Trump Purging Whoever Challenges His Administration

Last July, immediately after Robert Mueller’s feckless performance before Congress laid to rest his report two years in the making, Donald Trump declared to an audience of young people, “I can do anything I want as president of the United States”. He set about employing that doctrine the very next day with the call to the Ukrainian president that led to his impeachment and went on to expand its scope. He ordered the White House to turn over not a single document to Congress in the impeachment proceedings, disallowed anyone from his administration to testify (a few defied that order), and straight-armed all attempts by Congress to exercise its constitutional role of oversight of the executive branch.

Lately he has decided there should be no oversight within his administration, either. He has now fired the inspectors general of four departments, the latest — once again under cover of a Friday night, at odds with braggadocio about his power — being Steve Linick, the IG of the State Department. The first report said that Linick had been looking into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo using departmental staff to run personal errands — e.g., “walk his dog, pick up laundry, make dinner reservations for Pompeo and his wife”, said NBC News. New York Democratic Representative Eliot Engle then spoke up to say, “[The IG’s] offce was investigating — at my request — Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia”. How could there be an emergency for weapons that would not be delivered for another two years? The emergency maneuver was to sidetrack Congress.

Not to be forgotten — Mr. Trump never forgets — is that Linick also gave the House’s impeachment inquiry documents about Ukraine.

Pompeo asked him to fire Linick, said Trump. “Because it is my right to do it, I said, sure, I’ll do it. I — we have gotten rid of a lot of inspector generals [sic]. Every president has”. As we have come to expect of this president, that was simply made up. Presidents have not fired inspectors general.

So dwell on that: Secretary of State Pompeo had his department’s IG fired because Linick was investigating him.

The post of inspectors general at departments and agencies was created under the Carter administration in the wake of Watergate and other scandals. Appointed by presidents and approved by the Senate, Carter called them “important new tools in the fight against fraud,” who would be given “significant independence”. They cannot be fired by their departments or agencies, hence Pompeo’s request to the president, who has the sole right but not without justifying to Congress. The president paid no attention to the law’s requirement that he notify Congress 30 days ahead of removing an IG from office, writing no more than, “…it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General. That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General”.

You are cordially invited

In the midst of the Linick firing, NBC News broke the story of taxpayer-funded dinner parties hosted by Pompeo and wife using State Department facilities; there had been 24 before Covid-19 with many more on pause. Such entertaining is standard, we now hear, a chance for world figures to meet our government officials, members of Congress, and so on. But the reporters got hold of the guest lists. Most of the invitées have no connection to American foreign policy and diplomacy — a mere 14% of the list are diplomats or foreign officials. As a sampling direct from NBC News’ report, the master list includes:

“Singer Reba McEntire, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr…Fox News host[s] Brian Kilmeade, Laura Ingraham…former Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, American Gaming Association President Bill Miller and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, the influential anti-abortion rights lobbying organization…Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., a key defender of Trump during the impeachment proceedings…Chik-fil-A Chairman Dan Cathy, a major donor to campaigns against same-sex marriage. Republican megadonors like Home Depot founder Ken Langone, hedge fund executive Paul Singer and Texas real estate tycoon Harlan Crow.

The lists contain not a single Democrat from Congress.

Republican strategists have been urging Pompeo to run for the Senate in Kansas to keep Democrats from winning the seat. Beyond that there is speculation about Pompeo running for president in 2024. The odor of corruption becomes asphyxiating when, added to the extravagance at our expense, we learn that…

“all the information collected by the State Department during the invitation process, including the names and contact information for potential guests, is emailed back and forth to Susan Pompeo’s private Gmail account”

…putting the couple in pole position to build a formidable database for Mike’s personal political ambitions.

NBC News learned that, in the week before he was fired, Linick made some sort of inquiry to the State Department protocol office, which invites speculation that poking into Pompeo’s use of government property and citizens’ money to build a fund-raising list is the bigger reason for Linick’s expulsion.

Pompeo said “…Inspector General Linick wasn’t performing a function in a way that we had tried to get him to…”, a statement that showed no understanding of the role of inspectors general, who should be independent from any dictates of their departments.

