oliver stone treatment of jfk's assassination made a claim of a deep state- this coming from the left, not the right
but the look into the assassination of jfk did one thing for sure, exposed the intelligence community's working with organized crime and surveillance within the united states.
in 2014 a tufts university professor used the term "double government" in discussing the lingering powers of our national security institutions between and during presidential terms
couple all this with the unnaturally natural disposition of the bureaucracy to tilt far to the left in terms of maintaining power and pay and benefits and number of personnel and every other indices of power as dimocrats find a large part of the source of their power in the symbiotic slushes of funds between them and unions of all stripes and the dimocrat propensity to want to control all aspects of life, which requires an ever growing bureaucracy
senator schumer warned trump: Intel officials 'have six ways from sunday at getting back at you'
then after eight years of Obama teaming up with government functionaries to use the departments of our state against his political opposition it becomes ever more manifest something is afoot
just the simple abuse of our system of justice at the outset of Obama's administration by not prosecuting the club wielding thugs trying to intimidate voters in philadelphia
or his use to the epa to attack opposition and investigate and fine their businesses
or lois lerner in concert with the doj regarding political profiling
or Obama's assault on free speech and due process on college campuses where he had the department of education’s office of civil rights, in conjunction with the justice department, urge a crackdown on “unwelcome” speech and required complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere “more likely than not” standard.
not to mention myriad lies and coverups and use of the state department, doj, cia and fbi by his administration
then the kid glove treatment of hellary and her minions, not putting them under oath, giving them immunity in advance, not prosecuting one of them for what most americans could see as evident- all with an eye to protecting her for another 8 years of the bureaucratic expansion
then we come to the treatment of trump.
the set up and lying and "investigation and "wire-tapping" and fisa abuse and conspiracies AD NASEUAM
the immediate calls for impeachment beginning the night he won the election
comey et al trying to set up trump from the outset, even before he took office
the attacks on and set up of those working for trump
the jiggering of a special prosecutor who at one early stage told trump's lawyer john dowd there was no evidence of collusion, but refused to tell the American people that
the many leaks of information and attempts to head off trump's policies by government functionaries
and this second hand "whistleblower", seemingly poised for the right time and moment, a partisan, misusing the whistleblower statues to leak, all in conjunction with schiff and soros
the complaint was taken up immediately as proof of what? proof of nothing in the face of the real transcript , but was enough cover to let the dimocrats have something to investigate before the election, which is what this is all about
and there was the news media, holding the cloaks of these as they did their dark work
so given all that, its natural to think of conspiracy, its extreme partisanship and/or tin foil hat not to
in the united states the idea of a deep state, in hindsight, might be seen in general, then president, Dwight Eisenhower and his warnings about the military-industrial complex, one might even harken back to our very first president, ol' george himself, warning about foreign entanglements.
the left actually, not the right, began in earnest the belief in a dark aspect of the American intelligence community
they accused the u.s. intelligence community of driving the us into an ever deepening war in vietnam
there was a book written by a college professor titled "deep politics and the death of jfk", ....haven't read that book nor vouching for it, just giving the history of the term
even in popular culture, movies like the oliver stone treatment of jfk's assassination made a claim of a deep state- this coming from the left, not the right
but the look into the assassination of jfk did one thing for sure, exposed the intelligence community's working with organized crime and surveillance within the united states.
in 2014 a tufts university professor used the term "double government" in discussing the lingering powers of our national security institutions between and during presidential terms
couple all this with the unnaturally natural disposition of the bureaucracy to tilt far to the left in terms of maintaining power and pay and benefits and number of personnel and every other indices of power as dimocrats find a large part of the source of their power in the symbiotic slushes of funds between them and unions of all stripes and the dimocrat propensity to want to control all aspects of life, which requires an ever growing bureaucracy
senator schumer warned trump: Intel officials 'have six ways from sunday at getting back at you'
then after eight years of Obama teaming up with government functionaries to use the departments of our state against his political opposition it becomes ever more manifest something is afoot
just the simple abuse of our system of justice at the outset of Obama's administration by not prosecuting the club wielding thugs trying to intimidate voters in philadelphia
or his use to the epa to attack opposition and investigate and fine their businesses
or lois lerner in concert with the doj regarding political profiling
or Obama's assault on free speech and due process on college campuses where he had the department of education’s office of civil rights, in conjunction with the justice department, urge a crackdown on “unwelcome” speech and required complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere “more likely than not” standard.
