The Rats Abandoning the U.S.S. Trump Accept No Responsibility

I have always believed that decent and moral people do not knowingly "get in bed" so to speak with immoral people.  Sooner or later the immorality begins to rub off on you and you become perhaps forever tainted by your decision to dismiss immorality, hate and bigotry.  This is a lesson one can witness watching the rats leaving the rudderless Trump/Pence regime who now plead that they should not be blamed for the misogyny that flows in torrents from the White House virtually daily.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the shameless hypocrisy of those resigning from or being forced out of Trump regime positions.  Do not cry for any of these individuals who knew up front that they were making a pact with evil. Here are column excerpts:

One by one they leap — or are pushed — from the foundering USS Trump, each offering a variation of the same plea: Don’t blame me.

Comes now retired Gen. John Kelly, the second of President Trump’s chiefs of staff to be discarded. Days before departing, he paused for a two-hour telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times. It was an extended exercise in self-absolution.

Don’t blame him for Trump’s border-wall obsession. . . . . Don’t blame Kelly for Trump’s fabricated “crisis” at the southern border. . . . Don’t blame him for Trump’s claims that Hispanic immigrants spread violence and drugs.

And don’t blame him for the travel ban or the family separation policies, either. Rather, he, argued, he should be judged for what Trump didn’t do: . . . . Right. And if we judge success by things that didn’t happen, we should also credit Kelly for avoiding a zombie apocalypse.

Kelly served his country honorably for decades. But there’s nothing courageous in announcing, on the way out the door, that he didn’t agree with many awful things Trump did on his watch. There was, once, a good argument that qualified people, by taking administration jobs, could temper Trump’s worst instincts. But it turned out Trump was not to be tempered.

Those who disagreed with the madness had an obligation to resign, or at least to speak out — not to wash their hands of responsibility after the fact.

Don’t blame Rex Tillerson. The ousted secretary of state recently told Bob Schieffer of CBS News he reined in Trump by saying “you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates a treaty.”

Don’t blame Jim Mattis. The former defense secretary waited until resigning to publicly state his disagreements with Trump over NATO, “malign actors” such as Russia and “treating allies with respect.”

Don’t blame Reince Priebus. Trump’s first chief of staff spoke up about Trump’s chaos after he was ousted, telling author Chris Whipple: “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50.”

Also, don’t blame Omarosa Manigault Newman (she knew Trump was a racist but took a job in his White House anyway) or Michael Cohen (at his sentencing, the president’s former personal lawyer said his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him to “cover up his dirty deeds”) or Stephen K. Bannon (after he departed the White House, the former top strategist suggested Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had engaged in “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” behavior) . . . . The self-absolution extends into the diaspora of Trump apologists. Departing House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) gave a farewell speech denouncing the use of social media to “play on anger” and “on people’s fears.” Departing Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a Trump cheerleader, gave a farewell speech lamenting the loss of “comity, compromise and mutual respect.” Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), in defeat, denounced Trump for operating with “no real relationships, just convenient transactions.”

Better late than never? Perhaps. Those taking parting shots are certainly more honorable than those who, with non-disparagement agreements, get paid to defend Trump on the airwaves. The post-employment critics also compare favorably with Mick Mulvaney, who called Trump a “terrible human being” before becoming Trump’s budget director and now acting chief of staff.

But the after-the-fact criticism seems self-serving — a way for Trump enablers to rebuild their reputations and find new jobs. Tucker Carlson, an unstinting Trump booster, used the anonymity of a German-language weekly to put on the record that he questions Trump’s competence, knowledge, self-aggrandizement and personnel choices.

Even Carlson, though, is braver than the anonymous Trump official who wrote the New York Times op-ed about efforts to sabotage Trump from within. How long before the author emerges to claim credit — and perhaps a book contract? Proposed title: Don’t blame me.

A Damning Image of the Trump/Pence Regime

I continue to be amazed at those who are willing to prostitute themselves and accept positions within the Trump/Pence regime with seemingly no concern for how their reputations may be sullied and the morally bankrupt positions they be pressured to take. Many of these individuals ultimately end up leaving the administration - indeed, the White House staff has become a revolving door - and then belatedly tell the truth about the foul state of affairs that they have witnessed.  These confessions serve two purposes: an effort to regain moral standing and restore their reputations, and secondly, to issue a warning to Americans that things are seriously wrong under this utterly unfit occupant of the White House.  A column in the Washington Post looks at some of these tell all exits.  Here are excerpts:

From an administration’s departures we learn how it conducts itself. Honesty comes easier to those with little left to lose.

In this regard, the Trump administration offers much to analyze. The pace of disillusioned exits is rapid. And what the departing have chosen to emphasize reveals much about daily life in the executive branch.

