When a Trump official dares to speak out against the thin-skinned president, a clock begins ticking down to their resignation or firing over Twitter. Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned after raising questions about Trump’s foreign policy and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired over the phone and on Twitter after being outed for calling Trump “a f*cking moron.”
Elaine McCusker, Pentagon comptroller, resigns https://t.co/UwzsS7VUNi pic.twitter.com/IFw5pMSUyU
— Defense News (@defense_news) June 16, 2020
On Tuesday, the Pentagon budget chief who raised questions about Trump’s handling of foreign aid funds to Ukraine prior to the impeachment scandal, Elaine McCusker, resigned from her office. McCusker had served as the acting comptroller at the Pentagon. Current Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made the announcement.
Elaine McCusker, the DoD official who raised concerns about withholding money from Ukraine in emails that were part of #UkraineDocs resigned today as the acting comptroller, the Pentagon announced this evening. We got some of those emails redacted, and @K8brannen got the details
— Zachary Fryer-Biggs (@ZachFB) June 16, 2020
Although McCusker earned praise from Esper for her service at the Pentagon, her career was derailed when she questioned Trump’s hold on the congressionally approved aid to Ukraine that led to Trump’s impeachment.
According to POLITICO:
‘McCusker was nominated for the top position late last year, but the White House pulled her nomination in March after emails leaked to the media showed that she expressed concern over the administration’s demands to hold up aid to Ukraine.
‘In one email exchange published by The New York Times in December, McCusker pushed back on Michael Duffey, an official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, when he suggested the Pentagon, not the White House, would be at fault.
‘”You can’t be serious. I am speechless,” wrote McCusker.’
A Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, has submitted her resignation three months after the White House pulled her nomination to be the comptroller after she questioned the legality of the Trump administration's efforts to freeze military aid to Ukrainehttps://t.co/cHhPpg9Mbm
— POLITICO (@politico) June 17, 2020
News of McCusker’s resignation comes at the heels of the announcement of the book, The Room Where It Happened by Trump former national security advisor, John Bolton, which is rumored to blow the lid off the cover-up of Trump’s extortion of Ukraine. The book, set to be released on June 23, promises more details on not only Ukraine, but a host of corrupt foreign policy moves by the president.
In Amazon’s book description section, it says:
‘What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” he writes. In fact, he argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.’
NSC’s pre-publication review process is normally fairly straightforward, but Bolton’s case has been complicated by its potentially politically explosive allegations—including details about Trump’s alleged Ukraine-style blackmail threats to other countries https://t.co/Kl3AVjnI0i
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) June 16, 2020
Featured image screenshot via YouTube
