Official Trump Swamp Thread: Still Corrupt as Fuck

For instance, an unredacted timeline shows that State Department staffers proposed using emergency authorities on April 3, 2019, that drafts of the emergency certification were circulated 20 days later, and that it wasn’t until May 4 that Pompeo directed that the emergency be certified by May 24.

The report released online, however, said Pompeo briefed Congress on Iranian threats on May 21, approved the paperwork two days later and then certified that the emergency authorization was transmitted to Congress the next day.

In essence, the public version gives the impression that Pompeo moved quickly on an urgent issue, whereas the unredacted version shows a much longer timeframe of deliberation and action, undermining the argument that an emergency existed at all.

According to the unredacted report, by the time the inspector general began reviewing what happened in October, “foreign partners had taken full delivery of 4 of the 22 arms transfer cases included in the May 2019 emergency.” The low number of full deliveries, which was redacted in the public version of the report at State’s insistence, also raises questions about how much of an emergency was in play in the first place.

"The concern all along was that Pompeo concocted the emergency to bypass Congress," a congressional aide told POLITICO. "A few key details in the report verify that, and those are the details State tried to bury. It looks like a coverup.”

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According to federal records, when he became postmaster general, DeJoy still owned a large equity stake in XPO, totaling between $30 million and $75 million. Federal ethics officials recently approved his decision to keep these assets, but outside experts with decades of experience in government are raising red flags.

"The idea that you can be a postmaster general and hold tens of millions in stocks in a postal service contractor is pretty shocking," said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, who resigned in 2017. "It could be that he's planning on selling it, but I don't understand the delay. He has managed to divest a lot of other things. And if he wasn't prepared to sell that off, he shouldn't have taken the job."

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