Mr. Trump evidently believes that, rather than Mr. Pompeo hiring someone who is in the business of performing personal services, government employees paid with tax dollars should be assigned to perform chores for the secretary. He said:

“Look. He’s a high quality person, Mike. He’s a very high quality, he’s a very brilliant guy…I’d rather have him on the phone with some world leader than have him wash dishes because maybe his wife isn’t there? or his kids? You know. What are you telling me. It’s terrible. It’s so stupid. Do you know how stupid that sounds to the world? Unbelievable.”

The world more likely had another laugh listening to Mr. Trump shedding still more of the women’s vote.

the three axed before

Mr. Trump is intolerant of anyone whose job obligates reporting facts or taking action not to his liking. His pathology is such that he cannot let that go without retribution. He had already been getting rid of those who testified in the House impeachment proceedings, but his kill list is long. Inspectors general are chosen for their impartial records and reputations for rectitude. It’s something of a profession. In their place Trump has been systematically replacing them across the government with loyal political appointees unlikely to look for any fault.

        Steve Linick                  Kristi Grimm                   Glenn Fine             Michael Atkinson

Well into an earlier black hole of a Friday night to escape notice, Trump fired the intelligence agencies’ inspector general, Michael Atkinson. He had been 15 years with the Justice Department beginning in the Bush administration. He was Trump’s own nominee for the job. Atkinson’s crime? He had obeyed the law. Under the federal whistleblower statute, he was obligated to report to Congress receipt of a complaint that he deemed met the criterion of “serious concern”. It surely did. It led to no less than Trump’s impeachment.

But for exposing Trump’s misdeeds — his holding up Congressionally-authorized military assistance funds for Ukraine contingent on its president investigating Joe Biden and son and on fabricating that Ukraine not Russia interfered in the 2016 elections — Trump called Atkinson “a disgrace” who “did a terrible job”. Atkinson had forwarded “a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report — it was fake. It was totally wrong”, except that just about everything in the whistleblower complaint was corroborated by a dozen government officials who testified to Congress in the impeachment proceedings. The president said he felt there was a lack of loyalty, describing Atkinson as “not a big Trump fan”, as if loyalty to him was in everyone’s job description.

This was Trump rewriting history, projecting his reconstructed version to his base, a voting bloc that by now has likely forgotten details it may never have noted at the time and are now told to think, as Trump purges one after another, that inspectors general across the government have no business overseeing Trump’s government. This is the mentality of a dictator, who designs not to govern but to rule.

The inspector general of Health and Human Services, Christi Grimm, came out with a report saying that a survey of 323 hospitals around the country revealed that they faced severe shortages of coronavirus test supplies. The report made no judgments about the department or the administration but Trump called it “Another Fake Dossier!”. In his news briefing he said,

“It’s wrong…Could politics be entered into that?”…You didn’t tell me also that this inspector general came out of the Obama administration”

. Grimm’s service dates from 1999, but for Trump — who has spoken also of “Obama judges”, invoking a reprimand from Chief Justice Roberts — everyone with any connection to Obama is out to get him.

Yet another career government official who has served both Republican and Democratic administrations, acting Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, would be cashiered. The four top leaders of Congress had appointed Fine to the oversight board mandated by the Cares Act that is to keep watch over how $550 million of the the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus money will be spent to aid large corporations.

House Democrats had insisted that there be a rigorous oversight panel to prevent the money from being corruptly misappropriated to political favorites. That looked all too likely when Trump signaled in a signing statement that he did not intend to share information with the oversight board about how the money is being spent. “Look, I’ll be the oversight”, he said, and to that end replaced Fine’s fifth slot on the board with his own man, Brian Miller, of the White House Counsel office. It was Miller who, in a brusque three sentence e-mail, rebuffed Congress’s Government Accountability Office when it sought information pertinent to the impeachment proceedings.

Now dwell on that: In place of a long-term career professional inspector general, whose creed is fair-minded impartiality, we have a political appointee out to please the boss overseeing half a trillion in funds we taxpayers are on the hook for.

