Trump fires 17 government watchdogs in middle of the night - but a key one remains in his post
Trump fires 17 government watchdogs in middle of the night - but a key one remains in his post
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‘Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption,’ Elizabeth Warren says. President Donald Trump fired 17 inspectors general on Friday in a late-night purge of the internal government watchdogs that monitor federal agencies.
![[The removals seemed to violate federal law, which requires Congress to be notified 30 days before the firing of any inspector general confirmed by the Senate]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/24/15/bc8ea0e38a7b430090ca7657044f287b.jpg)
One of the fired officials told The Post, “It’s a widespread massacre.”. “Whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists, and that undermines the entire system,” the official added. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption,” she added.
Those working on the Trump transition had indicated that firings were likely to take place. Towards the end of his last term in office, in early 2020, Trump fired five inspectors general from their posts. Trump was handling the coronavirus pandemic at the time even as he worked to reshape the government to remove those he viewed as trying to work against him. One of them was Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence community, who handled the whistleblower complaint that prompted Trump’s first impeachment for pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
Horowitz delivered a report to the Department of Justice in late 2019 regarding the FBI investigation into possible connections between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He found that the FBI had a basis for starting the probe, but at the same time, he criticized the warrant application to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
