Trump almost got away with firing the guy who was investigating Mike Pompeo — but now it's all falling apart

Throughout Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency, he’s always been able to give even his most questionable and obviously self-interested decisions a veneer of reasonableness, even if only to the 35 percent of Americans whose support has never wavered.

Yet when it comes to his decision to dismiss State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, he has not even tried.

Trump announced the move in what DC veterans call a “Friday night news dump” last week by releasing a perfunctory letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring that he “no longer” has “the fullest confidence” in Linick — who has been the State Department’s top watchdog since 2013. When asked why he’d decided to start the process to end his tenure as Inspector General (which requires Congress be given 30 days’ notice), White House officials said Trump had made the decision at the recommendation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Not long after that, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel announced that he’d learned Linick had been investigating whether Pompeo had improperly ordered federal employees to perform personal tasks such as picking up his dry cleaning, making restaurant reservations for him and his wife, and walking his dog, Sherman.

An investigation into such matters would be consistent with reports from last year which indicated that House Democrats were investigating a whistleblower’s complaint over Pompeo turning his Diplomatic Security Service security detail into his personal valets by directing them to pick up Chinese food takeout and retrieve Sherman from the dog groomer.

Linick’s dismissal during an investigation into Pompeo is the latest in a string of firings which Trump has initiated since the end of his impeachment trial. The circumstances under which Linick’s firing was announced “strongly [suggest] that this is an unlawful act of retaliation,” Engel said.

Pompeo added yet another layer of mystery to the matter over the weekend by taking to Twitter to introduce his 114,000 followers to a new puppy called Mercer, raising the possibility that Sherman had blown the (dog)whistle on his best friend’s misdeeds and was being retaliated against, though sources close to Sherman maintain that he is a very good boy, is innocent of any wrongdoing, and remains a close adviser to the country’s top diplomat.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Pompeo confirmed that he’d advised Trump to fire Linick, but denied knowing about the probe into his use of DSS agents as “UberEats with guns”.

But Linick’s dismissal could be much more than a matter prompted by yet another Trump cabinet secretary’s personal ethics having gone to the dogs.

On Monday, Engel said in a statement that he’d “learned that there may be another reason for Mr Linick’s firing”.

"His office was investigating — at my request — Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia,” Engel said. "We don’t have the full picture yet, but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr Linick pushed out before this work could be completed.”

And while Trump’s previous firings of Inspector Generals have not stirred much activity among even those Senate Republicans who’ve long supported such watchdogs, this latest action prompted some — including Iowa’s Chuck Grassley — to stir from their customary somnolescence.

Yet when reporters asked Trump to explain his decision, he all but threw Pompeo under the proverbial bus by confirming that Pompeo had asked him to fire Linick, adding for good measure that he’d given agency heads carte blanche to ask him to fire any Inspector General who’d been appointed by his predecessor.

“So I don't know him. I never heard of him. But they asked me to terminate him,” Trump said. “I've said, ‘Who appointed him?’ And they said, ‘President Obama.’ I said, ‘Look, I'll terminate him’”.

He added: “I don't know what's going on other than that, but you'd have to ask Mike Pompeo.”

“The Inspector Generals, when they're put in by Obama — just like it could be that if they were put in by me and it was somebody else's administration, especially the other party, it could very well be that you'd be treated unfairly. But we've had a lot of cases where we thought that was unfair,” he continued.

Though Trump could not say how he or Pompeo had been treated unfairly by Linick or other Inspector Generals, he has frequently suggested that it is unfair for watchdogs or law enforcement to investigate Republicans because no one working in the Obama administration was indicted during Obama’s term in office.

But for government ethics experts, the reason more Trump officials are investigated is simple: There are more investigations because there is such widespread disregard for established norms, rules, and laws.