THE ENEMIES LIST

The autocrat knows that his arrogation of power breeds enemies. Paranoia dictates that he purge all around him of those who show hints of disagreement or disloyalty. Axios reported that Trump gave his 29-year-old body man, John McEntee, the new assignment of ridding his government of all believed to be anti-Trump.

The White House already had in hand lists of those to oust and replace, compiled over 18 months with the assistance of allies, among them even the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who runs a conservative activist network called Groundswell. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan gained access to such lists that form Trump’s notions of subversion, his “deep state” filled with what he calls “snakes”. Authenticating his use of that word, we heard Trump apply that insult to Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee. As The New York Times‘s Peter Baker wrote, “officials show up for work now never entirely sure who will be there by the end of the evening — themselves included”.

May 25 2020 | Posted in Governance | Read More »

What’s “Obamagate”? Just Ask the President

In the Rose Garden press briefing, May 11:

Phillip Rucker of The Washington Post: What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing, and do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?

Trump: Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected and it’s a disgrace that it happened and if you look at what’s gone on and if you look at now all of this information that’s being released and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning. Some terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again. And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks and I wish you’d write honestly about it but unfortunately you choose not to do so.

Rucker: What is the crime exactly that you are accusing him of?

Trump: You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.

Got it!

Michael Flynn: A Man Wronged or Justice Gone Wrong?

Reaction to the Justice Department dropping all charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, immediately split across the political divide where those on the right who say say Flynn was entrapped by the corrupt FBI faced off against those on the left who say erasing guilty
pleas is the latest proof that the Justice Department has become corrupt.

It’s a much broader story. Read on.

Upon announcement, President Trump tweeted, “Yesterday was a BIG day for Justice in the USA. Congratulations to General Flynn and many others”. He pronounced Flynn “exonerated”. Trump’s tweet continued, “I do believe there is MUCH more to come!” That looks to be advance notice that Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, plan to undo every indictment filed by Robert Mueller and company with pardons coming for Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos and others deemed loyal.

Trump declared that his former aide had been “an innocent man” all along. He accused the Obama administration of targeting Flynn, for which there is no evidence, and said, “I hope that a big price is going to be paid.” Mr. Trump said of investigating Flynn, “It’s treason. It’s treason.”

Critics of the Justice Department’s extraordinary move — one would be hard put to find instances of Justice reversing a guilty plea — could point to the decision as blatantly political. Former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal called it, “outrageous and indefensible and one of the greatest threats to the rule of law that Trump has done in his three years”. For New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, “A politicized and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice is going to let the president’s crony simply walk away.”

The president has all along been signaling his sympathy for Flynn. He has called him “a wonderful man”, “a fine person”, “a very good person”, and says he was maltreated. He had advisers pass messages to Flynn conveying his concern and encouraging him to stay strong. He has said he was “strongly considering” a full pardon. In February 2017 the president tweeted,

“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”.

Flynn had lied about phone calls made in late December, 2016, to Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian Ambassador to the United States. The day after Flynn submitted his resignation, the president asked FBI Director James Comey to dinner at the White House to make a request: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go”. Comey’s doing no such thing and his failure to pledge loyalty to Trump led to his firing, which in turn caused the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election to be turned over to a special counsel, former FBI director Mueller.

Trump professed to know nothing about Barr’s plan to have Justice drop the case, but when asked on April 30 about the likelihood of a pardon, Trump said he didn’t think he’d have to, telegraphing that he was in on the plan.

