“It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General. That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General,” Trump said in a letter sent late Friday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The letter states the dismissal is effective in 30 days.
Not long after Linick’s firing was announced, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Linick had opened an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo,” Engel said in his statement denouncing the firing. Engel did not provide any further details about the scope of this investigation or how he learned about it.
A senior State Department official confirmed that Pompeo made the recommendation that Linick be removed, but the official did not know the reasons why.
Requests for comment from the State Department Inspector General’s office and the State Department itself regarding the investigation revealed by Engel were not returned Friday evening. Engel’s office declined to provide further details about his statement regarding an investigation.
The inspector general investigation Engel referenced centers around possible misuse of a political appointee at the State Department to perform personal tasks for Pompeo and his wife, a Democratic congressional aide with knowledge of the investigation told CNN.
A source close to Linick told CNN the allegation raised by the Democratic aide had previously been brought to Linick’s office but was not aware of an official investigation being opened into the matter.
Engel’s revelation of an investigation into Pompeo opened by Linick shows the seriousness of a surprising move that mirrors the dismissal of former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson last month. The firing comes as Trump continues his attacks on internal government oversight. The President has shown repeated hostility to any independent scrutiny from within the government, often targeting officials he sees as holdovers from President Barack Obama’s administration or part of the so-called “deep state,” which he believes is aligned against him.
Linick, who was first appointed as an inspector general by Obama, had a small role in the impeachment inquiry. Linick gave a private briefing to bipartisan staff from eight House and Senate committees and gave them documents that the State Department had received from Trump’s private attorney Rudy Giuliani. The documents included unfounded allegations of wrongdoing against Biden and former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. By doing this, he broke ranks with State Department leadership who vowed not to cooperate with the investigation.
“On September 11, 2019, Ambassador Akard was confirmed by the Senate, 90-2, to lead the Department’s Office of Foreign Missions and we look forward to him leading the Office of the Inspector General,” a State Department spokesperson said. Akard is a former career Foreign Service Officer who served as a special assistant in the Executive Secretariat, as a political officer and general officer at Embassy Brussels, and served as a consular officer at the US Consulate General in Mumbai.
The decision to choose Akard as his successor was done in consultation with his management team, but Pompeo ultimately made the decision, the official said.
“This is scary and completely unexpected,” a separate State Department source close to Linick told CNN.
This source didn’t know of anything that seemed to trigger this beyond Trump’s general ire with what he deems to be the “deep state.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, quickly questioned Pompeo’s role in Linick’s dismissal and said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee needs to learn more.
“If Inspector General Linick was fired because he was conducting an investigation of conduct by Secretary Pompeo, the Senate cannot let this stand,” Murphy said on Twitter, referring to Engel’s statement. “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee must get to bottom of what happened here.”
Linick began his job in September 2013. He previously was a Justice Department prosecutor and worked as a top Department of Justice fraud official. He also served as the first Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
He was also an assistant US attorney in California and Virginia. Linick served as executive director of the Department of Justice’s National Procurement Fraud Task Force as well as deputy chief of the fraud section in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2006 to 2010.
“During his tenure at the Department of Justice, he supervised and participated in white-collar criminal fraud cases involving, among other things, corruption and contract fraud against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to his State Department biography.
The dismissal drew immediate condemnation from Democratic members of Congress.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the “late-night, weekend firing” of Linick an “acceleration of the President’s dangerous pattern of retaliation against the patriotic public servants charged with conducting oversight on behalf of the American people.”
Pelosi added that the firing will “set back the important work of the Office of the Inspector General to perform critical audits, investigations and inspections of U.S. embassies and programs around the world” during the coronavirus crisis.
Sen. Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who is the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the firing “shameful” in a tweet.
Trump has now fired multiple inspectors general in the wake of the Senate acquitting him on two articles of impeachment in early February, as the nation’s attention was on fighting coronavirus. The President, CNN previously reported, has been fixated on ridding his administration of government watchdogs he views as Obama loyalists.
In early April, Trump fired the intelligence community inspector general, Atkinson, who had told Congress about the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment.
Within a week, Trump removed the acting inspector general for the Defense Department, Glenn Fine, from his post. Fine’s removal from the top job made him no longer eligible to chair an accountability committee tasked with overseeing coronavirus emergency funds.
Trump also publicly attacked the top official at the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office over a report on hospitals facing supply shortages.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, condemned the series of dismissals on Friday.
“The firing of IGs (the fourth) is meant to intimidate and silence those who wish to hold corruption accountable,” Connolly said on Twitter. “It’s an attack on our democracy and should trouble all members of Congress. The GOP silence on this is a dereliction of duty.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting and background information on Linick.
CNN’s Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.
