The State Department inspector general found in a report released Tuesday that the department did not “fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns” when it green-lit arms sales to Middle Eastern countries.
The report also found that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did follow the law in his use of emergency powers, a point that State Department officials were eager to underscore in a press call Monday before the report’s release. Officials repeated many times that Pompeo’s actions were in “accordance with the law,” a preemptive spin that Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY) called “directly from the Bill Barr playbook.”
Politico obtained an unredacted version of the report, which suggests that Pompeo moved slowly, over weeks, to make the emergency declaration final. The public version, with the State Department’s redactions, makes the timeline seem much more condensed.
The IG investigation came at the behest of lawmakers who questioned Pompeo’s emergency declaration that allowed for the $8 billion sale to go ahead. Lawmakers had blocked some of the arms transfers out of concern that the weapons would be used on civilians.
The investigation received special attention after President Donald Trump, at Pompeo’s request, fired IG Steve Linick who was heading up the probe. Pompeo admitted that he responded to written questions pertaining to the investigation. The secretary has called Linick a “bad actor” and said he should have fired him “long ago,” though he denied that the firing was linked to the investigation.
After Linick’s ouster, Stephen Akard, an ally of Vice President Mike Pence, took over for about three months before he abruptly resigned last week. Diana Shaw, his deputy, has stepped into the role in an acting capacity.
Read the redacted report here:
Read the unredacted report here:
The unredacted report also raises questions about the legitimacy of the rationale for an “emergency.” In fact the existence of an “emergency” was a fiction.
Just fire them all until you get down to some lowlife lowbie who is hungry enough for advancement to do your bidding…
Dang interns. You can never count on them to assess risks of civilian casualties in international arms deals.
That is essentially their HR planning and hiring document.
Actually, it’s straight out of the Hermann Goering playbook. Goering’s first line of defense at the Nuremberg trials was that all the atrocities of the Nazi state, death camps, slave labor, Nacht und Nebel disappearances, and the rest of it, were all completely legal under the laws of the Third Reich. The American response was to put the jurists who made and enforced these law on trial for crimes against humanity.