berg80
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- Oct 28, 2017
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- #61
Why Is Trump’s Inspector General Purge Not a National Scandal?
www.lawfareblog.com
"If, three years ago, President Trump had removed two inspectors general from their posts within a week of each other for overtly self-interested reasons—as he has done over the past few days—it would have been a big scandal. Presidents don’t just fire inspectors general for doing their jobs, after all. And presidents who agree to have an oversight board composed of inspectors general don’t typically sack one of them to prevent him from leading the board’s monitoring of trillions of dollars of congressionally appropriated money.
Yet last week, the president announced the firing of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson for overtly retaliatory reasons. Atkinson had been the inspector general who notified Congress, as he was legally bound to do, of a whistleblower complaint that raised a matter of “urgent concern”—the event triggered the Ukraine scandal and the president’s resulting impeachment.
Trump, in explaining Atkinson’s removal, made no secret that it came in response to Atkinson’s having gotten Trump in trouble."
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There were actually some rumblings among a few Senators about this.
Bipartisan group of senators demands explanation from Trump on IG firing
www.axios.com
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But this admin is a scandal machine. As soon as information about one becomes public it is replaced with another. Trump's continuous failures in dealing with COVID has been a non-stop series of scandals one after the other. They happen too quickly for any one to be thoroughly investigated.
![www.lawfareblog.com](https://www.lawfareblog.com/sites/default/files/49728735392_48987f2aa5_b.jpg)
Why Is Trump’s Inspector General Purge Not a National Scandal?
The removal of a couple of inspectors general for transparently—and in one case, admittedly—self-interested reasons no longer generates outrage.
"If, three years ago, President Trump had removed two inspectors general from their posts within a week of each other for overtly self-interested reasons—as he has done over the past few days—it would have been a big scandal. Presidents don’t just fire inspectors general for doing their jobs, after all. And presidents who agree to have an oversight board composed of inspectors general don’t typically sack one of them to prevent him from leading the board’s monitoring of trillions of dollars of congressionally appropriated money.
Yet last week, the president announced the firing of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson for overtly retaliatory reasons. Atkinson had been the inspector general who notified Congress, as he was legally bound to do, of a whistleblower complaint that raised a matter of “urgent concern”—the event triggered the Ukraine scandal and the president’s resulting impeachment.
Trump, in explaining Atkinson’s removal, made no secret that it came in response to Atkinson’s having gotten Trump in trouble."
................................................................................................................................
There were actually some rumblings among a few Senators about this.
Bipartisan group of senators demands explanation from Trump on IG firing
![www.axios.com](https://images.axios.com/Y9WqXN0r3AXyfBuO-TAEBaCrgjA=/0x303:3518x2282/1366x768/2020/04/09/1586414885992.jpg)
Chuck Grassley leads bipartisan group of senators demanding Trump explain IG's firing
They say in a letter Trump "appears to have circumvented" Congress in his actions.
![www.axios.com](https://static.axios.com/img/axios-site/favicon-32x32.png)
But this admin is a scandal machine. As soon as information about one becomes public it is replaced with another. Trump's continuous failures in dealing with COVID has been a non-stop series of scandals one after the other. They happen too quickly for any one to be thoroughly investigated.