Good riddance to yet another Trump cabinet member


Labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is ‘leaving’ Trump’s Cabinet (i.e., she was fired) after investigations into several abuse of power allegations.

At least four Labor Department officials have already been forced from their jobs as the investigation progressed, including Chavez-DeRemer’s former chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, as well as a member of her security detail, with whom she was accused of having the affair, The New York Times reported.

The New Yorker‘s E. Tammy Kim has this summary.

Chavez-DeRemer was facing a litany of allegations of professional misconduct. The Labor Department’s inspector general had been investigating her, her advisers, and her family for months. Her chief of staff, Jihun Han—who, I reported last year, threatened employees with criminal prosecution for talking to the press—was pushed out in March; so was a security guard with whom the Secretary was allegedly having an affair. Chavez-DeRemer has been accused of drinking on the job and billing taxpayers for extravagant pleasure trips. The Times reported that she commanded a staffer to bring ‘sauvi B’ to her hotel room. She also instructed female employees to ‘pay attention’ to her father and husband. The latter was banned from the department’s headquarters after at least three women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching. (He has denied wrongdoing, and a police investigation, per the Washington Post, was closed in February.)

Giving even her husband and father access to female employees shows a high level of arrogance, not to mention giving new meaning to the term ‘family values’.

But while those abuses are bad enough, her policies were also terrible.

What she doesn’t deny is the agenda she pushed in her brief time as Secretary: the repeal of minimum-wage guarantees for home-care workers, the rollback of mine-safety rules, the defunding of training programs for women in construction, the elimination of grants to end child and slave labor.

These people have no shame.

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