Donald Trump just decided to fire the Inspector General in the middle of the night during a pandemic
With everything that’s going on right now, you’d think Donald Trump would have better things to do than to carry out old petty grudges. Then again, he isn’t bothering to do anything useful about the coronavirus crisis anyway, so he has plenty of time on his hands for deranged things. Sure enough, he just fired the Inspector General in the middle of the night.
Donald Trump has fired U.S. intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson tonight. If you’re trying to place the name, Atkinson played a key role in Trump’s Ukraine extortion scandal. When someone in the intel community discovered what Trump was up to, that person reported it to Atkinson, who reported it to Congress.
Politico says that Trump’s official excuse for firing Atkinson is that he’s lost confidence in him – but of course this is the most thinly veiled of generic excuses. Trump can fire the Inspector General without needing a reason, but he can’t do it for retaliatory reasons, or to try to cover up his own crimes, which is what Trump is doing here.
This is pretty clearly an illegal firing on Donald Trump’s part. He’s hoping that by doing it late on a Friday night, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, it’ll get lost in the news cycle. But this firing is an impeachable crime all by itself.
