Covering MAGA and Trump is a bit like an old-time, hard-boiled detective novel. Everyone’s bad. Or at least shady. The challenge is distinguishing between the merely shady sorta bad and bad bad. And apart from the bad and those who were merely drawn that way, sometimes you have two really bad people and one of them is victimizing the other, making the latter person a victim while also being bad. Which brings us to this quote from an article in the Washington Post about Eric Schnabel, the Chief Operating Officer of the National Institute of Health (NIH) who, as I noted earlier this week, was fired and marched off the premises Monday, allegedly for directing a contract to a company which employed his wife. This is a text he sent to a WaPo reporter after the Post tried numerous times to contact him and his wife.
“I need your help. I didn’t do what they said I did,” he texted. “This was a political hit job. Please call me.” Schnabel didn’t reply to numerous further attempts to contact him. (The quote was added after I originally linked to the piece.)
You can see why I was in the mood of an old detective novel. What in the actual fuck is that? As the friend who flagged the passage asked: What are they doing? Sending him to El Salvador? Those words read like a line out of a third chapter of a Chandler novel, after Marlowe has taken the case, met the initial characters and now things are starting to go seriously sideways.
As many besides me have noted, directing a contract to a company which employs your wife seems like pretty thin corruption gruel by Trump standards, especially to be frog marched off the premises without seemingly more than the most drumhead kind of investigation. Like if you’re not wetting your beak that much what are you even doing?
When I first saw the news about Schnabel I thought of a slightly different scenario. “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you King,” my mentor tells me. The president himself is actually not covered or arguably — under MAGA jurisprudence — not covered by a lot of anti-corruption statutes. And the Supreme Court has extended that protection by ruling that the president is likely immune from a lot of criminal law. Even aside from the president, there’s corruption and there’s corruption. Some things are extremely corrupt but they don’t fall unambiguously under a specific statute. There are catch-all statutes, but there’s enough vagueness to just ignore them, especially if you run the Justice Department. But there are some cases, especially with contracting, where there are really clear statutes about things you can’t do, things you must disclose, etc. I thought maybe Schnabel had run afoul of one of those.
But I’ve felt less inclined to believe that as this has moved forward. A few hours after this news broke we learned that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy had fired his chief of staff and deputy chief of staff. Seems like a big deal. Out of the blue. HHS is a big place. Are these related? There are a lot of high ranking people getting fired out of the blue. And NIH isn’t just any part of HHS. It’s ground zero for Kennedy, or at least the most controversial actions at his HHS since January.
Whether these things are connected, who knows? But beyond the gangland culture at the top of the White House, we’re seeing a similar gangland culture one and two levels down too. Part of that is that the tone is set at the top. The president sets the values and the rules. But that’s not the only reason. The entire administration is also staffed in a haphazard and chaotic manner, with different area kingpins grafted in by the coalitional logic of the campaign. (Kennedy here being a key example) Some departments are staffed and still run under the heavy imprint of Elon Musk’s dominant but brief reign as co-president.
Every administration has key power brokers in different policy areas or departments. But most have a general and somewhat unified approach to staffing. There’s nothing like that here. Every decision is ad hoc, at least as to specific personal. The DOGE period created huge capacity gaps which have led to many tasks simply going undone or being taken over by contractors or DOGE holdovers. You have a lot of what we might call managerial state of nature in which gangs or crews of appointees or temporaries are making not only their own rules in a policy sense but acting autonomously in an organizational sense — sort of like gangs each running small areas of a city after some post-apocalyptic crisis. In federal workforce terms, that’s very much what DOGE was and is.
I say all of this to note that we tend to see, and Trump wants us to see, the administration as a vast structure responding to his will. And in a way it is. But in another way it’s far less like that than any other administration we’ve known. And when weird stuff like the Schnabel thing happens — assuming there’s more to it than the wife contract, which might not be the case — it may be part of some skullduggery contained entirely within NIH or HHS. The rest of the administration may be as in the dark about it as we are. Something may be crooked but it might be a scam that Trump doesn’t even get a taste of. I’m not excusing them, mind you. It’s that the whole administration is more gangland than just the mafia boss at the top. Trump’s created a context in which there are lots of these gangs — lots of free-fire zones for all kinds of corruption and likely worse.
And so finally, if you know more about this Schnabel case please contact me on one of the secure channels above and below this post. Are you Eric Schnabel? Let’s talk.