In the case of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the complaint was an atmosphere toxic with cruelty. President Trump made a habit of undermining his chief diplomat in public. . . . . Tillerson was fired via tweet — a first for the office once held by Thomas Jefferson. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly reportedly told White House staffers that Tillerson received the news of his impending dismissal while on the toilet.

Jobs in the executive branch are hard enough without an added layer of stress caused by constant humiliation. But Trump emphasizes his own importance by diminishing those around him. So creative cruelty is essential to his management style. The result is fear, distrust and resentment — hardly a situation conducive to deliberation.

During his departure, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin made a similar point about civility. He says he was informed of his own firing just hours before a Trump tweet thanking him for his service was posted, and then the administration claimedhe had resigned. “It should not be this hard to serve your country,” he complained in a New York Times op-ed.

But Shulkin also described an atmosphere not just of cruelty but also of attempted corruption. He wrote of a “brutal power struggle” within his department with “political appointees choosing to promote their agendas instead of what’s best for veterans.” Their goal was “to put VA health care in the hands of the private sector.” And the reason for this, as Shulkin describes it, was not only ideological. “They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed,” he said. “That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.”

To summarize: The departing head of VA has accused swaggering White House appointees of trying to betray the interests of veterans for the financial benefit of favored individuals and businesses. A serious charge. But in the Trump administration’s carnival of corruption, this barely rates as a sideshow.

The departure of Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, brought a different sort of indictment. In his final public remarks, he was careful to preserve his ties to the president. But the topic he chose was Russia — particularly Russian cyber­operations against the United States and other NATO countries. And his judgment was harsh: “We have failed to impose sufficient costs” for such actions. The result? “The Kremlin’s confidence is growing as its agents conduct their sustained campaign to undermine our confidence in ourselves and in one another.”

For a national security adviser to make this statement in an administration where the president has been equivocal, even exculpatory, in his language about Russia is the most serious critique of all. 

The composite image of the Trump administration left by these departing officials is damning — a picture of cruelty, attempted corruption and national weakness. Instead of hearing gratitude for the experience of a lifetime, we are getting distress signals.

Be very afraid.

Trump Is Poised to Embroil America in New Wars

Anyone who has truly followed Donald Trump's career over the years will note one thing: the lives of others means nothing to the man and all that matters is satiating Trump's overweening ego.  Previously, Trump - Der Trumpenführer as I prefer to call him since he embodies some of the most dangerous elements of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini - has stated that only some "major event" will unify America in the wake of his divisive campaign.  What could such a major event involve?  In his latest piece in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan suggests that Trump will ignite new wars in the hopes of rallying the country behind him. In making his argument, Sullivan cites Plato's Republic which traces the decline of a republic into a tyranny - a historical work likely unknown to Trump and certainly unknown to most of his white supremacist and Christian extremist supporters - which aptly notes that throughout history would be tyrants have used war and foreign adventures to rally domestic support in the face of principled resistance.  Her are article highlights: 

Every now and again, when I find myself buried in the latest blizzard of invariably disturbing news emanating from the Trump White House, I go back and remind myself of the core narrative. I read Plato’s Republic again, the prism through which I first raised the alarm about Donald Trump’s emergence. The prism is essentially how a late-stage democracy, dripping with decadence and corruption, with elites dedicated primarily to enriching themselves, and a people well past any kind of civic virtue, morphs so easily into tyranny. This is the second phase of tyranny, after the more benign settling-in: the purge. Any constraints that had been in place to moderate the tyrant’s whims are set aside; no advice that counters his own gut impulses can be tolerated. And so, over the last couple of weeks, we have seen the president fire Rex Tillerson and Andrew McCabe, two individuals who simply couldn’t capitulate to the demand that they obey only Trump, rather than the country as well. And so Tillerson has been replaced by a fawning toady, Mike Pompeo, a man whose hatred of Islam is only matched by his sympathy for waterboarders. Pompeo has been replaced in turn by a war criminal, who authorized brutal torture and illegally destroyed the evidence, Gina Haspel. Whatever else we know about Haspel, we know she follows orders. And then last night, we saw McMaster fall on his sword, replaced by John Bolton, an unrepentant architect of the most disastrous war since Vietnam, a fanatical advocate for regime change in Iran, an anti-Muslim extremist, and a believer in the use of military force as if it were a religion. And this, of course, is also part of the second phase for Plato’s tyrant: war. “As his first step, he is always setting some war in motion, so that people will be in need of a leader,” Plato explains. In fact, “it’s necessary for a tyrant always to be stirring up war.”

