When President Donald Trump fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick at the request of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in May of 2020, all hell broke loose. Left-wing media and Democrats were outraged that he was removed, even as Pompeo said he should have fired Linick much earlier than he did.
The firing took place after information held by the State Department’s inspector general’s [IG] office somehow found its way into a Daily Beast article headlined, “State IG Set to Recommend Discipline for Trump’s Top Iran Hand.” The article, sourced to “two government sources involved in carrying out the investigation,” was about the State IG’s investigation into Brian Hook, a State Department official who had ended the employment of some individuals perceived to be loyal to the Obama administration and hostile to President Trump’s Iran policy.
Because the leak of the report almost certainly came from Linick’s office, Linick told State Department officials he’d contact his friends at the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), whose Integrity Committee watches the IG watchdogs. Instead, he picked the Department of Defense IG to investigate whether any of the 15 State Department IG’s staff with access to the draft report were responsible for the leak.
That IG found, in an “exceedingly cursory” review, that while Linick had emailed sections of the Hook report to his personal email account, in violation of State Department policy, there was no specific evidence that this was related to the leak. Linick told
