Grassley Says White House ‘Failed’ To Give Good Reason For IG Firings

"Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said Tuesday that the White House “failed” to provide a “good reason” for President Donald Trump’s firing of two inspectors general he had inquired about.

The two were inspector general for the intelligence community Michael Atkinson, and State Department IG Steve Linick.

Grassley said that the White House’s response also did not address the “glaring conflict of interest” created by Trump nominating replacements from the overseen department, some of whom are maintaining both positions at once.

“If the president has a good reason to remove an inspector general, just tell Congress what it is,” Grassley said in a statement. “Otherwise, the American people will be left speculating whether political or self interests are to blame.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/grassley-white-house-failed-inspectors-general-firing
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Realistically, is Trump concerned about this rebuke? No. Should he be? Yes. He never should have fired the IG's in the first place.

Why isn't he concerned? Because it won't effect how his base thinks about him. Why is that? Because experience has shown him he can say and do anything without fear of losing support from The Following. How can that be, it's crazy? Dear Leader is infallible.

Can the firings (and two others) be considered a sign Trump feels he does not have to abide by rules, protocol, norms, the intent behind the establishment of IG positions, and law (it is against the law to fire IG's without providing just cause to Congress)? Obviously, yes.

Will congressional Repubs do anything about this abuse of power? No.

 

Just getting ahead of the curve.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trump-twists-record-on-inspectors-general/

 

Pssst! The president can fire anyone he wants in the executive branch. That's why they call him the president.

 

One by one Republican Senators are suddenly realizing that Trump is a corrupt President. And that they made him even more corrupt by voting against his removal based on the precept that a President should be allowed to abuse power.

Do they now want to put the genie back in the bottle? Or are they sensing that things might not go their way in November, and are now realizing that what they decided can also be used by a Democrat in the Presidency?

 

For once I fully agree with Grassley.

 

There are no laws against abuse of power, either.
You can't fire someone with corrupt intent, and the IGs were looking into WH shenanigans, so Occam's razor is that he's firing the IG to block investigations into this administration in some capacity that he doesn't want the public to find out about.

If you are okay with that, then you are okay with corruption.

 

I read the article listed, and as it regards Atkinson, while the "whistleblower complaint" matched the items on the call, it was not verbatim accurate. Getting something 50% accurate, is not a truthful testimony. Otherwise, we could say Adam Schiff was telling the truth with his mockery of a parody.

Furthermore, what the President did was neither an abuse of power, nor illegal. In the ideal world, the DNC vets its candidates but unfortunately, that's not the DNC we have. Someone had to vet these potential abuses of power by Biden and it sure as hell wasn't going to be the DNC.

But on that note, I would like to chatise several senators whom have come out on recent days to give us a most laughable excuse pertaining to the recent investigations. To them, we cannot look over the information we've received, or trust the information they say because of "Russian disinformation", or that it comes from abroad.

What that really means, and this should be chilling: If an American Official of either party commits a crime or crimes abroad, we cannot trust any information that comes from the other country, because after all we can't "discern" it. That however, runs against how they've all trusted Christopher Steele and the dossier. Is it that British foreign interference is acceptable and permissible and believable, but other countries aren't?

This isn't merely a Trump issue, the acting Senate intelligence chairman has just revealed to us a loophole that I imagine has been exploited by many politicians in the past, on both sides. The words of the chairman and several senators have revealed that far from Trump corruption, we have good reason not to trust the US Senate in its entirety.

 

Shaking down a foreign leader for private gain is the very definition of abuse of power.

 

Except they got the funds a whole FIVE months before they began any such investigation(and they began their probe literally a month after the impeachment ended.)

Now you've got the US Senate diddling and muddling along, saying it can't trust or verify some of the explosive information out of Ukraine and therefore basically, doesn't want to. What acting chairman Rubio has effectively said today is this: If you're a US Official and you commit a crime abroad, any evidence abroad would be inadmissible because we don't believe it.

 

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing, care to elaborate ( and source ) ?

 

Not violating the letter of the law doesn't mean the spirit of the law was not violated.

"According to public reports, Atkinson was effectively removed from his position prior to the completion of the notice period. And in Trump’s letter informing Congress of his reasoning, he stated only that he had lost confidence in Atkinson. The bipartisan letter responds:
Congressional intent is clear that an expression of lost confidence, without further explanation, is not sufficient to fulfill the requirements of the statute. This is in large part because Congress intended that inspectors general only be removed when there is clear evidence of wrongdoing or failure to perform the duties of the office, and not for reasons unrelated to their performance, to help preserve IG independence."
https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-legally-and-illegally-fire-inspectors-general

What happened when Obama fired an IG?

"It (saying confidence in the IG was lost) is also the precise reason and language that President Barack Obama used in 2009 when he fired Gerald Walpin as inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), though the Obama White House within a week after the termination provided detailed reasons for the firing."
https://www.lawfareblog.com/legal-issues-implicated-trumps-firing-state-department-inspector-general

"In fact, Congress so closely guarded the independence of inspectors general that a move by Obama to abruptly oust the AmeriCorps IG in 2009 prompted a five-month investigation by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and then-Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that resulted in a 62-page report sharply criticizing the decision."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/24/trump-inspectors-general-constitution-275359

Obama removed one IG, explained why in detail, and was investigated for 5 months.

Trump fires 4 IG's for clear reasons of retribution and refuses to explain why (so far).

Is this really what Trump fans voted for? A prez who regards himself to be accountable to no one.

 

Sadly that's the only way to change the culture in DC which decide some time back that they are the masters of the public rather than the servants there of.