Trump’s latest “acting” Cabinet member — remember, he likes “acting” position fillers because he can fire and replace them much more quickly — is Patrick Shanahan, who stepped into former Defense Secretary Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis’ shoes at the beginning of the year, after Mattis rather conspicuously tendered a resignation letter that included a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration.
Shanahan was, of course, a corporate executive, this time from Boeing, a company that has, uh… extensive ties to the defense industry. In fact, what Shanahan is now being subjected to was almost a foregone conclusion when Trump appointed him.
According to reporting from Politico on Wednesday, the Office of Inspector General inside the Department of Defense is looking into an ethics complaint against Shanahan after the acting SecDef “allegedly took actions to promote his former employer, Boeing, and disparage its competitors, allegedly in violation of ethics rules.”
That was the statement of DoD OIG Spokeswoman Dwrena Allena. She went on to say that the OIG had already informed Shanahan of the investigation, and that he indicated he would cooperate.
I’m not certain how much his cooperation will help him, however — multiple witnesses say that during his time as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Shanahan regularly bad-mouthed competitors of his former employer’s, calling Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program, for example, “fucked up.” In violation of an ethics code he signed onto, Shanahan trashed Boeing’s competitors and regularly promoted Boeing’s own products for the government.
In fact, just before his sweet promotion from Trump, Shanahan pressured the Air Force to purchase Boeing’s F-15X fighters, despite pushback from the military amid a culture of trying to slim down fleets, budgets, and spending by top brass at the Pentagon.
Shanahan marks the approximately everyeth person in the Trump administration to come under investigation for corruption or bribery or some garbage like that. So weird, how all of Trump’s picks for everything have that one thing in common, isn’t it?
Featured image via screen capture
