One hesitates to paraphrase the genius of Robert Earl Keen, but it seems the grift goes on forever and the thievery never ends. The folks at CREW got their hot little hands on some of the financial details describing how high Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been living on the hog belonging to the rest of us.
Started by Pompeo in 2018, the Madison Dinners are a series of lavish events organized in part by his wife through her personal email account and funded by taxpayers. The dinners’ connection to the mission of the State Department is highly questionable, as only 14 percent of invitees reportedly have been diplomats or foreign officials. The vast majority have been from the private sector with no connection to the State Department’s foreign policy mission, such as Republican donors and conservative media figures. At the time of the Madison Dinners, Pompeo appeared to be using government resources elsewhere to support a potential run for Senate in his home state of Kansas. President Trump fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick as he was investigating allegations of significant misconduct by Pompeo. Linick reportedly made an inquiry into one of the offices responsible for arranging the Madison Dinners the week before he was fired. CREW filed a criminal complaint against Pompeo, calling for the FBI to investigate whether Pompeo obstructed the investigations into him by pushing Trump to fire Linick.
And then there's our narcoleptic Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who has been a very big fish in a very small barrel for a very long time. Now, thanks to Forbes, we learn that the inspector general of the department Ross purportedly heads has been dropping a line into that barrel for quite some time.
The report both revealed the investigation and published its findings. It concluded that Ross, who has served as commerce secretary since Trump’s first year in office, violated a federal regulation by failing to avoid the appearance of ethical and legal breaches. The report cleared him on other matters, including whether he lied to federal officials and engaged in insider trading. The probe began in November 2017, after Forbes reported how Ross had been apparently fibbing about his fortune for years. The investigation eventually expanded, following revelations the next year about false ethics filings, conflict-prone meetings and suspiciously timed investments. Thursday’s report catalogues a litany of inaccurate statements that Ross submitted to federal officials. He did not list all assets on his financial disclosure report. He claimed to have divested things he did not. He described stock distributions that did not happen. He said he sold assets that he actually shorted.