And everything we know about Trump’s character tells us that war is probably the only aspect of foreign relations he intuitively understands. He cannot exist as an equal party in an international system. He has to dominate other countries the way he does other human beings. And, when you look back, you see this has been obvious all along. On trade, he has long been rhetorically at war with our closest neighbors and trading partners, and now he has unveiled the contours of a major trade war with China; we already have a renewed and deeper presence in Afghanistan; and we have long been supporting the Saudi monarchy’s proxy and inhumane war with Iran in Yemen.

The real possibility of a nuclear conflict with North Korea is getting more real by the day (can you imagine Bolton’s counsel for the Kim Jong-un meeting?); and with Bolton in place, the groundwork for ending the Iran nuclear deal is also finally complete. And what’s noticeable in all this is the irrelevance of the Senate. They refuse to reclaim their treaty-making powers with respect to trade (they could end Trump’s China shenanigans overnight); they have abdicated any influence on foreign policy and war just as they have done nothing to protect the special counsel. They are just like the Roman Senate as the republic collapsed. The forms survive; there is nothing of substance behind them.

When the U.S. detonates the Iran Nuclear Accord, the European alliance, in so far as it still staggers onward, will reach crisis point; and the Iranian regime will likely accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They’d be crazy not to. At which point, the path to war starts (or rather is very hard to stop). Kushner is the key figure here, I suspect. His support for the Israeli hard right (he doesn’t just support the West Bank settlements, he funds them) and his very cozy relationship with the new Saudi prince/dictator both point in one direction: war with Iran. Getting the Americans to launch such a war is Jerusalem’s and Riyadh’s wet dream – which is why the reports of the Crown Prince’s boasting about Kushner being “in his pocket” are far from implausible.

All of these developments, I bet, have reached a new intensity because of Robert Mueller’s cumulative legal cornering of Trump, especially the special counsel’s recent crossing the line into the finances of the Trump Organization. At that point, I suspect Trump realized he was more vulnerable than he previously believed, and went on full offense everywhere. I was long a skeptic of Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Russia in 2016, but every single development in the last few months keeps pointing in the same direction — and it isn’t Trump’s exoneration.

Yesterday, we discovered that Guccifer 2.0, Roger Stone’s online pen pal, is actually a Russian agent. Trump’s initial refusal to say — even through his spokeswoman — that Russia is clearly responsible for the release of a nerve agent in a country which is one of our closest allies was simply staggering. As is his continued refusal to confront seriously the threat Putin clearly poses to democratic elections in the West. The extraordinary leak of the warning from his national security team not to congratulate Putin during the recent call is yet another sign, it seems to me, that even those working closest to the president want to alert the world about the threat to our national security that is coming from the Oval Office itself.

Part of me, of course, has long worried and hoped that my assessment of Trump as truly the tyrant of Plato’s imagination is melodramatic overkill. I’m given to excitability, even catastrophism. I’ve been wrong before. And there are many ways in which American life still seems the same.

We still hold elections — even if the president asserts that they are all rigged against him. In November, we have a chance to use the ballot box to save this country, and there are some signs that a wave is building. The courts still have some independence and feistiness; the media is still free, if now accompanied by a full-bore state propaganda channel.

But I worry that the more Trump is opposed and even cornered — especially if he loses the House this fall — the more dangerous he will become. If Mueller really does have the goods, and if the Democrats storm back into congressional power, then Trump may well lash out to protect himself at all costs. We know he has no concern for the collateral damage his self-advancement has long caused in his private and public life. We know he has contempt for and boundless ignorance of liberal democracy. We know he is capable of anything — of immense cruelty and callousness, of petty revenge and reckless rhetoric, of sudden impulses and a quick temper. We also know he is commander-in-chief, who may soon need the greatest distraction of all.

War is coming. And there will be nothing and no one to stop him.
   

The Growing Menace of the Trump/Pence Regime

If a fiction writer wrote about a White House like the one now on daily display even as recently as five (5) years ago, everyone would have condemned the narrative as "ridiculous" or "unbelievable."  Now, with each passing day we become increasingly aware that the occupant of the White House operates more or less like a crime boss, dealing with underworld figures, Russian oligarchs, cavorts with porn stars and then threatens them with physical violence while simultaneously trying to silence them with hush money.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin - who likely has his own cashe of blackmail materials - smiles on as American prestige and engagement with the world as a super power lurches from one embarrassment to another.  The story line put out by Trump sycophants and Republicans  - whose willingness to prostitute themselves to the morally bankrupt that would shame a tawdry whore - has been that "adults in the room" would rein in Trump's worse excesses.  As we are witnessing, this storyline is a crock of bullshit.   Every decent, honest American - which I am sad to say excludes evangelical Christians who put this human refuse in the White House - should be appalled and gravely worried.  A column in the New York Times looks at the rolling disaster.  Here are excerpts:

Since the beginning of this nightmare administration, we’ve been assured — via well-placed anonymous sources — that a few sober, trustworthy people in the White House were checking Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most erratic whims. A collection of generals, New York finance types and institution-minded Republicans were said to be nobly sacrificing their reputations and serving a disgraceful president for the good of the country. Through strategic leaks they presented themselves as guardians of American democracy rather than collaborators in its undoing.

