Department Of Labor Being Run By Edward Albee Characters, Apparently

The Secretary of Labor is accused of boozing on the job. Her husband has been banned from the building for groping women. It's a party!

What in the hell is going on at the Department of Labor?

Oh, we don’t mean in terms of policy. Under Donald Trump, as best we can tell, the department has promulgated a standard Republican mixture of deregulation of business, pushing more people to skip college to spend their lives welding shit, and whining about all the furriners and their dang anti-American H-1B visas.

We’re talking about the other crap going on at Labor, the stuff that makes it sound like the most insane telenovela to ever air on Univision. The crap where the Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is accused of being such a 57-year-old party animal who drinks in the office and has been banging one of her bodyguards that the department’s inspector general is investigating her for misconduct.

Now comes word that Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Shawn DeRemer, has been banned from DoL headquarters for sexually assaulting at least two female employees. Yes, sexual assault. Which is being investigated by Washington’s local cops, the Metropolitan Police Department.

Is everyone even remotely connected to the Trump administration a criminal pile of rhinoceros shit? That’s a rhetorical question.

DeRemer is an anesthesiologist in his home state of Oregon. So you would think he has better things to do with his time than hang around his wife’s office looking for women he can harass. But maybe not! Maybe sexually assaulting women is not a new thing for him, and no hospital or medical practice in the greater DC metro area wants him on staff because of it. Or maybe he retired so he could move across the country with his wife when she took this new job, and this is just how he’s spending retirement. It’s good to keep busy when you have retired, though we recommend taking up golf or restoring old furniture instead of fondling your wife’s employees.

Secretary Of Labor Being Investigated For Knowing How To Party

From the Times:

One of the incidents, during working hours on the morning of Dec. 18, was recorded on office security cameras, the people said. The video showed Dr. DeRemer giving one of the women an extended embrace, and was reviewed as part of a criminal investigation.

Ah, even better, he’s pulling his little routine (ALLEGEDLY!) in full view of the security cameras of what is probably a heavily wired building. The sense of entitlement is kind of breathtaking.

On the other hand, his wife is accused of drinking on the job and having an affair with her bodyguard, so it seems to run in the family.

After the women described the incidents to investigators, Dr. DeRemer was barred from entering the Labor Department’s premises, according to people familiar with the decision ... “If Mr. DeRemer attempts to enter, he is to be asked to leave,” a building restriction notice viewed by The Times said.

We are just marveling at a husband being banned from his wife’s entire office building, when she’s the one in charge! It would be like if Tim Cook’s wife wasn’t allowed on the Apple campus because she kept grabbing some poor iPhone engineers by their junk.

Ironically, the accusations against Dr. DeRemer came to light during the investigation of his wife, which has been going on since early January and has already resulted in two of her top aides and the bodyguard she was allegedly shtupping being placed on paid leave. Even more ironically, as we noted when we wrote about this a few weeks ago, DeRemer has been vocally defending his wife:

“There’s not an ounce of truth to this, and anyone who knows my wife would know that,” said Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, of the allegations in a statement.

We spent way too much time just now scouring stories on this new development to see if Chavez-DeRemer has returned the favor by vociferously defending her husband, and we have found nada. Maybe she’s saving it for the next time Trump calls on her to give him a verbal handy at a Cabinet meeting.

As we noted a few weeks ago, there was a time when a story involving a Cabinet secretary drinking, screwing the help, and abusing her underlings by making them run personal errands for her would have been a huge scandal. Press briefings would be dominated by reporters asking the White House press secretary about it. Reporters would be shouting questions at the president as he strolls across the White House lawn. Cable shows would have panels asking each other how soon Chavez-DeRemer might resign.

But in the age of Trump, the whole story gets buried under so many other scandals that it barely rates the occasional mention. We suppose that’s one of the side effects when the president has also been accused of adultery and sexual assault. Why worry about a lowly Cabinet secretary when the Big Guy himself has been accused of, and even found civilly liable for, doing much worse?

[NYT]

Wonkette survives thanks to our blood pressure medication and the generous donations of our readers.