“This is an administration where the lines between professional duties and personal benefit have largely faded,” said Noah Bookbinder, the Executive Director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “A lot of this starts from the top where you have the president putting his daughter and son-in-law into senior positions. This idea that that government is there to benefit him and to benefit the family, and to be a family business, seems to be part of the ethos of the place.”

Bookbinder added that the disdain for the ethical guardrails that Obama administration officials followed so scrupulously flows downward from the president’s decision to not divest from his business before taking office, and his belief “that government employees need to be absolutely loyal, which means promoting the political interest of the president”.

“You have people getting fired because they are doing their jobs carrying out investigations or reporting things that are supposed to be reported… because these employees are thought of as… employees of the president and of his appointees and friends,” he continued. “Doing anything that is not in his interest is seen as going against the way they look at these jobs. They don't see government employees as having a set of responsibilities to the country. They see them as employees with a set of responsibilities to them personally.”

Melanie Sloan, a senior adviser for the transparency group American Oversight, said the hostility to accountability displayed by Trump and his top aides is “consistent but not surprising” for an administration that “has demonstrated, on a near-daily basis, a lack of concern and interest in ethical rules and regulations”.

“When you have people at the top engaged in the worst conduct, then it becomes fine for everybody else, like the racism that we see throughout the country. When you see it at the top, that's where you get your leadership and everyone else takes their cues,” she said.

“The problem is, they get away with it because the Senate refuses to do anything about it,” she continued. “Any one of these actions would be cause for outrage by another president and yet the Senate and [Mitch] McConnell has decided to let it all go.”

Sloan recalled how Grassley had held up a number of Obama’s nominees because Obama fired Gerald Walpin, who had been the Inspector General charged with investigating matters at national service programs like AmeriCorps.

“But contrast that with the parade of terminations of Inspector Generals [under Trump] and the lack of any remotely equivalent sense of outrage… He's not threatening to hold up anything, he's done almost nothing in contrast to how he behaved, how he acted about Walton, and this is what — five or six Inspector Generals fired in just the last few weeks?”

Both Sloan and Bookbinder said reversing the trend of wholesale disregard for ethics under Trump will take the passage of significant ethics reform legislation, which Sloan predicted would become a popular cause among Republicans should former Vice President Joe Biden defeat Trump in November.

However, Sloan said it will take more than ethics reform to get to the truth about abuses and violations of law committed under Trump. Biden, she predicted, will need to “put teams in each agency” to investigate what has happened over the past four years. She added that the same rank-and-file federal workers who Trump has spent years demonizing as the “deep state” will most likely be “more than happy” to restore accountability to their agencies.

“The people who've managed to stay and deal through all this time will probably come forward and when they’re not afraid of losing their jobs, they'll probably talk,” she said.

But Joe Walsh, the ex-Illinois Tea Party Congressman who briefly mounted a primary challenge to Trump earlier this year, said rooting out the abuses of the Trump era and healing the damage to the country will take much more effort and imagination because Trump will not fade into the background like previous ex-presidents.

“I don't believe that Donald Trump will acknowledge he lost, I don't believe he'll congratulate Joe Biden when Joe Biden wins, I don't believe Donald Trump will show up at the inauguration, and then I think Donald Trump will try to cause a lot of trouble beyond that,” he said. “I think because of all of this — because it's unprecedented in this country, how he will behave after he loses — I think you're going to have to see some real institutional support, like some sort of bipartisan commission, some sort of something to help legitimize Biden, because Trump will do whatever he can to delegitimize him.”

Walsh said a future Biden administration could find a useful example in the de-Nazification policy laid out by the Second World War-era Allied Powers during the occupation of Germany.

“I think the Germany model is the way to go because they've got to be held accountable. It's been three-and-a-half years now, so everybody under his command who is doing what they know is wrong, there's no excuse for it, and we cannot ever go here again,” he said.

“Department by department, in areas and arenas where this President has overstepped his bounds and abused his powers and broken and abused policies, everybody who carried out these orders is going to have to be dealt with.”