Tag: us government
Karoline Leavitt

Trump Press Secretary Can't Confirm Musk Security Clearance

President Donald Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Monday could neither confirm nor deny whether billionaire Elon Musk has received a security clearance as a US government employee under the president's new administration.

During a press conference outside of the White House, CNN's Chief White House Correspondent Caitlin Collins asked the MAGA secretary, "Can you confirm that Elon Musk is a special government employee? And what kind of security clearance does he have?"

Leavitt replied, "I can confirm he's a special government employee. I can also confirm that he has abided by all applicable federal laws. As for his security clearance, I'm not sure, but I can check."

Collins then asked, "Did he pass a background check, do you know?"

"I don't know about the security clearance, but I can check," Leavitt replied.

Collins then asked if the MAGA secretary knows whether anyone on Musk's team has security clearance.

"I don't, no. But, again, I can check on that for you," Leavitt said.

Nico Perrino, executive dircector of the free speech nonprofit FIRE, replied: "Here we have a government employee holding press conferences about his government work on his privately owned social media platform, where he's also banning journalists and members of the general public who criticize him. Seems we're getting into First Amendment territory ..."

Former Politico CA reporter Carla Marinucci commented: "He’s acting co-president — with access to millions is private citizens’ data — and she doesn’t know if he has a security clearance???!"

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Donald Trump

Part Infant, Part Gangster: It's Very Hard To Keep Donald Trump Happy

The older he gets, the bigger the baby. Donald Trump has turned the U.S. government into one giant pacifier to calm his fear of seeming less than all-powerful. Consider those billionaires now dropping bags of gold at his feet, concerned that he would use his presidential powers to hurt them.

Donald Winnicott, a prominent English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, famously wrote that babies have "the illusion of omnipotence." They think the world revolves around their needs being met.

To reinforce his illusion that he embodies Roman Emperor command, Trump has turned to the cameras to publicly name formerly skeptical, or even just neutral, moguls now paying tribute:

"So Tim Cook (Apple) was here."

"We do have Jeff Bezos, Amazon, coming in."

"The top bankers, they're all calling."

Reputable political analysts say this executive behavior reflects alarm that Trump might try to sabotage their business and hurt their investors. Anyway, the commentators add, paying a million or two in tribute is "just a rounding error" to these guys.

The analysts are not wrong. More amazing is that they would calmly portray threats toward leading American enterprises —engines of the economy, creators of jobs — as something a normal president would do.

Another word for this is extortion. It's the mobster message: "If you don't want trouble, you know what to do."

Recall during the first term when Trump tried to punish Amazon through higher postal rates and by taking away a $10 billion Pentagon cloud servicing contract. Trump's motives were not at all hidden. Bezos owned The Washington Post, which was often critical of him.

The nomination of vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services could be seen as a classic baiting operation. Its intention is also to dare senators, Republicans included, to challenge his choice of this weirdo. If Trump wins, then he's proven he has them all in a headlock.

The objective isn't just to get away with things but to send the mob message, "If you don't want trouble, you know what to do." And to add, Caligula style, "Let them hate me, so long as they fear me."

Seeing that Bobby Jr. may be a crackpot too far even for cowed Republicans, Trump could drop the nomination. But that might seem like surrender. Instead, he's gaslighting the public on what RFK Jr. stands for. It happens that the lawyer helping Bobby choose staff for HHS petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

"You're not going to lose the polio vaccine," Trump recently told reporters. Big of him. That the public needs that kind of reassurance shows how deep Trump thinks he can take it into the rabbit hole of mind-bending. Until he came along, no one even imagined that an American leader might deny their families protection from a polio epidemic causing paralysis, long-term muscle weakness, fatigue and pain.

But suppose Trump arm-twists the Senate into approving a health official who would "put the public's health in jeopardy," according to 75 Nobel laureates. That would be hard to beat as a display of omnipotence. He would again be matching Caligula, who is said to have appointed a horse as a consul.

Uber and its CEO have just contributed a combined $2 million to Trump's inauguration. What makes this example of executive submission special is that Uber's chief legal officer, Tony West, is Kamala Harris' brother-in-law. Uber's CEO did little to veil his motive. It was his biggest donation ever to a political candidate, he noted, and showed "Uber's eagerness to work with the incoming administration."

Babies grow out of the obsessive need to display dominance. Trump hasn't, and he's almost 80.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Official Involved In Bush-Era Purge of Gay Employees Now Working For Trump

Official Involved In Bush-Era Purge of Gay Employees Now Working For Trump

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

It was one of the uglier scandals of the Bush administration: Top officials at an agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers launched a campaign against their own employees based on suspected sexual orientation, according to an inspector general report.

