White House adviser Kevin Hassett will leave the administration this summer, after returning in March to help the president respond to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, according to two administration officials.
Mike Griffin, the Pentagon’s first undersecretary of research and engineering, and his deputy, Lisa Porter, will leave July 10.
Well I totally missed this!
Over Memorial Day weekend, Attorney General William Barr removed a low-profile US attorney in Texas following the public airing of a dispute over an investigation into Walmart – a move that didn’t draw the same attention as the firing of the high-profile US attorney in Manhattan, but is now raising new questions about political interference inside the Justice Department.
Joseph Brown, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and a Trump appointee, was pushed out after ProPublica published a nearly 7,000-word storyheadlined “Walmart was almost charged criminally over opioids. Trump appointees killed the indictment,” which described an internal battle over a Texas prosecutor’s efforts to bring criminal charges against Walmart, according to people familiar with the matter. Walmart has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Late last month, Brown was contacted by a Justice Department official in Washington and given an ultimatum, he could resign or it would go “differently,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.
The official didn’t explain why Washington officials wanted Brown to leave, according to the person, "but it was clear it was related to ProPublica. That’s the only explanation.”
And a twofer!
Joshua Russ, the assistant US attorney in Texas overseeing the civil investigation and the co-head of a Justice Department working group, resigned in October after the civil investigation stalled.
In his resignation letter, which was published by ProPublica, Russ wrote, “I appreciate that there are rational disagreements about how best to proceed, and I respect those divergent views. However, I deeply regret that Department leadership prevented EDTX from filing its lawsuit in 2018.”
Brown was replaced by Stephen J Cox, a Barr pick who ran the civil division in Washington. According to ProPublica, when Texas prosecutors wanted to file a civil lawsuit against Walmart Cox was among the Washington officials who said it wasn’t ready.
The Federal Election Commission is losing its short-lived quorum after Caroline Hunter, a longtime Republican commissioner of the FEC and former chair of the agency, is resigning, according to a resignation letter obtained by POLITICO.
Her departure from the agency means that the FEC will be unable to make major enforcement actions.
Cross-posting 
Chris Cox, President Donald Trump’s top liaison to the House of Representatives, has told associates he is leaving the White House, 15 hours after POLITICO raised questions about his alleged contacts with a former lobbying client while in government.
On multiple occasions, Cox suggested while working in the White House that he was collecting intelligence or doing work after speaking to representatives and lobbyists from corporate interests, multiple sources said. White House spokesman Judd Deere defended the practice in Playbook’s afternoon editionThursday. “I’m not seeing anything nefarious here,” he said.
Russell Travers, the former head of the U.S. government’s hub for analysis of counterterrorism intelligence, was so alarmed that he shared his concerns with the intelligence community’s top internal watchdog in his final weeks on the job.
“I think there are really important questions that need to be addressed, and I don’t think they have been thus far,” said Travers, who ran the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) until March of this year. “And that has me worried, because I do think we could very easily end up back where we were 20 years ago.”
Travers detailed his concerns, much of which remain highly classified, to the intelligence community’s inspector general. About a week later, he was summarily ousted, he says — and the Trump administration official who fired him didn’t explain why.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Matt Albence is retiring from the agency he has led since last year, according to a Department of Homeland Security official.
A longtime career law enforcement official, Albence has filled the top spot at the agency multiple times during the Trump administration as leadership at ICE – an agency under DHS – has shifted.
Reopened, Fire away Mr President, I’m ready.
I did listen for a long while…Mueller She Wrote. She had excellent podcasts with very noteable people - Ex FBI Andy McCabe became a fan.
Too bad…right?!
I like her sense of humor. I listened too. It’s was a funny show.
The Department of Homeland Security is removing its top intelligence official from his post amid criticism of his office’s role in the civil unrest in Portland, Oregon. Brian Murphy, who has been the acting chief of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), is being removed from that role, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to POLITICO. The person said acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf made the decision.
Missed one, thanks
The internal State Department watchdog, whom President Trump installed after the previous inspector general was abruptly fired, has resigned, the department said in a statement, marking another significant shake-up for an office sworn to investigate malfeasance and wrongdoing.
Stephen Akard’s departure, which will be effective Friday, was announced to staff members by his deputy, Diana R. Shaw, who told colleagues that she will become the temporary acting inspector general.
Brian Hook, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran and one of the few national security officials to survive the turmoil in the foreign policy team through most of President Trump’s term, plans to announce Thursday that he is resigning his post.
The departure of Mr. Hook, 52, appears to bury any remaining chance of a diplomatic initiative with Iran before the end of Mr. Trump’s term. In the four years during which Mr. Hook became the face of United States sanctions against Tehran, Mr. Hook also held out the possibility of resuming direct talks, the way the Obama administration had.
But to the Iranians — and to some of his critics in Europe and at home — Mr. Hook was merely a defender of a policy meant to break the country and force it to the table to renegotiate a deal they had reached, and complied with, with the Obama administration in 2015.
Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades’ worth of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.
The reshuffling threatens to heighten tensions between postal officials and lawmakers, who are troubled by delivery delays — the Postal Service banned employees from working overtime and making extra trips to deliver mail — and wary of the Trump administration’s influence on the Postal Service as the coronavirus pandemic rages and November’s election draws near.
Former VOA director Amanda Bennett speaks out
The upending of the U.S. Agency for Global Media continues: New CEO Michael Pack “continues to dramatically reshape the government-run media group,” Politico’s Daniel Lippman reported Wednesday. Two execs who were removed on Wednesday, CFO Grant Turner and general counsel David Kligerman , “say their ouster amounts to ‘retaliation’ for standing up to Pack.”
Notably, the recently-departed VOA head Amanda Bennett gave a statement to Lippman – her first public remarks since resigning in advance of Pack’s shake-up. Bennett stood up for the ousted execs: “The American people are going to be very very sorry when they wake up one day and find that by these individual actions — one at a time that nobody stopped — they’ve lost the functioning government they once had.”
Bennett continued: “What is happening at USAGM is a microcosm of what’s happening all across the U.S. government – driving out honest, skilled, talented long serving professional public servants on trumped up charges and replacing them with people of no qualifications whose only attribute is loyalty.” She concluded: “McCarthy couldn’t have done it better.”
Kyle Murphy, former Intel official from the Pentagon pens an article about his resignation after seeing the use of force against US Citizens for protesting.
I left government service after more than a decade because I lost faith in the courage of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to refuse unlawful orders from the President. They effectively labeled me and other Americans expressing our views in a peaceful assembly as enemies. They authorized troops to use overwhelming force and set a dangerous precedent by enabling the president to ignore state and local officials’ objections and deploy federal forces in response to popular protests. While the military is, thankfully, out of the spotlight for now, the president has turned to other eager allies — in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice — who believe their components of the federal government can clamp down on dissent with a veneer of legality.
I have seen up close the president’s disdain for democratic values, and recent events should be put in the context of a continuous slide toward authoritarianism. In 2015, I was detailed to the White House as an apolitical civil servant on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. My term was set to conclude in January 2017, but I agreed to extend for two months at the request of NSC leaders to support an orderly transition between administrations. I briefed President Donald Trump before several introductory calls to foreign heads of state, and as is customary, I listened in and prepared the official transcripts. I was appalled by the ways he actively undermined the democratic principles we have long aspired to model and to advance globally.
And inteviewed on Maddow tonight…
