More details continue to trickle out in the wake of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick's firing and while we already knew Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered his staff to do household chores for him, that also apparently extended to the rest of his family.
Writing for Slate, Fred Kaplan reports that Pompeo also ordered staff to chauffeur his wife when she traveled on personal business and even ordered them to help his mother-in-law move.
Linick was looking into two issues brought to his attention by several employees. First, Pompeo and his wife, Susan, were using State Department political appointees for personal household tasks—having them pick up dry cleaning, walk their dog, buy groceries, and so forth. The couple have apparently made these demands quite a lot. A friend of the family told me that when Susan Pompeo visited her mother in Lafayette, Louisiana, security officials were ordered to pick her up at the airport. Last June, they were told to pack up the house in Lafayette and cart away boxes when her mother prepared to move to a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas.
It's not clear who is behind the leaks of various details of Pompeo's growing list of abuses, but I don't think it's Linick.
I can only speculate, and it certainly could be Linick or people close to him, but it seems more likely to me that the leaks are actually coming from within Trumpworld. It's beginning to look like someone wants Pompeo gone sooner rather than later.
Pompeo should be gone, of course, even if we're only learning these details because someone close to Trump wants us to. Pompeo is utterly pompous and abusive but, more importantly, his leadership has been a disaster. His misuse of department resources may be what finally gets him, but if the Trump regime actually valued policy successes he would have been ejected long ago.
Maybe that's the wrong way to put it. What we see as success is actually seen as failure in the Trump White House, after all, and things we see as failures are counted as successes.
Trump's foreign policy from one side of the globe to the other has been one blunder after another, but Trump is happy. He likes his blunders.