United States Federal Government Officials

"At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act (From Linicks's May 2016 report)"

"We want to make sure we get it right... We want it to be accurate and thorough. It’s a top priority for our office...There is evidence that it (unfilled vacancies) has affected staffing, for example, in consular operations. It has affected staffing in bureau of diplomatic security, which obviously affects our security if we have limited staff. It’s affected our IT staff...we have not recovered yet in our civil service staffing levels at this point.... (the hiring freeze’s impact on the existing workforce) does have an impact on morale around the world... Inexperienced staff, insufficient training, staffing gaps and frequent turnover contribute to the department’s other management and performance challenges."

"Steve Linick, the State Department's inspector general, is set to hold an "urgent" briefing Wednesday with senior congressional staff members after Secretary Mike Pompeo Tuesday accused lawmakers of "intimidating and bullying" State Department officials by calling them for depositions related to the Ukraine inquiry... Although Linick serves at the pleasure of the President, there are safeguards to prevent him from being quickly removed... Linick, who was appointed to his post in September 2013 has a history of serving in oversight positions. At the State Department he oversaw the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. His May 2016 report on the probe was critical of Clinton, saying the former secretary failed to follow the rules or inform key department staff regarding her use of the private server."

"John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, says there are “serious questions” about the integrity of the State Department Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG is locked in an increasingly contentious fight with Clinton’s campaign on a host of issues, including her use of a private email account during her time as secretary of State... source within the OIG contacted The Hill claiming that the office has grown increasingly partisan, accusing it of having an “anti-Clinton” bias. Told by The Hill about the remarks, Podesta described the source as a “whistleblower” whose comments called into question the integrity of the OIG investigations. “This person’s account is highly troubling, and is cause to ask serious questions about the independence of this office,” Podesta said of the source. The Clinton campaign says it does not know the identity of the source. An OIG official strongly disputed the source’s account. “Partisan politics play no role in OIG’s work,” the spokesman said Monday. The source charges that State Inspector General Steve Linick is “excessively deferential” to Emilia DiSanto, the OIG deputy director and a former aide to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)... The source also charged that Linick is “more or less under her control, possibly out of a desire for a more prestigious appointed position.” ... The OIG spokesman noted that Linick, a two-time appointee of President Obama, was asked by Secretary of State John Kerry last year to investigate how the department handles records management, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and the archiving of emails."

"Linick previously served as inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency from 2010 until 2013. He was also an assistant US attorney in California and Virginia. Linick served as executive director of the Department of Justice's National Procurement Fraud Task Force as well as deputy chief of the fraud section in the DOJ Criminal Division from 2006 to 2010. During his tenure at the Department of Justice, he supervised and participated in white-collar criminal fraud cases involving, among other things, corruption and contract fraud against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan," according to his State Department biography."

"Steve Linick, who was appointed to detect mismanagement at the state department, was fired on Friday. US Democrats have launched an investigation into President Donald Trump's firing of the state department's internal watchdog. Inspector General Steve Linick was investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for suspected abuse of office, reports say. But he was sacked late on Friday after Mr Trump said he no longer commanded his full confidence. The move prompted angry criticism from senior Democrats in Congress. They accused Mr Trump of retaliating against public servants who want to hold his administration to account. Mr Linick was the third official responsible for monitoring government misconduct to be dismissed in recent weeks."

"Let’s be clear: all of these moves are punishment for doing the jobs the law authorizes and requires IGs (inspectors general) to do... This will not end until Congress takes these retaliatory firings seriously. The appointment of a crony of the VP further politicizes jobs that by statute are supposed to be non-partisan. Another important norm defiled."

"This firing is the outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of state, from accountability... I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”"

"We need to unleash the voices of the scientists in our public health system in the United States so they can be heard and their guidances need to be listened to."

"Republican lawmakers on the panel for the most part were careful not to attack Bright directly. But Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., slammed Bright for continuing to collect his $285,000 salary while first on sick leave for a spike in blood pressure, and now on vacation as he tries to straighten out his work situation. “You’re too sick to go into work, but you’re well enough to come here while getting paid,” said Mullin. “I have a hard time understanding that.”"

