President Donald Trump appears to be working to try and upend the possibility of substantive oversight and investigation of his administration ahead of the 2020 election, columnist David Lurie writes for the Daily Beast. Amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, Trump has already fired or publicly dragged through the metaphorical mud a whole slew of inspector generals across the government, even including the official now formerly tasked with overseeing the disbursement of huge sums of Coronavirus relief funding. Trump dismissed Glenn Fine from that post, and he dismissed Michael Atkinson from his post as the intelligence community’s inspector general, and he’s been publicly complaining about the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), all in an apparent bid to boost his re-election chances.
His excuses for the firings and criticisms range from a supposed loss of confidence in Atkinson to supposed problems with the data presented by the HHS inspector general’s office. The truth is — that office’s data about medical supply problems around the U.S. isn’t fake news as Trump has claimed, and Atkinson followed protocol in submitting to Congress a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s attempt to bribe Ukraine. Trump just doesn’t want the scrutiny.
Besides the above-noted issues, Trump has even insisted that his administration will attempt to restrain an oversight official from reporting directly to Congress in the event of the White House refusing to produce material related to the Coronavirus response effort, despite the provision for that direct reporting in the legislation that establishes a special inspector general’s office for the relief oversight in the first place. Noting that former Trump personal aide John McEntee has come back aboard at the White House to assist in the purge of officials deemed not loyal enough to Trump — as if that’s the most important job requirement for government service! — Lurie writes:
‘“In the midst of a deadly pandemic, Donald Trump has expanded his war on oversight by attacking the governments’ inspectors general, compounding the damage already done by his unprecedented stonewalling of congressional oversight investigation… That effort might help Trump delay any formal reviews of his failed leadership during the pandemic, or of his administrations’ disbursement of trillions in coronavirus-related spending, until after the November election.’
Trump has long established his penchant for stonewalling attempts at oversight and investigation. Amidst the Ukraine bribery attempt investigation and subsequent impeachment proceedings, Trump flatly refused to comply with subpoena after subpoena — and then his loyal shills in the Congressional GOP whined about Democrats supposedly not getting enough information, as if it was their fault.
Lurie does note that at least in this Coronavirus situation, the truth appears to be emerging even if the president attempts to hide it.
As he writes, “[journalists], health-care workers, and state and local officials are seeking to ensure that many of the critical facts come to light” amidst potentially life-threatening medical supply shortages that could have potentially been averted if the president had spent the early weeks of the outbreak preparing instead of insisting that concern over the virus was some kind of “hoax.”
