Wonkette Awards New York Post Nobel Prize Of 'Making Up Bonkers Lies About Fired USAID IG For Trump'
It's a major award!
On Tuesday, USAID Inspector General Paul Martin released a report detailing the serious problems caused by Trump freezing the agency’s funds — including the deeply disturbing fact that nearly $500 million worth of food meant to feed starving people all over the world was in danger of spoiling.
On Wednesday, he was fired. Illegally.
By law, the administration is required to give Congress 30 days notice before firing an inspector general, which they clearly did not do. (Nor, obviously, did they give notice before firing 17 agency inspectors general on Jan. 24, four days after Trump’s inauguration. Some number of those IGs seem to have been investigating waste, fraud, and abuse by … Elon Musk.) It is also required to give a reason for the firing, which they also declined to do. Probably because “he told people we were going to let an absolutely absurd amount of food spoil because of the childish games we are playing with crucial federal agencies” would generally not be considered “just cause.”
“While initial guidance following the pause in foreign assistance funding provided a waiver for emergency food assistance, shipments of in-kind food assistance have been delayed around the world,” the report revealed. “USAID-funded implementers face conflicting instructions, and USAID staff express concerns about potentially circumventing the restrictions on external communications by providing clarifying guidance. According to USAID staff, this uncertainty put more than $489 million of food assistance at ports, in transit, and in warehouses at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion.”
On top of that food that was about to go bad due to Trump’s malevolence, Martin revealed that there was an additional 500,000 metric tons of food either already at sea or ready to be shipped, that was not included in the waiver, that was set to spoil.
That is a truly astounding amount of food to let go to waste. So astounding that, clearly, even the Trump administration could tell that doing so is a bad look for them.
While practically every other news outlet’s headline pointed out that Martin had been fired immediately after revealing the food spoilage, The New York Post went a different direction entirely. Their headline read “Trump fires USAID’s top watchdog after reports of billions wasted on educating al Qaeda terrorist and drag shows” — which, boy, if there were a reward for misleading headlines, would certainly take every prize.
According to their own reporting, this “educating al Qaeda terrorist” thing occurred in 1990. Not only was Paul Martin not involved with USAID at that time, but the president at that time was George Bush. The first one. A Republican. It also occurred well before the guy was a terrorist.
Via New York Post:
American-born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki received “full funding” to attend Colorado State University in 1990, USAID documents obtained by Fox News show. […]
And the documents revealed that al-Awlaki — who was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico — lied on his application and claimed that he was born in Yemen, apparently so he would be eligible for the federal tuition funding worth more than $27,000 at the time. (Tuition and fees for an international student at the Fort Collins-based public university would be nearly 10 times that today.)
Using the education USAID provided him — he earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering in 1994 — al-Awlaki would go on to teach Islam at mosques across the country from Denver to San Diego and Virginia, where US officials believe he used his platform to radicalize and recruit terrorists.
Too bad, I guess, that USAID did not employ any psychics at that time who could have told them that a decade later the guy they gave a scholarship to would be involved in 9/11 (though given that this happened in 1990, it seems somewhat unlikely that anyone would have known what that meant).
The drag show thing, you will be shocked to know, is also an outright lie. What they are referring to was a $20,000 grant provided by the State Department (not USAID) for an arts festival by the Centro Ecuatoriano Norteamericano Abraham Lincoln (CENA) in Cuenca, Ecuador, as part of an effort “to promote tolerance, and the arts provide new opportunities for LGBTQI+ Ecuadorians to express themselves freely and safely” — and it wasn’t “just” uncovered, it was widely reported and complained about … in the New York Post.
These two things (that Paul Martin had absolutely nothing to do with) cost a total of $47,000. Is $47,000 less than “billions”? I’m not a math genius, so I can’t say for sure, but I think it might be.
It will likely not shock you to know that the Post did not even mention anything about the $500 million worth of food that was about to spoil, writing simply that “[h]is dismissal came just one day after his office had published a report criticizing Trump’s call to freeze USAID funds after finding that the agency had wasted billions on lefty schemes in recent years.”
It’s almost as if they, too, realize that this is a bad look for the Trump administration and wish to sweep it under the rug, while keeping calendar-deficient math wizards consumed by anti-woke hysteria and mad about the imaginary excesses of an agency that exists for the sole purpose of doing good things around the world.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
In New York the Post has been looked at as a National Enquirer version of a newspaper. But MAGA now sees it as serious news.
Robyn wrote: "According to their own reporting, this “educating al Qaeda terrorist” thing occurred in 1990."
And the Post is only reporting it now?