not to mention myriad lies and coverups and use of the state department, doj, cia and fbi by his administration
then the kid glove treatment of hellary and her minions, not putting them under oath, giving them immunity in advance, not prosecuting one of them for what most americans could see as evident- all with an eye to protecting her for another 8 years of the bureaucratic expansion
then we come to the treatment of trump.
the set up and lying and "investigation and "wire-tapping" and fisa abuse and conspiracies AD NASEUAM
the immediate calls for impeachment beginning the night he won the election
comey et al trying to set up trump from the outset, even before he took office
the attacks on and set up of those working for trump
the jiggering of a special prosecutor who at one early stage told trump's lawyer john dowd there was no evidence of collusion, but refused to tell the American people that
the many leaks of information and attempts to head off trump's policies by government functionaries
and this second hand "whistleblower", seemingly poised for the right time and moment, a partisan, misusing the whistleblower statues to leak, all in conjunction with schiff and soros
the complaint was taken up immediately as proof of what? proof of nothing in the face of the real transcript , but was enough cover to let the dimocrats have something to investigate before the election, which is what this is all about
and there was the news media, holding the cloaks of these as they did their dark work
so given all that, its natural to think of conspiracy, its extreme partisanship and/or tin foil hat not to
- rexdutchman
- 10-15-2019, 09:14 AM
Just ask the Kenndy's about the deep state
- WTF
- 10-15-2019, 12:12 PM
- dilbert firestorm
- 10-15-2019, 10:15 PM
what conspiracy?
- The_Waco_Kid
- 10-15-2019, 10:49 PM
Adam Shitface is now (yesterday) touting the "story" that the Whistelblower won't be called to testify so as to conceal his identity .... he's "protecting" the Whistelblower from perjury charges? The "investigation" doesn't need facts ... only rumors and innuendos. ALA...
i guess that means Schitthead Schiff's attempts to have the "whistleblower" testify remotely and incognito are failing.
so now he won't testify at all and we'll just take his word for it. Right!!
if the "whistleblower" does have first hand knowledge then he was present in the situation room. how many were there? that is known only by those who were there, including Trump.
but if you think Schitthead Sciff not wanting the "whistleblower" to testify is shady .. then there is this about Marie Yovanovitch ..
https://nypost.com/2019/10/14/what-a...hment-inquiry/
What are the Democrats hiding about impeachment inquiry?
By Post Editorial Board
October 14, 2019 | 7:27pm | Updated
America’s top two Trump-hating newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have now both called on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote of the full House of Representatives to make the “impeachment inquiry” truly official — and to set rules like those for the inquiries targeting Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, so that the minority party and the White House weren’t totally sidelined.
So far, though, Pelosi and her impeachment pointman, Rep. Adam Schiff, are moving the opposite way.
President Trump and other Republicans have been complaining about Schiff’s decision to hold most hearings behind closed doors, yet the Intelligence Committee chief opted for even greater secrecy in last Friday’s questioning of Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine — conducting it as a deposition, which makes it a criminal offense for either side to discuss her answers.
That keeps even the rest of the House in the dark about everything except the opening statement Yovanovitch made public.
Schiff is going to even greater lengths when it comes to the whistleblower whose complaint launched this whole … adventure. He might not even have the guy testify — which would remove any chance for anyone to probe his motives and biases.
This, when Schiff has admitted that, contrary to his earlier account, his staff was in touch with the whistleblower before he’d even begun to file his complaint.
And when the Washington Examiner has revealed that at least two Schiff staffers (one of them hired in the midst of the complaint filing) worked with the whistleblower at the White House back when he was advising the Obama point man on Ukraine, Veep Joe Biden.
