[guest post by JVW]
[UPDATE: Commenter Appalled makes the following observation:
Looking around some, I can’t see any record of Ms. Tribble being appointed by the President (either Trump or Obama) and confirmed by Congress. If she had been, there would be something in the Congressional Record about it, and there is no Ahsha Tribble there. That makes her a Civil Service employee, and not, somehow, Trump’s fault or Trump’s appointee.
That’s a good addition, and Appalled did more legwork on this matter than I did, having only made a cursory check myself. It still seems that at some point she was chosen for the Obama White House, even if it wasn’t an appointment, so somebody in President Obama’s circle must have thought highly enough of her competence and character to bring her into the inner sanctum.]
—- Original Post —-
In a nice companion piece to Dana’s take-down of the Grey Lady’s insipid take on the September 11 anniversary yesterday, today the paper’s Twitter account released this Tweet, which I am going to screen-shot in anticipation of it eventually being deleted:
From the accompanying article:
MIAMI — A former top administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was arrested on Tuesday in a major federal corruption investigation that found that the official took bribes from the president of a company that secured $1.8 billion in federal contracts to repair Puerto Rico’s shredded electrical grid after Hurricane Maria.
Federal authorities arrested Ahsha Tribble, FEMA’s former deputy administrator for the region that includes Puerto Rico, and Donald Keith Ellison, the former president of Cobra Acquisitions with whom Ms. Tribble had a “close personal relationship,” Rosa Emilia Rodríguez Vélez, the United States attorney for Puerto Rico, announced. They were accused of conspiring to defraud the federal government, among other charges. [. . .]
And then the money paragraphs that are partly repeated in their Tweet:
President Trump has repeatedly cast Puerto Rico’s leaders as incompetent and corrupt. Tuesday’s arrests, however, did not involve any Puerto Ricans, but rather a longtime federal employee working on the island under the Trump administration.
Ms. Tribble, who holds a doctorate in meteorology, was assigned to Puerto Rico for a year, where she was the agency’s energy sector lead. She was also a Homeland Security adviser during the Obama administration. [emphasis added]
Wait, come again? Ms. Tribble served in the Obama Administration as well? One wonders how and when she might have gotten her start in government — ahem, ahem — service and what her rise through the ranks looked like. According to her LinkedIn profile, it appears that she began working as a Technical Officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in June 2003, just after finishing her doctoral degree. A couple of years later she rose to the position of Executive Officer, which she held until June 2008 when she became the Chief of the Climate Services Division in the final six months of the Bush Administration. She then became a Senior Policy Advisor at NOAA in June 2009, during the early months of the Obama Presidency, before moving into a White House role as the Director of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience Policy. Since then she’s worked at the National Security Council, the Department of Energy, and, finally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
I don’t know at what point Ms. Tribble first received an actual White House appointment for her job, but it seems to make sense that it would have been at the same time that she actually started putting “White House” on her résumé, which was in January 2011. As much as the New York Times might want to believe otherwise, the Federal Government under President Trump contains lots of people who served in other administrations, even those who received White House appointments from Presidents not named Donald J. Trump. The Times in its zeal to be the chronicler of The Resistance is continually beclowning itself with these lame attempts at finger-pointing. This President — all Presidents for that matter — needs a robust media to hold himself to account for his decisions and deeds, but the Grey Lady is unfortunately a collection of embittered progressives, lacking credibility as objective chroniclers of the scene and instead continually outing themselves as unhinged partisans raging in the night. So much the worse for our democratic republic.
– JVW
