The year or so that the Trump administration has been in power has been chock full of controversies, with the president seemingly unable or unwilling to align himself and his team with standards of law and order and governance.
Now, this week, there’s yet another new scandal affecting Washington, D.C., this time poised to bring down the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, David Shulkin, who himself is actually a transplant from the Obama administration.
According to a report from the inspector general who oversees his department, which was released earlier this week, Shulkin’s chief of staff played a part in bilking American taxpayers out of thousands of dollars last year to pay for airfare for his wife to go overseas.
Now, that chief of staff — Vivieca Wright Simpson — has resigned, according to comments from Shulkin himself to the Military Times outlet.
The VA secretary commented Friday:
‘She called me this morning and told me she doesn’t want to be in this environment anymore.’
Simpson has been accused of altering official emails in order to obtain approval for Shulkin’s wife’s airfare to be funded by taxpayers. The inspector general overseeing the VA referred the matter to the Department of Justice, with it being an open question whether or not she could face criminal charges for “false representations and alteration of an official record.”
There’s been a complication, however, with Shulkin suggesting this week that Simpson’s email account may have been compromised. Thus, the VA secretary’s retort is that it wasn’t really his chief of staff who altered the official email.
On Thursday, following an appearance in front of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Shulkin commented to reporters:
‘I wish I could tell you why someone can take over someone’s email and impersonate them. We have found that someone has taken over the chief of staff’s email and sending emails as if it’s her. So we need to understand that.’
The veracity of Shulkin’s claim that his now former chief of staff had their email hacked is seemingly up in the air still.
On Thursday, ranking member on the House VA Committee, Democratic Rep. Tim Walz of Minnesota requested the Justice Department look into the allegations that Simpson had her email account hacked.
Obviously, this is far from the first time that an alleged email hack has ended up at the front of the national political conversation. In the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta had his email hacked as a part of the Russian scheme to tip the outcome of the election away from Clinton and towards Donald Trump.
The allegations of email hacking do not completely absolve Shulkin of wrongdoing, even if they’re true. His department’s inspector general has also gone after him for improperly accepting free Wimbledon tickets for himself and his wife and for wasting the department’s time on sightseeing during the trip he, his wife, and others took overseas last year.
In the months before this scandal broke, Trump had touted the supposed success of VA reforms accomplished under Shulkin, and the VA secretary says that he met with White House chief of staff John Kelly on Thursday on the topic of keeping a focus on those successes in the midst of the travel scandal.
Travel scandals have already taken out one Trump Cabinet member in the comparatively short time he’s been in office; last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned after it came out that he’d used massive amounts of taxpayer money to pay for charter flights.
Featured Image via Olivier Douliery/Pool via Bloomberg