Flynn was hardly a good choice for the important post of national security adviser. He had posted multiple conspiracy tweets alleging that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, drank the blood and bodily fluids of other humans in Satanic rituals. He tweeted about “New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc” in the wake of the Pizzagate fable of Ms Clinton’s supposed involvement in a sex trafficking scheme out of a D.C. pizzeria named Comet Ping Pong. He had led chants of “Lock her up!” at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

fbi hardball

The release this April of FBI notes about its interview with Flynn was the predicate for the government dropping the charges against Flynn. They exhibit the prejudicial bent of certain of the agency’s higher-ups that have already gotten the Bureau into trouble, the anti-Trump e-mails of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the use of the Christopher Steele dossier in error-ridden FISA filings. Flynn was suspected of lying when he denied to White House officials that in December 2016 phone calls to the Russian Ambassador he had discussed President Obama’s new sanctions against the Kremlin. The FBI got wind of the calls and set up an interview for January 24, 2017. The just-released notes taken preparatory to the interview, allegedly by E.W. Priestap, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, said,

“What is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

Flynn’s lawyers claimed the FBI had improperly trapped Flynn into lying and fought to get the Justice Department to turn over the handwritten notes. Entrapment is contradicted by the agents who conducted the interview, who said at the time that they didn’t think Flynn had lied to them, that he had a “very ‘sure’ demeanor”, and even Director Comey said it was a “close” call.

Flynn’s defenders say the FBI was out to get him, and if the FBI is out to get you, it is not above using its power abusively to extract information from a suspect. President Trump said of the senior FBI and Justice Department officials who pursued him, “They’re scum — and I say it a lot, they’re scum, they’re human scum”.

But entrapment or no, the FBI’s predatory plotting does not undercut the fact that Flynn had in fact lied to the FBI and others when he claimed he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian diplomat. A fortnight later in his resignation letter Flynn admitted making misleading statements — he called it “incomplete information” — to Vice President Pence about the Kislyak calls. On Face the Nation in 2017 Pence said, “I can tell you that Flynn lied to me and the president did the right thing” in firing him.

reconsideration

The Justice Department has structured the FBI’s actions intricately to arrive at their rationale for voiding the general’s guilty pleas. Calling them “the frail and shifting justifications for its ongoing probe of Mr. Flynn”, the court filing says the FBI had decided to end its inquiry into whether Flynn was collaborating with Russia, and only then learned of the phone calls to Mr. Kislyak through routine government wiretaps. With reason to suspect that Mr. Flynn might be involved in a national security breach, they kept their investigation open to question Flynn about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

Shea says there was nothing about Flynn’s Russia contacts “to indicate an inappropriate relationship between Mr. Flynn and a foreign power”, despite his then being a private citizen tampering with U.S. foreign policy, and that “the FBI was eager to interview Mr. Flynn irrespective of any underlying investigation”. In filing reads that

“[T]he government has concluded that [Flynn’s FBI interview] was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and therefore “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

The underlying investigation having been dropped, the claim is that the interview was disconnected, taking place in a legal void. Barr said on CBS News, “They did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage”. Therefore, the further FBI investigation of Flynn by the Mueller team should not have existed at all, which means all subsequent charges against Flynn had no basis, because the law only allows prosecutions of false statements when those statements are “material” to a pending investigation. Barr said the Justice Department was duty-bound to dismiss the case because “a crime cannot be established here.”

These assertions are hotly disputed by legal analysts who find breaking the Flynn probe into two parts an entirely false contrivance. Only Shea signed the filing; no other career prosecutor at Justice would join him. Brandon Van Grack, a Mueller team member and veteran prosecutor on the case, withdrew from the prosecution. Mr. Van Grack had said in earlier court filings that the “topics of sanctions went to the heart of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence investigation” and “any effort to undermine those sanctions could have been evidence of links or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Calling the FBI interview of Flynn’s discussing sanctions with Kislyak “untethered” is a sham.

his roy cohn

Behind this extraordinary development was, of course, Bill Barr. Just months before, Barr had moved to soften the sentence of Trump confidant Roger Stone. Four prosecutors quit the department over that override. Before that he had stepped in front of the Mueller Report when it was submitted to his department after two years of work. In a hastily issued four-pages, Barr deliberately mischaracterized the report’s 448 pages to make it appear that Trump was effectively exonerated from any Russian involvement, allowing that to steep in the public consciousness for two weeks before the report, with its malfeasance and 10 instances of obstruction, was made public. Barr’s Justice Department has now, certainly at his instruction, petitioned the Supreme Court not to allow the release of redacted portions of the Mueller report, even to those with classified clearance. That makes it apparent that he had his department redact material he deemed important to hide beyond even now, months after the Russia investigation has all but vanished into American amnesia.