Last August, after the president said there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., senior officials rationalized their continued role in the administration to Mike Allen of Axios. “If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall,” Allen wrote. Since then, we’ve had a government shutdown over immigration, albeit a brief one. A trade war appears imminent. Arrests of undocumented immigrants — particularly those without criminal records — have continued to surge.

Over the past 14 months we’ve also seen monstrous levels of corruption and chaos, a plummeting of America’s standing in the world and the obliteration of a host of democratic norms.

Increasingly, however, the people who were supposed to be the adults in the room aren’t in the room anymore. The former Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell left in January. Gary Cohn, head of the National Economic Council, announced his resignation on March 6. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was terminated by tweet on Tuesday. National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster will reportedly be among the next to go, and Trump may soon fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, possibly as a prelude to shutting down the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The self-styled grown-ups are, for the most part, being replaced by lackeys and ideologues. Larry Kudlow, the CNBC pundit Trump has appointed to succeed Cohn, is known for the consistent wrongness of his predictions. Tillerson was a terrible secretary of state, but unlike his chosen successor, the director of the C.I.A., Mike Pompeo, he never trafficked in nut-job Benghazi conspiracy theories or anti-Muslim invective. John Roberts of Fox News reported that McMaster could be replaced by uberhawk John Bolton . . . .

This new stage of unbound Trumpism might make the administration’s first year look stable in comparison. That would partly vindicate the adults’ claims that things would be even messier without them. But it would also mean that by protecting the country from the consequences of an unhinged president, they helped Trump consolidate his power while he learned how to transcend restraints.

Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly. . . . Of course, unlike Omarosa Manigault Newman, who confessed horror at her former boss’s presidency on “Celebrity Big Brother,” they haven’t. Their defenders among anti-Trump Republicans say it’s because some of them still have a role to play in staving off potential disaster. One Republican in regular contact with people in the White House told me that Powell and Cohn “need to protect their capacity to reach in and help manage in the event of any national crisis.”

I don’t find this entirely convincing. If these people see the administration as unequipped to handle an emergency, they owe the country a firsthand account of our vulnerability.

[I]f there’s one person who has no excuse for not speaking out, it’s Tillerson, once one of the most powerful private citizens in America, now humbled and defiled by his time in Trump’s orbit. . . . . There’s little doubt that Tillerson holds Trump in contempt and disagrees with large parts of his agenda. After Charlottesville, Tillerson refused to say that the president’s words represented American values.

“Rex is never going to be back in a position where he can have any degree of influence or respect from this president,” my Republican source said. Because of that, the source continued, “Rex is under a moral mandate to do his best to burn it down.” That would mean telling the truth “about how concerned he is about the leadership in the Oval Office, and what underpins those concerns and what he’s seen.”

In this case, patriotism and self-interest point in the same direction. Before entering this administration, Tillerson was a vastly more respected businessman than Trump . . . . Now the first line of his obituary will be about a year of abject failure as the country’s lead diplomat, culminating in a humiliation fit for reality TV.

The only way he will ever change that is by joining those who would bring this despicable presidency down. If Tillerson came out and said that the president is unfit, and perhaps even that venal concerns for private gain have influenced his foreign policy, impeachment wouldn’t begin tomorrow, but Trump’s already narrow public support would shrink further.

Last year, Axios’s Allen and Jim VandeHei half-jokingly called the insiders trying to circumscribe Trump the “Committee to Save America.” Now the committee, having failed, is disbanding. The least they could do is be frank with the rest of us about what we’re up against.

Leak Documents Reveal New Ties Between Trump Administration and Russia

The cesspool of corruption and possibly treasonous activities that is the Trump/Pence administration seem to no few limits.  Two campaign operatives are under indictment and another one has plead guilty.  Yet, it would seem that more indictments will follow.  Thus the question becomes which of the campaign/administration members will decide to go state's evidence against Trump and, if America is lucky, Mike Pence in order to save their own asses.  On the coming indictment front, NBC News is reporting as follows today:

Federal investigators have gathered enough evidence to bring charges in their investigation of President Donald Trump's former national security adviser and his son as part of the probe into Russia's intervention in the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.

