President Donald Trump only gets the “best people,” right? One of those “best people” who was in a top position in the Justice Department has resigned in the face of revelations that they’d viewed pornography on their government-issued computer. The now former deputy assistant attorney general’s identity has not been revealed, but details of their case emerged in a report that the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office released this week.
Apparently, the official “had been observed” viewing the pornography. Investigators uncovered that on not one but two computers that the now former official had been issued, data sat chronicling “numerous sexually explicit website searches, sexually explicit search engine terms, and sexually explicit images.”
Initially, the unnamed now former Trump administration official apparently lied to investigators about his online behavior carried out on the government’s dime. Only in the context of a second interview did he admit that he “may have intentionally accessed pornographic websites using government computers.” Despite the lies to investigators, the Justice Department ultimately declined to bring charges, according to the investigation summary that the inspector general’s office released. Apparently, the official resigned before the investigation was even complete.
This inspector general’s office report got somewhat buried under the more high-profile one they released this past week covering former FBI Director James Comey. The office faulted Comey for his handling of memos chronicling interactions with President Trump, insisting that he broke department policy by keeping them personally, but they added that they found no evidence of any intentional leak of classified information to the media.
In other words, Comey broke no laws, which puts a huge hole in Trump team plans for a criminal case against the former official — although you wouldn’t know as much if you asked Trump himself. Just this Friday, he claimed on Twitter that the only reason Comey wasn’t facing charges was the mercy or whatever of top Justice Department officials like Attorney General Bill Barr. To be clear again though — Comey broke no laws. Yet, Trump has shown no intention of slowing up in his intention to claim exactly that anyway.
Besides the deputy assistant attorney general who resigned, the Trump administration continues to prove defined by a consistent stream of high-profile departures. This week, the president’s longtime personal assistant Madeline Westerhout was pressured out of the job after Trump learned she’d shared “intimate details” about his family with reporters. CNN called that disclosure a “red line” for Trump, no matter the time he’d spent working with Westerhout in the past.
Other officials to step aside either willingly or by force include the now former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, now former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, James Mattis, who used to be Secretary of Defense, and many, many more. Trump personally fired Comey in early 2017, when he was in the early stages of leading the investigation into Russian interference in U.S. elections and possible Trump team cooperation with those efforts. The president has consistently denounced the whole thing as a farce and claimed this week he should get time added to his term to account for that taken up by it.
Featured Image via screenshot