Barr got his own characterization as the president’s personal lawyer instead of the nation’s, and has been called the most troubling member of the Trump administration for having pursued a political agenda from the moment he walked through the door.

“Bill Barr is a man of unbelievable credibility and courage and he’s going to go down on the history books”, Trump told “Fox & Friends”. He said that if Barr had been his first attorney general, there would never have been a Russia probe. “He would have stopped it immediately”.

That doesn’t seem exaggerated. Barr authored a 19-page memorandum that won him his job by criticizing the Mueller obstruction inquiry and arguing that a president could not be investigated while in office. He said in an interview in April that the Mueller investigation was started “without any basis”.

It is unusual to the point of unheard of for the Justice Department to undo a guilty plea.

“Attorney General Barr’s politicization of justice knows no bounds,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “Overruling the Special Counsel is without precedent and without respect for the rule of law.” Over 2,000 former DOJ employees are calling on Barr to resign. Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe said to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, “What Barr has done on Trump’s behalf with respect to Flynn, who entered a fully justified guilty plea that the district court duly approved, is blatantly and purely partisan”, adding, “I know of no similarly corrupt action in the Justice Department’s entire history.”

Barr, in a CBS News interview, said, “There’s only one standard of justice…I also think it’s sad that nowadays these partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice”. Neal Katyal doesn’t think that. He observed, “There’s one form of justice for Trump’s pals and one form for the rest of us.”

why has this gone on?

It started a week before Trump’s inauguration when Washington Post columnist David Ignatius revealed that American authorities had intercepted a phone call on December 28th between Flynn, who was tapped by the president-elect to be his national security adviser, and the Russian Ambassador. The call was on the day before President Obama was to impose new sanctions on Russia and expel 35 of its diplomats in retaliation for Russia’s trying to influence the American elections. Reuters followed the Post a day later to say there had been five phone calls between Flynn and Kislyak.

The timing was suspect. Was Flynn calling to assure the Russian that, once president three weeks forward, Trump would make the sanctions go away? And, looking back to December, wasn’t it curious that Putin uncharacteristically said he would not retaliate against the sanctions? Trump had immediately tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!”.

There were other questions about Flynn’s activities that drew the FBI’s attention. He lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government but lied repeatedly about taking money, having failed to file required documents as an agent of a foreign government. He was paid to go to Russia in 2015 where he was photographed seated alongside Vladimir Putin at dinner. He was working on a beclouded for-profit nuclear-reactor scheme in the Middle East.

The Mueller office swept those issues aside, as well as possible charges against Flynn’s son who had been involved in these same activities at his dad’s consulting company, in return for Flynn in December of 2017 pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He entered a second guilty plea in 2018. His actions were a violation of the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from interfering in disputes between the United States and another country. But the Logan Act dates from 1799. No one had ever been prosecuted under it. Guilty pleas for lying to the FBI sufficed.

The intention of his calls to the Russian was a tacit withdrawal of Osama’s sanctions punishing election interference and to therefore urge that Russia not escalate tensions in retaliation. How do we know that was Flynn’s intention? He said so in his guilty plea. And he had already let that be known. Back on the day he resigned he said to The Daily Caller that the talk with Kislyak “was about the 35 guys who were thrown out.?.?. It was basically, ‘Look, I know this happened. We’ll review everything’?”. It was an open admission that the incoming Trump administration was undermining Obama’s policy even before taking office.

Flynn was subject to five years in prison, but the Mueller investigation, more interested in what Flynn knew about the Russian intervention and any coordination with the Trump campaign to affect the election, credited Flynn with being a model cooperator and initially recommended only probation as a sentence.

