Trump’s political Misadventures Drags Government Image Down The Tubes
Americans have mistrusted their government ever since its founding in 1776 but under trump, the skepticism and suspicion have been inflamed to reach a subterranean level never seen before, a level so low as to endanger the future of democracy.
In large part, trump sowed mistrust by politicizing the government as he appointed corrupt, unqualified majordomos who vowed allegiance to trump. That includes the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security and its inspector general, the Department of Justice, including the FBI and the Attorney General; the Environmental Protection Agency, the Treasury Department, the National Weather Service, the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Supreme Court.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by trump supporters, said missing texts between high ranking trump officials that are being sought by the committee are “the biggest remaining mystery. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to learn. We don’t know what the political dynamics were within the Secret Service — And the committee is determined to find it out.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., another member of the committee, said that the Secret Service had dumped hundreds of thousands of documents on the committee last Tuesday morning, a familiar legal tactic to bury the important information in meaningless documents.
Politicizing the Secret Service, the Office of Inspector General and the Department of Homeland Security is the corruption scandal du jour because of revelations that text messages of Secret Service agents leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurgency were deleted more than a year ago and may never be recovered. Those messages could shed crucial light on the events surrounding the attempted coup and trump’s continuing efforts to claim he was robbed of victory in 2020 by widespread voter fraud, contentions that have been rejected in various courts and by virtually all experts in the field.
First, let’s examine the role of Joseph V. Cuffari, inspector general to the Department of Homeland Security. Cuffari reported to the House committee earlier this month that texts for trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli were missing for Jan. 5 and 6, a crucial period leading up to the Jan. 6 attack.
Cuffari said the homeland security department reported that texts were lost in a “reset” of government phones when officials left their posts in January 2021. The department’s undersecretary of management also told Cuffari that the text messages for its chief, undersecretary Randolph “Tex” Alles, the former Secret Service director, were also no longer available due to a previously planned phone reset. Alles, 68, was the Deputy Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Management. On April 25, 2017, trump appointed Alles as Director of the Secret Service but less than two years later, Alles resigned because he fell out of favor with trump, who reportedly referred to Alles as “dumbo.”
Cuffari did not lean on the department leadership to explain why they gave a deep six to the records, nor did he try to recover the lost data. He also neglected to alert Congress to the potential destruction of government records. Now, members of the House committee who fear Cuffari’s allegiance remains with trump, want him to step aside from the probe.
In September 2020, Brian Murphy, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence division, filed a whistleblower complaint, claiming that Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli, and Kirstjen Nielsen had politicized the Department of Homeland Security to support the views of trump and Stephen Miller, a close advisor and architect of many of the trump administration’s harsh immigration policies. Nielson served as Secretary of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019 when she resigned because of trump blamed her for the growing number of Central American families crossing the southern border. Nielsen’s successor, Kevin McAleenan, left the department after seven months out of frustration over trump’s efforts to politicize the department to help his re-election.
Cuffari began investigating the whistleblower allegations after the 2020 election. His office released no “intelligence products” specific for the Jan. 6 attack. On April 27, 2021, Brian Volsky, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s whistleblower protection unit, filed a memo accusing Cuffari, James Reede, who was the counsel to Cuffari and Kristen Fredericks, who was Cuffari’s chief of staff, of mishandling Brian Murphy’s complaints.
Trump nominated Cuffari, 63, to be Inspector General on July 25, 2019. A trump loyalist to the core, upon his confirmation, Cuffari rejected his staff’s recommendation to investigate what role the Secret Service played in forcibly removing protesters from Lafayette Square during a June 1, 2020, Trump photo op at St. John’s Church. Protesters had gathered peacefully in Washington, D.C., over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Law enforcement officers used tear gas and other riot control tactics to chase the protesters so that trump and senior administration officials could walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where trump held up a Bible and posed for a photo op in front of the church’s parish house, which had been damaged by a fire during protests the night before.
Cuffari also tried to corral the extent of investigation into the spread of COVID-19 in the Secret Service. It was later reported that 881 employees of the Secret Service had been infected with COVID-19, more than 11 percent of the agency.
Chad Wolf, 46, another trump appointee and key player in the situation, was named the acting secretary of homeland security in November 2019 but the appointment was ruled unlawful in November 2020 and Wolf resigned because under the valid line of succession, the acting secretary would be Chris Krebs, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Krebs, 45, was director from November 2018 until November 17, 2020, when trump fired him for contradicting trump’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. On Jan. 10, 2021, Krebs said trump should resign the presidency after the Capitol was attacked.
Wolf was also the under secretary of homeland security for strategy, policy, and plans from 2019 to 2021.
Wolf was a lobbyist from 2005 to 2017, helping clients secure contracts from the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security awarded $6,050,000 in contracts to Berkeley Research Group, where Wolf’s wife, Hope Wolf, is an executive, according to a published report.
Wolf helped craft the trump administration’s onerous family separation policy and was prominent in the controversial decision to deploy federal law enforcement to stem civil demonstrations in Portland, Ore., and elsewhere beginning in July 2020.
Tom Ridge, the first director of homeland security criticized the move.
“The department was established to protect America from the ever-present threat of global terrorism. It was not established to be the president’s personal militia,” Ridge said.
In September 2020, a whistleblower accused Wolf of having ordered staff to stop reporting on threats from Russia. According to published reports, trump told aides that he liked Wolf more than his predecessors because they had disagreed with trump’s expansive view of federal power. Wolf also was reported to have a good relationship with Stephen Miller.
During his tenure as head of homeland security, Wolf redirected resources toward antifa, a loose movement of left-wing agitators, counter to the advice of career officials and law enforcement who said the threat of domestic terrorism came from far right groups, not antifa.
In September 2020, Wolf defied a subpoena to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security. He resigned on Jan. 11, 2021, after the storming of the Capitol.
Kenneth Cuccinelli, 54, was trump’s senior official as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security from 2019 to 2021. Cuccinelli was previously attorney general of Virginia, where, as a self-described opponent of homosexuality, he defended anti-sodomy laws and prohibitions on same-sex marriage. Cuccinelli also rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and tried to block undocumented immigrants from attending universities, repeal birthright citizenship, and force employees to speak English in the workplace.
In May 2016, Cuccinelli was named general counsel of the FreedomWorks Foundation, which pushed false and misleading claims about mail-in-voting, targeting ad campaigns on swing states with high concentrations of minority voters.
Cuccinelli defended the deployment of federal agents dressed in camouflage and tactical gear to Portland, Ore., where they detained protestors and held them in unmarked vehicles.
According to a whistleblower complaint released in September 2020, Cuccinelli ordered the intelligence branch at homeland security to modify its intelligence assessments to downplay the threat posed by white supremacy groups and to instead focus on “left-wing” groups such as the antifa movement.
On New Year’s Eve of 2020, Trump pressured Cuccinelli to seize voting machines in swing states and help him block the peaceful transfer of power. Trump falsely told him that the acting attorney general had just said that it was Cuccinelli’s job to seize voting machines “and you’re not doing your job.”