Let's Just Cut Out The Grifty Middle-Woman And Make Sarah Palin Head Of The Air Force!

Sad news for Sarah Palin today, as the rumored ambassadorship to Canada went to some lame lady just because she's married to a billionaire and gave Donald Trump lots of money. Is that even fair? Did that lady grift her own dimes to get to Trump's big speech and then vomit even more craziness than usual on it? Did that lady squeeeeeeze all her pennies just so she could give Donald Trump a widow's mite contribution of $10,000, or one-eighth of all her 2016 contributions from SarahPAC (which grossed $1.4 million)? SHE DID NOT.

But maybe we can find a place for Sister Sarah anyway. Because we just learned about Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of the Air Force -- after being turned down a couple few million times by actual Air Force people, and Navy people, and Army people -- and the lady he picked, well, she is sort of just a pale imitation of THE INIMITABLE.

 
 OK, maybe she is imitable.

Heather Wilson, one of few Trump nominees to actually get nominated (he still has more than 500 Senate-confirmable positions he hasn't even tapped yet), used to be a Republican Congresswoman from New Mexico. Then, literally the day after she left Congress, she became a "strategic adviser" to two separate nuclear labs, using her "expertise" to soak up defense contracts. Tell us more, Center for Public Integrity! 

Wilson’s work involved using her contacts in Washington to try to gin up new federal business opportunities for the privately run weapons labs.

But the labs got into trouble by billing the government for her work, and one of them was accused of effectively using federal funds to lobby for more federal funds, a violation of law, according to the Energy Department’s Inspector General. The lab’s manager, the Sandia Corporation, agreed to pay a total of $4.7 million dollars to the government to settle the case, although it too denied any wrongdoing.

Pfft, who would think that a multimillion dollar settlement was evidence of wrongdoing! 

But surely Heather Wilson did lots of work for her $20,000 a month paid by the feds to lobby the feds?

According to investigators, Wilson refused from the outset to provide a detailed accounting — at any time — of how she did her work while earning fees from Sandia and from the Los Alamos National Laboratory totaling $20,000 a month.

Because -- get this -- she wrote into her contract that nobody could ask her what her "deliverables" were or how she spent her time. That's some contract!

[Inspectors] complained in part that Wilson’s silence about how she spent her time had blocked their efforts to determine whether she was billing the labs fairly or improperly collecting fees from more than one laboratory for doing essentially the same work. They also expressed uncertainty that Wilson had met a contractual requirement that she devote 50 hours a month to meeting each of the labs’ needs.

On at least two occasions while working as the head of a consulting firm she established after leaving Congress, for example, Wilson occupied a single seat at government meetings in Washington, but collected two paychecks from firms running separate labs, which subsequently each billed the government for these expenses.

[...]

“Due to the lack of work product, we were unable to prove or disprove the potential issue of duplicative services,” said Felicia Jones, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department’s Inspector General Office, in a Feb. 16 email to the Center for Public Integrity about the notes, which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

There's much more at the link about how these goldanged bureaucrats just wouldn't stop regulating poor Heather Wilson and leaving her free to be a small businesswoman entrepreneur off the backs of gubmint contracts -- that is, until they all threw their hands up in despair at ever getting a straight answer out of her, except when the question was "hey can we see some time sheets" and the answer was "go fuck yourself."

This lady sounds like a small-time con, Don. Twenty thousand a month to do no work? Pffft. Why not choose someone who knows how to fleece the geese and the ganders? A real pro?

You can't get much more real than that.

[ CenterForPublicIntegrity ]

 Wonkette would like to grift you, but we keep forgetting not to do an honest day's work. MONEY PLEASE.