That fell apart. Relations with the feds deteriorated when the government brought a case against his consulting firm partner and tried to bully Flynn into testifying against him. With Flynn becoming uncooperative, prosecutors no longer ruled out following federal guidelines that called for a few months in prison. Flynn had hired new lawyers who took a much harder tack, expressing outrage at the feds’ “stunning and vindictive reversal”. The retired general now claimed he was the victim of a partisan conspiracy by prosecutors and federal investigators, and that he had been insufficiently represented by his original attorneys, Covington & Burling, one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms. Flynn had evidently come to realize, as David Graham at Vanity Fair put it, “Cooperating with authorities might get you off easy, but staying loyal to the president will get you off entirely”.

His new attorneys requested withdrawal of Flynn’s guilty plea while pressing to get further documentation of the FBI interview unsealed. Barr brought in outside prosecutor Jeffrey Jensen to review the case, undercutting his own department’s prosecutors just as he had done for Roger Stone. Flynn’s lawyers claimed the interview notes proved the FBI effectively entrapped the general, even though the interview had nothing to do with his admissions of guilt which were almost a year away. The release of those notes and the public uproar that greeted the FBI’s tactics gave Mr. Barr ammunition for undoing Flynn’s plea deal. Jensen unsurprisingly concluded, “Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case”.

questions

When it became apparent that Flynn had lied to the FBI and the Vice President, Mueller used that to pressure Flynn to provide information about Russian connections in the Trump campaign for the presidency. That cooperation earned Flynn the likelihood of no more than probation as a sentence as we saw. Why, then, did he carry on for two years past that point, steadily worsening his legal position, reportedly having to sell his house, and running up millions in legal fees? Editorialists on the right say that Mueller ruined Flynn’s and his family’s lives, but it seems that Flynn himself contributed heavily to that ruin.

Trump Makes His Move to Cripple U.S. Postal Service

First President Trump said the U.S. Postal Service must quadruple its rates for package delivery if it expects to get the $10 billion line of credit voted by Congress as coronavirus relief. Expecting a $13 billion loss

from the pandemic, the Service says it will not be able to operate beyond September if it does not receive the funds authorized in the $2 trillion Cares Act, monies that the Trump administration now says it will hold hostage. Now, to force the rate changes, Mr. Trump has named his own man to be the new head of the Postal Service. Credentials? He is a major donor to his election campaign and to the Republican National Committee.

The pandemic has reminded us that we like getting mail, that the workers who process it into our mailboxes from all over the country and the world are essential, along with grocery clerks, farm workers, pharmacists, medical personnel — it’s a long list. They deserve a thank you note in your mailbox.

Yet, since early in his tenure at the White House, Mr. Trump has shown particular animus toward the Postal Service, or USPS, accusing it of financial mismanagement. There may be valid reasons. The USPS loses money every year — $8.8 billion in fiscal 2019, heavily burdened by pension fund costs. But it needs to be stated at the outset that the forced increase in package rates would be costly for Amazon, a heavy user of the Service, and that means Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. Raising package rates would be using the public service relied on by America’s hundreds of millions as a private vendetta to get back at Bezos. Why? Because Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, a newspaper that has been a relentless critic of Trump. The president has raged against the Post for years, calling their exposés of his administration “fake news”.

Trump’s demand would be costly for Amazon because its free-shipping deals such as Amazon Prime make it difficult for the company to pass costs on to customers. Making his motive obvious is Trump saying, “The post office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times”. The USPS does not need a price increase. They are able to offer low prices to deliver packages because they have an advantage over rival delivery services. Because they deliver mail, they already go “the last mile” to America’s homes and businesses. A forced price increase in the highly competitive delivery arena would drive Amazon and others to UPS and Fed Ex overnight, worsening the Service’s financial condition. Yet Trump claims…

“[E]every time they bring a package, they lose money on it…If they don’t raise the price of the service they give, which is a tremendous service, and they do a great job and the postal workers are fantastic — but this thing’s losing billions of dollars…If they don’t raise the price I’m not signing anything, so they’ll raise the price so that they become maybe even profitable but so they lose much less money, okay?”