Mueller is applying renewed pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

The investigators are speaking to multiple witnesses in coming days to gain more information surrounding Flynn's lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. 

Flynn's son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked closely with his father, accompanied him during the campaign and briefly worked on the presidential transition, could be indicted separately or at the same time as his father, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

If the elder Flynn is willing to cooperate with investigators in order to help his son, two of the sources said, it could also change his own fate, potentially limiting any legal consequences.

All of this is explosive enough, but more disclosures have come out that are damning to Der Trumpenführer pretense that he and/or his cabal of  sycophants have no tires to Russia.  Of particular interest are the ties of Trump's Secretary of Commerce to businesses involving Vladimir Putin's family.  As an added bonus, it seems that Prince Jared has lied yet again and failed to reveal contacts with Russia.  Here are excerpts from The Daily Beast about a massive document dump.   

A new trove of more than 13 million leaked documents implicates top officials and associates of President Donald Trump—as well as foreign politicians—in shady business relationships tied to offshore financial accounts.

In at least two cases, the documents highlight top administration officials’ previously undisclosed connections to Russia and Kremlin-linked interests.

The so-called “Paradise Papers” were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the same publication that obtained the “Panama Papers.”

The documents show that many of the wealthy individuals Trump brought into his administration have worked to legally store their money in offshore havens where they would be free from taxation in the United States. Trump has promised repeatedly to “drain the swamp,” in condemning the idea that well-connected individuals in Washington, D.C. preserve their own interests at the expense of the rest of the country.

Among the Trump administration officials implicated in the leaks is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who according to the documents concealed his ties to a Russian energy company that is partly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. Through offshore investments, Ross held a stake in Navigator Holdings, which had a close business relationship with the Russian firm. Ross did not disclose that connection during his confirmation process on Capitol Hill.

“In concealing his interest in these shipping companies—and his ongoing financial relationship with Russian oligarchs—Secretary Ross misled me, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the American people,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement on Sunday. He characterized Ross’ financial disclosures as a “Russian nesting doll, with blatant conflicts of interest carefully hidden within seemingly innocuous companies.”

Top White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is also implicated. The documents reveal that Kremlin-connected Russian tech leader Yuri Milner invested $850,000 in a startup called Cadre that Kushner co-founded in 2014. Kushner said in July that he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door meeting that he never “relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.” Representatives for Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the chairman and vice chairman of the committee, did not immediately return requests for comment. Kushner, who still has a stake in Cadre, did not previously disclose the firm’s other business ties. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and top economic adviser Gary Cohn are all mentioned in the documents. But some lower-level appointees have more egregious connections to offshore interests—in some cases, directly related to industries they are tasked with regulating. Randal Quarles, who was confirmed just last month to be vice chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve, has financial connections to a bank based in Bermuda that is being probed by U.S. officials under suspicion of tax evasion. A Federal Reserve spokesman told The Guardian that Quarles divested from the bank when he assumed his position at the U.S. central bank.

With this kind of news breaking, one has to wonder whether Trump is secretly welcoming the extensive news coverage on the Texas mass shooting.  For Trump, the timing could not have been opportune.

Tillerson Won't Say Whether "Gay Rights are Human Rights"

First we had Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions denying that LGBT Americans face discrimination.  Now, during his confirmation hearings, Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State nominee, won't admit that gay rights are human rights.  Yet "friends" who voted for Trump continue to be baffled as to why I remain upset with them and find being around them difficult. I truly wish that these individuals had to walk in the shoes of typical LGBT citizens who fear firing daily and other sorts of discrimination so that they could get their heads out of their asses.  Here are highlights from the Washington Blade:

President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of state on Wednesday declined to specifically say whether “gay rights are human rights.”

“American values don’t accommodate violence or discrimination against anyone,” said former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson in response to a question U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked during his confirmation hearing that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held.

Coons also asked Tillerson whether he believes the promotion of gay rights is “a piece of our human rights advocacy and agenda around the world.”

Tillerson did not specifically mention lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people.

Coons noted in his question that he previously met with a woman from Zimbabwe who received asylum in the U.S. because she was tortured “for who she was.” He also told Tillerson, who was a member of the Boy Scouts of America’s executive board when it voted to allow openly gay scouts into the organization in 2013, that he was “encouraged by his tough leadership moment.”

The promotion of LGBT and intersex rights abroad has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy during President Obama’s second term.

Tillerson on Wednesday did not say whether the Trump administration would continue the Obama administration’s policy. It also remains unclear whether the position of special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBT and intersex rights will remain at the State Department.