President Donald Trump has fired two top Inspectors General since Friday, and freely admitted Tuesday he is targeting for firing at least seven of the federal government’s key watchdogs.
The press largely ignored Trump’s brazen admission, but he clearly said Tuesday he intends to “change” out even decades-long veteran Inspectors General, with less-qualified ones loyal to him.
Walter Shaub, who was the Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, is sounding the alarm bells.
In a lengthy 22-tweet statement Shaub calls Trump’s “assault” on the federal government’s Inspectors General “late-stage corruption,” and he warns that “fascism is eyeing this republic like lunch.”
Shaub points to “open presidential profiteering,” bolstered by “hard-to-prove conflicts of interest” that “were significantly influencing policy.”
He says Trump went through a period of a “growing awareness that many laws don’t have teeth or depend upon the executive branch to enforce them.”
Trump’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions “should have triggered his removal from office. But wild-eyed Senators were hot on the trail of more judges.”
As the corruption grew, “Trump’s hold on the Senate was absolute. We don’t know what assurances he received behind the scenes, but we saw even longtime Republican Senators abandon previously espoused principles to protect him in plain sight.”
“The collapse” of congressional oversight “was a potentially mortal wound” to the Republic.
Trump, his enablers, and his supporters went after whistleblowers and witnesses. The President began to “purge” political appointees, and then even “career Feds, whose due process rights exist to prevent politicians from harnessing them for corrupt aims or, at least, silence any who might report wrongdoing.”
It didn’t matter.
You can read the entire thread starting here on Twitter or in full at Threadreader.