Late Friday night, Donald Trump fired, Steve Linick, the inspector general for the State Department, the fourth such firing in the last six weeks. The question, of course, is why the president took such a step.
Yesterday, Trump seemed eager to pass the buck and put the onus on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Asked at a White House event yesterday for some kind of explanation for Linick’s ouster, the president told reporters, “Yeah, I don’t know him at all. I never even heard of him, but I was asked to by the State Department, by Mike…. I don’t know what’s going on other than that, but you’d have to ask Mike Pompeo.”
The comments hardly diffused the controversy. On the contrary, Trump’s eagerness to wash his hands of the matter only raised the volume on the lingering questions. After all, the State Department’s IG — the cabinet agency’s internal, independent watchdog — was investigating Pompeo when Pompeo directed the president to fire the investigator.
And what, pray tell, is the Kansas Republican offering by way of a defense? NBC News reported:
The State Department and Pompeo’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But in brief excerpts from a forthcoming interview with The Washington Post, posted by the reporter to Twitter, Pompeo said the inspector general “wasn’t performing a function in a way that we had tried to get him to” and was “trying to undermine what it was that we were trying to do.”
A State Department official also told the Washington Post there were concerns about a “leak” to the media eight months ago, though there’s no proof Linick was involved.