"The State Department’s official watchdog is finalizing several investigations into the Trump administration’s alleged mistreatment of its workforce, its top auditor told lawmakers on Thursday. State’s inspector general is wrapping up an 18-month probe into alleged prohibited personnel practices by the department’s political appointees at two different offices. Department whistleblowers told lawmakers in early 2018 they were being assigned to tasks unrelated to their normal, substantive duties because of work they had conducted under the Obama administration. Investigators have opted to deliver two separate probes, one looking at potential misconduct at the Bureau of International Organizations and the other in the Office of the Secretary, Steve Linick, the IG, told the House Appropriations Committee. Linick opted to separate them so the could deliver the results of the international office investigation to State this week. He expected to complete the probe into the secretary’s office next month. Both reports will be made public after State has the opportunity to review and respond to them."

"Inspector General Steve Linick recommended that the department develop a “corrective action plan” to fix the leadership deficiencies in the bureau. He also recommended that the department consider other moves, including “disciplinary action” against (Kevin) Moley. The State Department has agreed on both counts. Linick has been investigating allegations that Trump appointees had targeted career staffers for political retaliation since spring 2018. His other cases include ones involving the alleged actions of aides to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. They include one case exposed by Politico in which a career staffer of Iranian descent was ousted from a top policy role. Linick’s investigation grew to cover the international organizations bureau after a June 2018 report in Foreign Policy about (Mari) Stull, whom career staffers accused of deeply hostile behavior, including compiling loyalty lists. The report issued on Thursday is based on thousands of emails and other documents, as well as investigators’ interviews with more than 40 people, including Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not listed as having been interviewed. “Nearly every employee interviewed by OIG raised concerns about the leadership of IO and the treatment of staff,” the report states."

"The assault on the IG is late-stage corruption, and Trump’s kicking down one of the last bulwarks that stand between us and the burgeoning corruption-driven authoritarianism.... Cover it like you’re a foreign correspondent in a collapsing republic. Because you are. (to journalists)"

"The Trump administration has fired the state department’s inspector general who is reported to have been investigating the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for a potential abuse of office. The inspector general, Steve Linick, was given notice of his dismissal late on Friday night and is to be replaced by Stephen Akard, a close ally of the vice-president, Mike Pence... According to a Democratic congressional aide, just before his abrupt dismissal Linick had opened an investigation into allegations that Pompeo had been using a political appointee at the state department to run personal errands for him and his wife, Susan. Linick is the latest in a string of officials in watchdog roles fired by the president in recent months, turning on its head the tradition that such jobs are filled with non-partisan figures... In 2019 a state department whistleblower reportedly alleged that Pompeo had used his security detail to run chores like picking up food and picking up the family dog from the grooming salon. Under US law the president is required to give 30 days’ notice before firing an inspector general, to allow Congress to investigate the reasons for dismissal."

"I believe with proper leadership and collaboration across government, with the best science leading the way, we can devise a comprehensive strategy, we can devise a plan that includes all Americans and help them help us guide us through this pandemic. The window is closing to address this pandemic because we still do not have a standard centralized coordinated plan to take this nation through this response."

"Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to improve our response now, based on science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged. There will be likely a resurgence of Covid-19 this fall that will be greatly compounded by the challenges of seasonal influenza. Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history."

"We need to be truthful with the American people. Americans deserve the truth. The truth must be based on science. We have the world's greatest scientists. Let us lead. Let us speak without fear of retribution. We must listen. Each of us can and must do our part now."

"I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way."

"Lives were endangered, and I believe lives were lost. Not only that, we were forced to procure the supplies from other countries without the right quality standards, so even our doctors and nurses in the hospitals today are wearing N95-marked masks from other countries that are not providing the sufficient protection that a US-standard N95 mask would provide them."

"There's no one company that can produce enough for our country or for the world. We need to have a strategy and plan in place now to make sure that we can not only fill that vaccine, make it, distribute it, administer it in a fair and equitable plan. We don't have that yet and it is a significant concern."

"Rep. Butterfield: How could we be struggling to get adequate supplies of simple supplies like swabs? What does this say about the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak? Bright: It says to me, sir, that there is no master coordinated plan on how to respond to this outbreak."

