‘It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump had one word in response to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, after the RINO senator and failed presidential candidate expressed alarm about Trump’s lack of accountability.
LOSER! pic.twitter.com/p5imhMJqS1
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2020
Romney’s public rivalry with Trump has grown increasingly bitter since he became the only Republican in Congress who voted to convict the president during last February’s partisan impeachment effort.
After Trump announced the firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick—the fourth IG to receive his pink slip since the impeachment ended—Romney criticized the move on Saturday, claiming that such retributive action was a “threat to accountable democracy.”
The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so
without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) May 16, 2020
Trump’s decision to fire Linick was his latest in his series of efforts to clean out the Deep State.
The IG was said to be investigating whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo allowed a political appointee to perform personal favors for him.
Like recently fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who fielded the initial “whistleblower” complaint that triggered the Ukraine proceedings, Linick also played a central role in Democrats’ impeachment probe.
But Romney’s claim that Trump’s actions were “unprecedented” is misleading at best.
Former President Barack Obama fired Gerald Walpin, the then-inspector general of the Corporation for national and Community Service, back in 2009 after Walpin began investigating one of Obama’s prominent supporters.
The focus on clearing out Obama’s “resistance” holdovers within the bureaucracy comes as the Justice Department has turned its sight recently toward the potentially criminal conduct of several high-ranking Obama administration officials.
Recently declassified documents have shown that FBI officials attempted to set up former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and that many—including then Vice President Joe Biden—were allowed to unmask Flynn’s identity and gather crucial data from intelligence reports during the period between the November 2016 election and Trump’s January 2017 inauguration.
They abused these surveillance powers to launch a smear campaign against the incoming president and his advisers, which ultimately gave way to Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian collusion—despite the fact the the FBI knew early on that no such collusion existed.
The same leftists who pushed the Russia-gate hoax—helping Democrats to retake the House of Representatives in 2018—then promoted the Ukrainian scandal, which led to Congress’s failed impeachment probe.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.