Oh man, MSNBC and the Democrats don’t know what they’re doing here – they’re serving up the reddest of red meat for consumption by Trump’s base.
They are reporting that Trump is targeting career professionals at the State Department for not being sufficiently supportive of his agenda:
BREAKING: House Democrats say a whistle blower has come forward with claims the State Dept. was targeting career employees who aren’t “supportive” of Trump’s agenda pic.twitter.com/gXV7FhrZCk
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 15, 2018
Also:
NEW: Dems say whistleblower documents show White House worked with outside conservatives like Newt Gingrich to orchestrate a “cleaning” of State Department career employees deemed not loyal to Trump’s agenda. pic.twitter.com/qmA51f2GkO
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) March 15, 2018
Here’s the letter:
More from Politico:
The exchanges provide a window into the intense suspicion – critics call it paranoia – of senior Trump officials towards the career staffers they inherited upon taking over the government, especially in the realms of foreign policy and national security. In one email, a staffer was described as “a leaker and a troublemaker” while another was branded a “turncoat.”
Although career staffers generally observe an ethos of nonpartisanship, many Trump officials saw them as constituting a “deep state” cabal determined to sabotage the new president’s agenda. The emails also suggest that Nowrouzzadeh may have been targeted in part because of her ethnicity, which would be a violation of federal employment law.
The emails were the subject of a Thursday letter to the White House and State Department from Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, respectively. The letter called the emails, provided to Congress by an unnamed whistleblower, “extremely disturbing” and demands further documents from the Trump administration.
In the early months of Trump’s presidency, conservative media organizations such as Breitbart News and the Conservative Review published several stories singling out career civil and foreign service staffers by name. The reports often called such employees “Obama holdovers” — even though many, like Nowrouzzadeh, joined the government well before Obama took office — and urged their firing. The stories were terrifying to career employees who in some cases had spent decades working out of the spotlight. Nowrouzzadeh, who would not comment for this article, told Hook that she feared for her safety.
This is very difficult to decipher. Of course there are elements in gov’t hostile to Trump, just as there were elements hostile to Bush. It’s gonna happen. And isn’t it reasonable for a president to want to out people who unsupportive of his agenda?
But on the other hand, if they’re doing it out of paranoia and believing half-assed reports from the far right media like Breitbart, then that could be worrisome because then you’re targeting good people unnecessarily and weakening the government.
So I rate this one: I have no idea.