Staffers were abruptly reassigned from Washington, D.C., to a new office 500 miles away in Detroit in what the head of the office reportedly described as an effort to “ship [them] out.” Staffers who refused were fired.

Crude anti-gay emails were found in the agency chief’s account.

Now one of the major players in the scandal has a new assignment: He works in the Trump administration.

In December, James Renne was appointed to the Trump “landing team” at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as part of the transition effort between the election and the inauguration. He was then hired January 30 in a senior role at the Department of Agriculture, though his exact job duties are not clear.

Renne was part of the wave of early political appointees on so-called “beachhead teams,” whose role is to lay the groundwork for the new administration’s policies. (We published details on hundreds of beachhead hires, obtained through public records requests.)

In the Bush administration, Renne was hired in 2004 as deputy special counsel of the Office of Special Counsel, the small federal agency that is supposed to protect employees across the government from retaliation for whistleblowing. The tenures of Renne and his boss, Special Counsel Scott Bloch, were almost immediately mired in controversy after career gay employees said they were improperly fired. Language stating that job discrimination protections extend to sexual orientation also disappeared from the agency website.

A little-noticed inspector general report, released in 2013, depicts Renne as a central player in the efforts. Bloch and Renne, it found, hatched the plan to abruptly open a new “Midwest Field Office” in Detroit and reassign career staff there. Employees who declined to move lost their jobs.

The report found that the employees were targeted for no legitimate reason, pointing to “facts which reflect that Mr. Bloch and Mr. Renne may have been motivated in their actions by a negative personal attitude toward homosexuality and individuals whose orientation is homosexual.”

One evening shortly after he was hired in 2004, Renne took the lead in removing the language from the agency’s website about how job protections cover sexual orientation, the report says.

From the report: “Mr. Renne was depicted as intently searching the OSC website with the assistance of a senior career official to identify passages which interpreted [the nondiscrimination law] as extending protection to gay employees on the basis of their sexual orientation. According to this account, Mr. Renne demanded that OSC’s information technology manager remove these materials from the website immediately.”

That change was later the subject of congressional hearings.

Renne did not respond to requests for comment. The Department of Agriculture, which hired him, declined to comment.

The scandal at the Office of Special Counsel dragged on for years, spawning congressional and criminal investigations.

In a formal complaint filed at the time, the employees who were reassigned to Detroit pointed to a “Concerned Catholic Attorneys” letter Renne had signed in 2000 that is a broadside against a range of gay rights efforts. It warns that the “homosexual lobby’s power has grown exponentially.”

The inspector general report found that Renne played a central role in the plan to open a Detroit office, noting that “the reorganization was formulated by Mr. Bloch and Mr. Renne very early in their tenure.” An outside consultant they hired to help with the plan told investigators that “it appeared that Mr. Bloch may have been heavily influenced by Mr. Renne.”

That consultant, retired Lt. Gen. Richard Trefry, told investigators:

Mr. Bloch indicated to General Trefry that there was a sizeable group of homosexuals employed by OSC, which had developed during the years prior to his taking office, that he “had a license” to get rid of homosexual employees, and that he intended to “ship them out.”

The report continues:

Further, in the portions of Mr. Bloch’s official e-mail account that were available to the investigative team, there were crude and vulgar messages containing anti-homosexual themes that appeared to have been forwarded from his personal email. 2026 Similarly, Mr. Bloch’s public media references to [his predecessor as Special Counsel, Elaine] Kaplan contained repeated, negatively-phrased assertions regarding her sexual orientation. For example, in interviews he granted during 2007, Mr. Bloch described her as a “lesbian activist,” a “public lesbian,” a “well-known gay activist”, and similar depictions.

Now in private practice, Bloch told ProPublica the report is “filled with untruth, outright falsehoods, and innuendo.” When the report was released, Bloch denied that he ever talked about targeting gay employees.

The inspector general report says it was based on interviews with more than 60 people and examination of over 100,000 emails.

The affected gay employees ultimately came to a settlement with the government. The terms were not released.

During the investigation into his tenure, Bloch’s home and office were raided by the FBI and he ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge arising from his hiring the company Geeks on Call to do a “seven-level wipe” on his government computers. Years later, Bloch later unsuccessfully sued the government over his firing.

There’s little public record of what Renne has been doing since his time working with Bloch. The Trump landing team announcement identified him as working for Renne Law. A fellow member of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence landing team said that Renne had worked at the ODNI inspector general office. And Bloch said he also heard that Renne had gotten a job in the intelligence community after their work together. An ODNI spokesman declined to comment.

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Danziger: Leaving Broken Crockery (And Bullsh*t) Behind

Danziger: Leaving Broken Crockery (And Bullsh*t) Behind

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam as a linguist and intelligence officer, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. Born in New York City, he now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

 

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