As Politico reported in 2017, Ukrainian officials during the 2016 campaign “tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office … disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and … [and] helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.” What did the whistleblower, and Schiff’s staffers, know about all that — and why did no one blow any whistles then?
What are they trying to hide?
Schiff doesn’t want anyone to get the chance to ask.
Pelosi has a clear duty here: Go to the full House to pass rules so her impeachment inquiry can be more than an outright frame job.
- WTF
- 10-16-2019, 09:38 AM
- rexdutchman
- 10-17-2019, 09:07 AM
That's funny , But all the incoherent tirades from the Big-T hates is just as funny
- WTF
- 10-18-2019, 11:59 AM
the term "deep state "I think was first used about the intrigues of Turkey's government's functionariesYou expect anyone to read all of that nonsense? If so....you are a true VIP.
in the united states the idea of a deep state, in hindsight, might be seen in general, then president, Dwight Eisenhower and his warnings about the military-industrial complex, one might even harken back to our very first president, ol' george himself, warning about foreign entanglements.
the left actually, not the right, began in earnest the belief in a dark aspect of the American intelligence community
they accused the u.s. intelligence community of driving the us into an ever deepening war in vietnam
there was a book written by a college professor titled "deep politics and the death of jfk", ....haven't read that book nor vouching for it, just giving the history of the term
even in popular culture, movies like the oliver stone treatment of jfk's assassination made a claim of a deep state- this coming from the left, not the right
but the look into the assassination of jfk did one thing for sure, exposed the intelligence community's working with organized crime and surveillance within the united states.
in 2014 a tufts university professor used the term "double government" in discussing the lingering powers of our national security institutions between and during presidential terms
couple all this with the unnaturally natural disposition of the bureaucracy to tilt far to the left in terms of maintaining power and pay and benefits and number of personnel and every other indices of power as dimocrats find a large part of the source of their power in the symbiotic slushes of funds between them and unions of all stripes and the dimocrat propensity to want to control all aspects of life, which requires an ever growing bureaucracy
senator schumer warned trump: Intel officials 'have six ways from sunday at getting back at you'
then after eight years of Obama teaming up with government functionaries to use the departments of our state against his political opposition it becomes ever more manifest something is afoot
just the simple abuse of our system of justice at the outset of Obama's administration by not prosecuting the club wielding thugs trying to intimidate voters in philadelphia
or his use to the epa to attack opposition and investigate and fine their businesses
or lois lerner in concert with the doj regarding political profiling
or Obama's assault on free speech and due process on college campuses where he had the department of education’s office of civil rights, in conjunction with the justice department, urge a crackdown on “unwelcome” speech and required complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trial, and convict based on a mere “more likely than not” standard.
not to mention myriad lies and coverups and use of the state department, doj, cia and fbi by his administration
then the kid glove treatment of hellary and her minions, not putting them under oath, giving them immunity in advance, not prosecuting one of them for what most americans could see as evident- all with an eye to protecting her for another 8 years of the bureaucratic expansion
then we come to the treatment of trump.
the set up and lying and "investigation and "wire-tapping" and fisa abuse and conspiracies AD NASEUAM
the immediate calls for impeachment beginning the night he won the election
comey et al trying to set up trump from the outset, even before he took office
the attacks on and set up of those working for trump
the jiggering of a special prosecutor who at one early stage told trump's lawyer john dowd there was no evidence of collusion, but refused to tell the American people that
the many leaks of information and attempts to head off trump's policies by government functionaries
and this second hand "whistleblower", seemingly poised for the right time and moment, a partisan, misusing the whistleblower statues to leak, all in conjunction with schiff and soros
the complaint was taken up immediately as proof of what? proof of nothing in the face of the real transcript , but was enough cover to let the dimocrats have something to investigate before the election, which is what this is all about
and there was the news media, holding the cloaks of these as they did their dark work
so given all that, its natural to think of conspiracy, its extreme partisanship and/or tin foil hat not to Originally Posted by nevergaveitathought
- lustylad
- 10-19-2019, 08:14 AM