Drain The Swamp! Hur går det för Donald Trump med det?

Trump's White House Is Losing Staff at Record Numbers
Like shameless, self-preserving rats fleeing a racist sinking ship, staffers are exiting the Trump White House in record numbers, according to an Associated Press analysis of the administration’s just-released 2018 financial disclosure forms.

Per the AP, 141 staffers who were working in the Trump administration on June 30th of last year are no longer there 365 days later.

That 37% turnover rate marks a record high, which looks even worse as you delve deeper into the data. As the White House Transitions Project noted following the release of this year’s financial disclosure forms, Trump has the highest overall turnover of any recent president at this point in his tenure. A whopping 61% of his top staffers have left since the start of his presidency—a turnover rate nearly 20% higher than the next most-abandoned president, Bill Clinton, who had a 42% turnover rate. (President George W. Bush had the lowest rate with just 5% turnover during his first 17 months in office)

Five Stages of White House Employment

Trump says "that I don't know" when asked if John Kelly is leaving

Den amerikanska regeringen överförde pengar till George Soros för att hjälpa vänsterregeringen i Albanien att driva igenom en reform av rättsväsendet, avslöjar dokument som den konservativa tankesmedjan Judicial Watch har fått tillgång till. Syftet med reformen ska enligt Judicial Watch ha varit att ge den sittande socialistregeringen "full kontroll" över rättstillämpningen i Albanien.

Amerikanska UD och den amerikanska biståndsmyndigheten USAID vägrade först att lämna ut de Soros-relaterade dokumenten men efter att Judicial Watch stämt myndigheterna nåddes en förlikning där staten både ersatte tankesmedjans rättegångskostnader och lämnade ut de offentliga handlingarna.

Pruitt aides reveal new details of his spending and mismanagement at EPA
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces rising scrutiny over several ethics issues, including his use of taxpayer money.

Two of Scott Pruitt’s top aides provided fresh details to congressional investigators in recent days about some of his most controversial spending and management decisions, including his push to find a six-figure job for his wife at a politically connected group, enlist staffers in performing personal tasks and seek high-end travel despite aides’ objections.

The Trump administration appointees described an administrator who sought a salary that topped $200,000 for his wife and accepted help from a subordinate in the job search, requested aid from senior EPA officials in a dispute with a Washington landlord and disregarded concerns about his first-class travel.

The interviews conducted by staffers for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee late last week shed new light on the EPA administrator’s willingness to leverage his position for his personal benefit and to ignore warnings even from allies about potential ethical issues, according to three individuals familiar with the sessions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation.

The EPA’s former associate administrator for the Office of Policy, Samantha Dravis, spoke to Republican and Democratic aides for several hours on Thursday, followed by Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, on Friday.

Both aides described instances in which their boss pressed to travel first-class or via private jet, while Dravis acknowledged that Pruitt asked his subordinates to do nonofficial work for him, multiple individuals said.

Don Fox, former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, said in an interview Sunday that the fact that the administrator asked federal employees to perform multiple tasks unrelated to their official work raises serious questions about whether the EPA administrator has violated federal rules of official conduct.
Tallying Pruitt?s problematic spending View Graphic

“Pruitt is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of examples of how senior government officials, particularly in this administration, abuse their power and their position,” Fox said, “and really treat the government’s resources — of which the most valuable are personnel — as personal servants.”

Fox said that because most of the behavior Pruitt has been accused of involves violations that fall under federal Standards of Ethical Conduct for executive branch employees, it is up to either the president or his chief of staff to respond.

“If we were talking about any other federal employee it would be that person’s supervisor to take disciplinary action, which could be anything from counseling to dismissal from public service,” he said. “This falls squarely on the shoulders of the president, and he seems to do nothing but go out of his way to praise Scott Pruitt.”

During her session with investigators Thursday, according to two individuals, Dravis also described how Pruitt asked her and another former top aide, Sarah Greenwalt, to review a rental agreement that he had decided to break. Pruitt and his wife lived briefly last year in Washington’s U Street corridor before relocating — a move that forced them to pay a penalty. The administrator asked the two advisers, both of whom are lawyers, to examine the lease to see if there was a way to avoid the penalty, Dravis told committee staffers.

Pruitt’s approach during the transition foreshadowed the kind of behavior that has attracted scrutiny in recent months. According to a current and former EPA official, Pruitt routinely asked his assistants — including then-executive scheduler Sydney Hupp — to put hotel reservations on their personal credit cards rather than his own.

In one instance, according to former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski, Hupp was stuck with a bill of roughly $600 for a booking she had made for the administrator’s family during the transition. Chmielewski said in an interview last month that he was in Jackson’s office when Hupp approached Pruitt’s chief of staff to explain that the period for transition reimbursements had expired and that Pruitt had not covered the bill.

The incident, aspects of which were first reported in the Hill newspaper, prompted Jackson to leave $600 in cash in Hupp’s drawer.

Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.

Nine Notorious Dictators, Nine Shout-Outs From Donald Trump
The president of the United States continues to heap praise on the world's most reviled rulers.

President Donald Trump suggested he might have to jail journalists