Landing a White House job is a highly competitive sport, and who manages to get those jobs has always been a subject of fascination. And in the Trump White House, being the relative of someone with a big administration job seems to be one crucial advantage. Family connections, through marriage or direct blood ties, turn up in several places among the people who are in charge of communicating the Trump administration’s agenda or who are involved in his reelection effort. For example, Giovanna Coia, who was a member of the White House press staff until last month, is a cousin of White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway. Coia, who was promoted to deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, recently married John Pence, Vice President Pence’s nephew. The younger Pence is a senior adviser to the Trump-Pence reelection campaign. The public liaison office, which the White House describes as “the primary line of communication between the White House and the public,” also employs Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. The younger Giuliani earns $95,000 a year as an associate director, according to White House personnel documents; his job is to coordinate visits to the White House by championship sports teams. Laura Schlapp, a newly hired public affairs specialist at the Pentagon, is the niece of Mercedes Schlapp, the former White House director of strategic communications, and Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. Mercedes Schlapp left her White House position last June to become a senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. The White House press operation also includes a married couple that bridges the president’s inner sanctum and the vice president’s press office. Katie Miller, Pence’s press secretary, is married to Stephen Miller, a senior White House official and Trump’s top immigration adviser. The couple met while working for the administration; they were married at the Trump International Hotel in Washington in February. And of course Trump’s second press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the daughter of one of his high-profile allies, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee — though Sanders joined the 2016 Trump campaign shortly before her father endorsed him. Hiring relatives to senior roles was relatively common for presidents in the 19th century. Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower both appointed their sons to senior positions. John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert as attorney general, and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to head the Peace Corps. In 1993, Bill Clinton appointed his wife, Hillary Clinton, to chair a task force on health-care reform, drawing criticism from Republicans. However, the practice generally declined thereafter, circumscribed by federal laws and judicial decisions. But in a legal opinion written in early 2017, the Justice Department concluded that the president has “special hiring authority” and a decades-old anti-nepotism statute didn’t apply to the White House itself. This interpretation gave Trump a greenlight to hire family members. A judge hasn’t ruled on the Justice Department opinion. The White House press office declined to comment on its hiring practices. As a legal matter, “there’s not enough evidence that any of these hirings violated federal anti-nepotism rules, [but] they do raise a larger question about merit,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government-watchdog group. “If these people were hired based on their familial relations and not on their ability to do the jobs, that is going to leave the taxpayer represented by a government not qualified to best carry out its work,” he said. “There’s no better example of this than Jared Kushner, who seems to be doing half of the jobs in the White House and none of them well.” Some conservatives raised an eyebrow during the Obama administration over numerous instances in which journalists were married to, or close relatives of, prominent government figures. The overlapping relationships suggested at least the appearance of a conflict — the suspicion that journalists might pull their punches because of their personal relationships with officials they were covering. “There are over 300 million Americans,” wrote the National Review in 2013, “but you’d never know it” from “the inbreeding among Obama’s court and the press corps.” In this case, people close to the White House suggest there’s little downside to hiring from within, and there may even be some advantages to it. “She [McEnany] wouldn’t have hired [Gilmartin] if she didn’t already know he could do the job,” said one official, who spoke anonymously because wasn’t she wasn’t authorized to comment. “She knew he could do it. And he can.”


Trump says he "authorized" government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys a monument or statue

President Trump said in a tweet on Tuesday he has "authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S." The president said the punishment is up to 10 years in prison, per the Veteran's Memorial Preservation act "or such other laws that may be pertinent." In a second tweet, he said the action "is taken effective immediately, but may also be used retroactively for destruction or vandalism already caused."  It is unclear, however, what Mr. Trump's "authorization" means. The Veterans' Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act was enacted in 2003, making attempts to damage or destroy statues or monuments that commemorate the service of those in the armed forced punishable by up to a decade in prison.  Mr. Trump's tweets come after monuments across the country, many of them of statues of Confederate soldiers, have been vandalized or toppled in recent weeks.  In one of the latest cases, protesters tried to pull down a statue of former President Andrew Jackson near the White House on Monday night before they were dispersed by police.  Over the weekend, Mr. Trump criticized police in Washington, D.C., after protesters toppled the district's only outdoor statue of a Confederate general late. According to CBS affiliate WUSA, protesters tore down and set fire to a statue of Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike, which had been standing since 1901. "The D.C. Police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn," he tweeted. "These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!" The sweeping movement to remove statues of people including slave owners and colonizers, as well as to remove Confederate symbols, swelled this month following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police and nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.


Why a rotting Green Bay boardwalk may help solve America’s jobs crisis

No result found, try new keyword!Across the country, state and local officials are considering ways to directly hire their out-of-work constituents, hoping that they can pay them to clean up parks, assist in conservation efforts and ...



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