The president is, by any measurable standard, really bad at handling staffing issues. For his White House to be effective, you’d think that he’d want to surround himself with people who don’t have major security issues in their background and who are equipped for the job — and ready to fill their position for a significant period of time — but that’s not the path the Trump White House has taken. Instead, the president has lost senior staffer after senior staffer as his administration has dragged on.
One of the senior members of the administration to be pushed out recently is Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin, who lost his job after a scandal involving misuse of government funds and time for travel came to light.
The president has nominated White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson to fill the position in Shulkin’s absence, but now, compounding issues with the nomination, allegations have come out against him of having led a wildly inappropriately functioning medical office throughout recent years.
The bulk of the allegations are found in a document released Wednesday by the Democrats of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. Included among them is a story of Jackson having personally taken it upon himself to dish out a large quantity of the opioid painkiller known as Percocet to a White House military office staff member and leaving his own staff in a “panic” when they discovered that the medication was missing, a panic facilitated in part by Jackson sometimes only recording a distribution of pills after it took place.
Ironically, it’s the Trump administration that has in recent weeks and months come out strongly against the improper distribution of opioids to the point of the president seeking the death penalty for certain drug dealers.
That’s not where the allegations of misconduct against the president’s pick to be the next VA Secretary end. Continuing on with the issue of mishandled medication, Jackson allegedly wrote himself prescriptions at times and had a physician’s assistant actually provide the medication to him after facing scrutiny inside the office.
Jackson is also alleged to have a penchant for drunkenness to the point of having “wrecked a government vehicle” while under the influence of alcohol at a Secret Service going away party, an allegation that Jackson has specifically and unsurprisingly denied.
In another alleged incident, while overseas with the Obama team in 2015, Jackson got drunk and banged on the door of a staff member’s hotel room to the point of attracting the attention of the Secret Service, which tried to get him to calm down in an effort to keep the president himself from being woken up by the noise.
For now, the White House is standing by Jackson. White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley insisted that the administration will not “write him off in any way before his hearing.”
The White House has stood by Jackson as questions swirl around the VA nominee. https://t.co/ASRJpl1zPI pic.twitter.com/2Mc0GFeCkm
— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) April 25, 2018
Jackson had initially been scheduled to appear before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee on Wednesday, but on Tuesday, committee leadership announced that they would be postponing that hearing in order to give them more time to look into the newly surfaced allegations. Those allegations reported by the committee itself are based on the testimony of nearly two dozen current and former colleagues of Jackson.
Featured Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
