Donald Trump's Key Foreign Policy Adviser, Joseph E. Schmitz, Was Forced Out of the PentagonBy Jeff Stein On 3/21/16 at 7:58 PM
Republican candidate Donald Trump at a presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio on August 6, 2015. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Joseph E. Schmitz, named by Donald Trump as a key foreign policy adviser on Monday, was forced out of his job as the Pentagon’s top watchdog a decade ago amid accusations that he protected top officials in the George W. Bush administration suspected of wrongdoing.
Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential candidacy, named Schmitz as one of his five top foreign policy advisers during an editorial meeting at The Washington Post on Monday morning. The group will be chaired by Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Schmitz’s rocky three-and-a-half year tenure as the Defense Department’s inspector general ended in 2005 amid a barrage of attacks questioning his leadership, mostly notably from Senator Charles E. Grassley, the long-serving Iowa Republican who has championed whistleblower rights at the Pentagon. Grassley, then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, accused Schmitz of blocking investigations of Bush administration officials tied to Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts and questioned his ties to lobbyists. Schmitz also drew scrutiny for naming L. Jean Louis as his chief-of-staff. Louis was a bank investigator who gained notoriety for raising accusations, later discredited, against Bill and Hillary Clinton during the Whitewater scandal.
“Schmitz slowed or blocked investigations of senior Bush administration officials, spent taxpayer money on pet projects and accepted gifts that may have violated ethics guidelines, according to interviews with current and former senior officials in the inspector general's office, congressional investigators and a review of internal e-mail and other documents,” The Los Angeles Times reported in 2005.
In 2006, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan watchdog in Washington, D.C., noted that Schmitz "resigned under a cloud of allegations that he had allowed inappropriate political interference in a Boeing tanker lease investigation by the White House, as well as other politically sensitive investigations."
"The original report's secrecy begs the question of why the DoD [inspector general] was hiding Boeing's role," said Nick Schwellenbach, a POGO investigator at the time.
A review board, the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, subsequently reviewed Grassley’s accusations and “concluded that there was no wrongdoing.”
But that wasn’t the end of controversy surrounding Schmitz, whose job put him in charge of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Pentagon programs. When he resigned as inspector general, he took a job with the parent company of Blackwater USA, the controversial defense contractor whose operatives killed 17 civilians and wounded 20 in Baghdad in 2007.
POGO’s executive director, Danielle Brian, excoriated Schmitz’s move to Blackwater in 2006. “The inspector general is a standard-bearer for ethics and integrity for the Pentagon,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “To see a person who has been holding that position cash in on his public service and go work for one of their contractors is tremendously disappointing.”
In 2008 Schmitz argued that lawsuits against Blackwater should not go forward in the United States because the shootings took place in Iraq, where Islamic sharia law predominates, according to a report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation magazine.
A Naval Academy and Stanford Law School graduate, Schmitz grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a far right-wing southern California Republican congressman and 1972 presidential candidate whose views were too extreme for the conservative John Birch Society, which expelled him.
During his time as inspector general, Schmitz revealed a fascination with Germany, in particular the Prussian militarist Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, whose service to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War earned him the moniker of being the U.S. military’s first inspector general. “Schmitz even replaced the official inspector general's seal in offices nationwide with a new one bearing the Von Steuben family motto,” The Los Angeles Times reported. When Grassley complained about Schmitz’s plans to travel to Potsdam, Germany at taxpayer expense in 2005 to speak at a ceremony commemorating Baron von Steuben he was forced to cancel the trip, according to reports at the time.
Scahill also reported in his 2008 book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army that on his official biography, Schmitz proudly listed his membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, “a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century, before the first Crusades, with the mission of defending ‘territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the Muslims.’”
Schmitz and the Trump campaign could not be immediately reached for comment.
Another new Trump foreign policy adviser, Walid Phares, is connected to anti-Muslim sentiments and causes. A Lebanese Christian, Phares served as a top adviser to a Christian militia blamed for atrocities during the Lebanese Civil War, according to investigative reporter Adam Serwer. “He was also a close adviser to Samir Geagea, a Lebanese warlord who rose from leading hit squads to running the Lebanese Forces,” Serwer wrote for Mother Jones magazine in 2011. At the time, Phares was a counterterrorism adviser in Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Trump previously suggested he didn’t need any foreign policy advisers. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” the candidate said March 16 on MSNBC's Morning Joe.
After naming his advisers Monday, however, Trump said he had “quite a few more” he would announce in coming days.
“But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with,” he told The Washington Post. “We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that’s a pretty representative group."
And besides, all these people have been trained to be afraid of each other and hate each other ON PURPOSE. We are dealing with some seriously sick ptb fucks so buckle the seat belts because this show ain't over by a long shot.