"Military power is the least likely instrument of national power to be successful if you decide to use it. A corollary truth with great relevance to Cuba is that sanctions, embargoes, closing embassies and withdrawing ambassadors, the silent treatment, branding other countries as evil and advocating and supporting regime change—all of these methods, even if actually backed by strong military power and the threat to use it, rarely work and, even when they appear to do so, the results they produce are usually negative and even when they are positive, are almost never long-lasting."

"Let's examine just two of the extremely negative impacts of our almost half-century of failure vis-à-vis Cuba: The U.S. has reconciled with the Communist governments in China and Vietnam. We support dictators throughout Central Asia under the strategic mantra of "contact and influence is better than isolation". We talked to the Communist Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. But we cannot bring ourselves to deal with Havana and have maintained that failed policy for almost half a century. It is simply absurd to continue to do so."

"The export of revolution at the behest of the Soviets has been transformed into the export of healthcare at the behest of the Cuban people. When I visited Cuba this past March, this was one of the areas of Cuban activity on which I focused—the delivery of first-class healthcare to impoverished people in Cuba, in Venezuela and elsewhere in South and Central America, and increasingly in sub-Saharan Africa."

"A rapprochement with Cuba would create the same opening in Latin America that a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian situation would create in the Middle East. I am not sufficiently naïve to believe that either development would meet all regional challenges or solve all problems, but both would be a dramatic and effective start. Both would give America a decisive leg-up on regaining some of the prestige and power we have squandered in the past seven years."

"For almost half a century, U.S. policy with respect to Cuba has failed—miserably."

"While we have significant relations on almost every level with Communist countries 10,000 miles away such as China and Vietnam, we have almost no relations with the 11 million souls on an island 90 miles off our southern coast where all this dynamism is beginning to show."

"We could learn much from how the Cubans deliver healthcare particularly applicable to our rural areas and our inner cities where impoverished people predominate. And in the process, the contact would benefit Cubans. They would be able to study what is strong and robust about the U.S. healthcare system—the high technology components, for example—and at the same time learn that freedom and democracy are pretty good items too."

"Because of our failed Cuba policy, we miss valuable opportunities to share Cuba’s rapidly growing store of knowledge and expertise in, for example, how to deliver high quality healthcare to deeply impoverished areas. Moreover, we are missing opportunities to explore mutual interests in vaccine development, to share in Cuba’s extraordinary wealth of experience in combating hurricanes and the floods that often accompany them, to explore together Cuba’s continental shelf for fossil fuels, and to sell our agricultural products in a more cost-effective and profitable way to an island population that needs these products and would benefit greatly from the shortened transits and thus reduced expenses."

"We have just, as we did with torture from 2002 to 2007, 2008, as we substantiated for the world that torture was OK, we have now OK’d the killing of recognized members of other states’ government. That’s what Soleimani was, no matter how heinous we may paint him... We have become the law of the jungle, rather than, as we have been since 1945, the greatest supporter of international law and the rule of law in general across the face of the globe. With torture and with killing other state recognized individuals of their government, we have become the tiger, the lion, the bear, the alligator in that jungle. It’s not a very, very good precedent to have set, as the Russians indicated. The Chinese have said similar things. It’s a terrible precedent to have set. America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It’s part of who we are. It’s part of what the American Empire is. We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Tom Cotton is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That’s the truth of it. And that’s the agony of it."

"The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington... to say that Soleimani, himself personally, was an imminent threat is, as I said before, laughable. And the fact that Esper and Pompeo, who have some manner of expertise in military affairs, are saying these things makes them even more egregious liars than otherwise. If John Kerry got up there and said something like that, or if Warren Christopher got up there and said something of that, Kerry even with his Vietnam experience, you could give them a little bit of leeway. But these guys are supposed to be experts in the very fields that they’re talking about. They’re anything but experts. They are warmongers. They are warmongers par excellence."

"Mike Pompeo and Vice President Pence, they both long for the rapture, for the end times, for Jesus coming down to the Earth and killing all the unbelievers with his flaming sword. This is what they are all about. This is why they allowed the embassy to move to Jerusalem. Go back and check the remarks that were made at that time, the prayers that were given and so forth. This is, in a word, a very different U.S. administration, but in the same hands of the military-industrial complex, of the national security state, of all the people who want warfare to be the raison d’être of this empire at the same time."

"Well, we’ve got 330 million Americans 280 million of whom I’m convinced, are ignorant, apathetic, fearful, etc, etc. And you tell them anything, and they’ll believe it. And if you give them the politics of fear, as a daily food, they will believe you. They will go along with you."

