San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Dems probing ouster of inspector general
WASHINGTON — Two top congressional Democrats opened an investigation on Saturday into President Donald Trump’s removal of Steve Linick, who led the office of the inspector general at the State Department, citing a pattern of “politically-motivated firing of inspectors general.”
Trump told Speaker Nancy Pelosi late Friday night that he was ousting Linick, who was named by President Barack Obama to the State Department post, and replacing him with an ambassador with close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, in the latest purge of inspectors general whom Trump has deemed insufficiently loyal to his administration.
In letters to the White House, State Department, and Linick, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, requested that the administration turn over records and information related to the firing of Linick as well as “records of all IG investigations involving the Office of the Secretary that were open, pending, or incomplete at the time of Linick’s firing.”
Engel and Menendez said in their letters that they believe Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recommended Linick’s ouster because he had opened an investigation into Pompeo’s conduct. The lawmakers did not provide any more details, but a Democratic aide said that Linick had been looking into whether Pompeo had misused a political appointee at the State Department to perform personal tasks for himself and his wife.
“Such an action, transparently designed to protect Secretary Pompeo from personal accountability, would undermine the foundation of our democratic institutions and may be an illegal act of retaliation,” the lawmakers wrote.
Under law, the administration must notify Congress 30 days before formally terminating an inspector general. Linick is expected to leave his post then.
Trump’s decision to remove Linick is the latest in a series of ousters aimed at inspectors general who the president and his allies believe are opposed to his agenda.
In May, Trump moved to oust Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, whose office had issued a report revealing the dire state of the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. He has also taken steps to remove two other inspectors general, for the intelligence community and for the Defense Department.
Linick was spotlighted during the impeachment inquiry when he requested an urgent meeting with congressional staff members to give them copies of documents related to the State Department and Ukraine, signaling they could be relevant to the House investigation into whether Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The documents — a record of contacts between Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and Ukrainian prosecutors, as well as accounts of Ukrainian law enforcement proceedings — turned out to be largely inconsequential.