Well, no, not okay (and that is his wording). To the contrary, package delivery is the USPS’s sole profitable business line. It is 5% of delivery volume but 30% of its revenue. Raise prices and they stand to lose that 30%, left with only money-losing mail at rates the Service doesn’t control.

“This is about as catastrophically stupid an idea that anyone could ever imagine,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University Business School to The Washington Post. “As if anyone, from Amazon to the local mom and pop delivery businesses, would ever put up with a rate increase like that when they have alternatives.”

the quid pro quo

The administration’s demands go much further than a package delivery rate hike. As the condition for the release of the virus funding, Mnuchin’s plan, with Trump’s support assumed, calls for the Service to hand over much of control to the Treasury Department. Early in his job as treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin was charged with studying what should be done with the perennially ailing Postal Service. A task force he set up produced a 74-page report last fall that presaged the key requirements he is now pushing in negotiations with USPS management:

• Mnuchin wants to oversee hiring and firing decisions at upper levels including the postmaster, currently controlled by the Postal Service’s five-member board of governors.

• Treasury would review all large contracts for package delivery, a means of forcing pricing higher.

• The department would press for tougher concessions from the powerful postal unions on salaries and benefits.

This is not Mnuchin’s first attempt. Before 1970 the “Post Office”, as it is sometimes called, had for a hundred years been a cabinet level government department. As a financial backstop when it was made partly independent, the government has for five decades extended to the service a low-interest line-of-credit, currently $15 billion. Last fall, Mnuchin broke with precedent for the first time when he attempted to impose terms on the balance of the credit line not yet drawn down. He was rebuffed by the unions and the USPS leadership.

Mnuchin is this time using the pandemic to exact his and Trump’s terms, never mind the rather impolitic moment considering that the 630,000-person postal system workforce has been working without a supply of masks, gloves, sanitizers, or wipes; 1,219 workers had tested positive with the coronavirus by late April; and 44 have died. The Service needs the money, more than the $10 billion, but Trump himself cut the original request to that amount, according to insiders. It faces a liquidity crisis from mail volume cut in half by the pandemic — no one is sending out shopping flyers, cataloguers have held back — and a 57% drop is expected in the 4th quarter, normally the peak season.

blood from a stone

The Postal Service has struggled ever since first-class mail began to plummet in the Internet era. We once communicated by sending letters through the post. Long-distance phone calls were expensive and there was nothing else. Now we have social media and e-mail, both in most cases even free. Banks, credit cards, investment accounts nag at us to receive invoices and statements by e-mail for them to avoid paying for postal mail. We pay our bills online. But do we want there to be no mail service?

Adding to its difficulties, the USPS is not its own boss. Congress must approve post office closures. It has aggravated Postal Service loses by resisting closure of thousands of money-losing post offices because Congress members fear the backlash in their districts. A move a decade ago to save $3 billion a year by ending Saturday delivery was thwarted for the same reason. Rate increases are controlled by the Postal Regulatory Commission. A federal appeals court ruled a five-cent first-class increase illegal last fall because there is a law that says increases cannot exceed inflation.

Worst of all, the Postal Service is the only agency in or connected to the federal government that must fund in full its future pension fund obligations. Congress in 2006 passed a law requiring the USPS to pay $72 billion over 10 years to prefund 75 years worth of retiree benefits, a burden mandated of no other federal agency or private corporation. A further requirement is that the Service can only hold the pension benefit reserves in Treasury bills. In other words, Congress used its residual controls over the Post Office to squeeze it for money to fund the George W. Bush administration’s budget deficits.

Beginning in 2011 the USPS simply stopped paying for lack of money, but the annual burden stays on its books and exaggerates its annual loss. That plays into conservatives’ hands who want to privatize various government services, turning them into for-profit corporations. Which makes suspect a president and his treasury secretary now angling to take control of the Postal Service and break it financially by destroying its one profitable business. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sees through this. “Right now, I see a big danger for our country in the form of the administration’s interest in privatizing the post office,” she told reporters. “This is just about somebody on the outside making money off the post office instead of recognizing the important role [it] plays.”