"As Colin Powell's right-hand man at the State Department, Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term. Yesterday, Colonel Wilkerson made up for lost time. He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy."

"I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council."

"This (a war with Iran) would be a vicious, long-term guerrilla campaign waged by the Iranians over 10 or 15 years... And it would cost $2 trillion and lots of lives and more than anything else, it would require at least a half a million troops. No allies are going to join us. I’ll go to my grave regretting the death of every soldier and sailor, marine and airmen in Iraq and... three hundred thousand or so plus civilians and millions that have been displaced."

"Democrats need to get their act together... they need to do things like not just talk about prohibiting the president from using military force against Iran without congressional authorization. They need to scare the bejesus out of him if there’s any way to do that, and say, “We will cut everything off immediately if you use force against Iran without our permission.” And then they need to think hard about whether or not they’re going to give permission."

"The uniform I wear... is that of a United States Army... The members of our all-volunteer force are made up of... people from all ethnicities, regions, socioeconomic backgrounds, who come together under a common oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. We do not serve any political party; we serve the Nation."

"He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave... He went and told his boss what he just heard."

"I don’t give the leadership in the Pentagon a lot of credit for smarts these days either—not the chairman, not the Joint Chiefs, not the service chiefs as service chiefs. They’re just not very smart people; no imagination at all. And what we’re doing here is just fulfilling history’s mandate, if you will. We will fight, therefore, let’s go ahead and fight. I actually heard someone say the other day, an otherwise sane and sober person, it’s better to fight them now than to wait later because later they’ll be better. Well my question was, why fight them at all?"

"Wilkerson won't say outright that he and Powell were deliberately snowed by intelligence reports tailored to fit a political push for war, but he has edged closer to that view, noting, "I've begun to wonder." It turns out that the administration relied on fabricators' claims about Hussein's illusory WMD programs and, in one case, an al Qaeda suspect whom the CIA turned over to alleged torturers in Egypt. "I kick myself in the ass," Wilkerson says. "How did we ever get to that place?""

"I obviously wasn't happy with the job he did... First of all he reported a false call... what was said on the call was totally appropriate."

"If I have any disdain for a particular political party in the Congress of the United States other than the Republicans, it is for the Democrats. I have never seen such a feckless, cowardly, incompetent, inept group of people— from Charles Schumer to Nancy Pelosi— across the board in the Congress. They have no guts whatsoever, no courage whatsoever. That’s one reason my party, which I don’t fault for courage and I don’t fault for ruthlessness, even disgusting ruthlessness, beats them all the time. Mitch McConnell has no qualms about sticking daggers in people’s back and twisting them while he smiles, but the Democrats seem to have no courage, no ruthlessness, no “I’m going to get you” about them. And you can say, well that’s a positive. In American politics, that’s not a positive."

"As a young man, I decided I wanted to spend my life serving this Nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression. For the last 20 years, it has been an honor to represent and protect this great country."

"In the spring of 2019, I became aware of two disruptive actors... Ukraine's then-prosecutor , and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the President's personal attorney, promoting false narratives that undermined the United States' Ukraine policy. The NSC and its interagency partners, including the State Department, grew increasingly concerned about the impact that such information was having on our country's ability to achieve our national security objectives."

"I want to... recognize the courage of my colleagues who have appeared and are scheduled to appear before this committee. ...[T]he character attacks on these distinguished and honorable public servants is reprehensible. It is natural to disagree and engage in spirited debate, and this has been the custom of our country since the time of our Founding Fathers, but we are better than personal attacks."

"[M]y simple act of appearing here today, just like the courage of my colleagues who have also truthfully testified before this committee, would not be tolerated in many places around the world. In Russia, my act of expressing concern to the chain of command in an official and private channel would have severe personal and professional repercussions, and offering public testimony involving the President would surely cost me my life. I am grateful to my father—for my father's brave act of hope 40 years ago and for the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant, where I can live free, free of fear for mine and my family's safety."

"Dad, I am sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected professionals. Talking to our elected professionals is proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth."

"[A] strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests because Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression."

"We are not a country where a group of lieutenant colonels can get together and dictate what the policy of the United States is..."