Secretary Of Labor Being Investigated For Knowing How To Party

Also how to be an asshole to subordinates. She contains multitudes.

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer

There has been a great deal of chaos in January, which we are told is a month despite the incontrovertible fact that it has been five years long, and we haven’t even gotten to mention the sex scandal involving a Cabinet secretary yet. In the Before Times, this story would have been A Thing. In the second Trump administration, it gets buried by the illegal military raid on a sovereign nation and the murder of a protester by a member of America’s newly unleashed secret police and the same secret police occupying an entire city and the president blowing up an 80-year-old defense alliance over who gets sovereignty over an iced-in rockpile and the roaring return of the measles and the president getting regifted a Nobel Peace Prize like he’s in the saddest white elephant gift exchange in history and ...

And that’s just since New Year’s.

So, Cabinet secretary sex scandal. It’s nice to have something relatively low stakes to think about before the next Trump administration atrocity, which should have hit the news by the time you finish reading this sentence.

The Cabinet member is Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. To her credit, she has managed to keep a low profile this year while nitwits like Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Scott Bessent hoover up all the attention like a bunch of less intelligent Roombas. This ability to avoid the spotlight has allowed Chavez-DeRemer to get busy banging a subordinate behind her husband’s back. ALLEGEDLY.

Of course, Noem has also allegedly been banging a subordinate behind her husband’s back. It’s just that adultery is the least repulsive thing about Kristi Noem, whose ethical ledger is so deep in the red that cheating on a spouse might not even be worth recording.

The Chavez-DeRemer story was broken by The New York Post two weeks ago. The Post reports that the secretary is being investigated by the Labor Department inspector general for the affair, among other things:

The former Oregon congresswoman is also accused of drinking in her office during the workday and committing “travel fraud” by having her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff “make up” official trips to destinations where Chavez-DeRemer can spend time with family or friends on the taxpayers’ dime.

See, it’s fine for us to drink in the office during the workday, because the office is our dining room table and there is no one around to catch us at it except the occasional Orkin man. It’s another thing for a Cabinet secretary to do it. Although by DC standards, affairs and drinking in the office during the workday sound pretty tame. Powerful people have been getting drunk and chasing subordinates around their desks since time immemorial. We’ve written about more than a few congressional dalliances in our time.

Chavez-DeRemer is also being accused of being a bad boss who made her employees do menial personal errands while on the clock. The complaint filed against her also says that on official trips, she’ll talk for half and hour and then go out drinking at night. The way this is written, you half-wonder if she should be attending AA meetings.

It is also wild that Chavez-DeRemer is being investigated by her department’s IG, since that IG is a Trumper named Anthony D’Esposito, a former congressman from New York who, during his one term in office, was accused of ethical violations for, uh, having an affair with a woman he eventually put on his payroll. That affair appears to have ended when his fiancée found out about it. Whoops!

In a further weird twist, Chavez-DeRemer served her only term in the House in the same Congress as D’Esposito. So presumably these two knew each other. One wonders if she might have really pissed off D’Esposito at some point if his office is leaking this story to The New York Post.

The fallout so far includes the Secretary’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, both of whom were put on leave two weeks ago. We found out on Friday that a few days after that, a member of Chavez-DeRemer’s security detail was also put on leave indefinitely because he’s the subordinate she’s accused of banging at the Red Rocks Casino in Las Vegas during a weekend getaway, among other places.

An affair with the bodyguard, how cliche. All we need is a picture of this guy fireman-carrying her away from an attempted assassination while “I Will Always Love You” swells to a climax.

How is Chavez-DeRemer’s husband taking all this?

“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.

Poor guy. The husband is always the last to know.

One downside for Republicans — probably the only downside since they are all incapable of embarrassment — is that Chavez-DeRemer is one of the vanishingly tiny number of GOPers who is pro-union. The head of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, who famously shocked people by endorsing Trump in the last election, is a supporter. So the GOP has a good chance of bringing some of the historically pro-Democrat union vote over to their party. Or it had a good chance.

At the moment, the White House is sticking by Chavez-DeRemer. Trump has supposedly said in the past he doesn’t want to fire Cabinet members in his second term after all the turnover of his first, because he hates to think he has handed the media a scalp. That might save her job.

Well, that and the fact that her boss is a raging shithead who gets his White House into some sort of crisis every 20 minutes. Which heightens the odds this little scandal will be forgotten about by Friday.

OPEN THREAD.

[NY Post / Bloomberg]

Wonkette giveth, and perhaps also receiveth?