Weaponizing the Watchdog

Donald Trump’s fascist takeover of government is a comprehensive affair, and sometimes it’s the little things that reveal just how thoroughly his administration has been dismantling our democratic infrastructure. On June 16 Trump nominated the thirty-year-old lawyer and right-wing commentator Paul Ingrassia to lead a federal agency called the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC). This is not the type of special counsel position famously occupied in recent years by Robert Mueller or Jack Smith; the OSC has nothing to do with the Department of Justice or criminal law. It is a small, independent ethics agency with a nonetheless crucial function. Congress created the office in 1978 partly to serve as a secure channel for federal employees to report corruption, threats to public safety, and fraud in the executive branch.

The OSC is supposed to stand as a bulwark against the politicization of day-to-day government services that should be carried out impartially, such as the distribution of veterans benefits and social security payments, disaster rescue and recovery, air traffic control, weather forecasts, and passport issuance. It does that, in part, by investigating personnel changes to ensure that federal employees are hired and fired for their work, not their politics. The OSC also investigates officials suspected of misusing their government authority to influence elections and defends whistleblowers in the executive branch against reprisal by fighting to protect their jobs and, in some cases, pursuing disciplinary actions against anyone who tries to retaliate against them.

Past administrations have sought to fill the job with appointees who would strive to act independently of the White House’s political agenda, interpreting and applying laws objectively. The notable exception is Trump, who has a long record of trying to undermine the office’s integrity. In his first term, for instance, he not only ignored the OSC’s recommendation to fire Kellyanne Conway upon its finding that she had committed serial violations of the Hatch Act—a federal law against misusing government power to influence elections—he also allowed the White House counsel to respond to that recommendation in a letter attacking the OSC for “attempting to tilt the political playing field.” Since retaking office he has fired the special counsel, installed his current trade representative, Jamieson Greer, as acting special counsel, and revived and expanded the Schedule F category of federal employment that he created in his first term—now called Schedule Policy/Career—in part to strip the OSC of its jurisdiction to uphold civil service protections. Last Friday The New York Post reported that, at the request of a Republican senator, the OSC was investigating Jack Smith for allegedly trying to influence the 2024 election by prosecuting Trump that year.

Nothing illustrates Trump’s determination to shatter the office’s neutrality quite so clearly as his choice of Ingrassia to lead it. When journalists started reporting that the nominee had a history of bigoted comments and associations, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told reporters that the administration stood by Ingrassia for a pointedly political reason: it had “full confidence in his ability to advance the President’s agenda.”

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If Ingrassia actually wanted to help protect federal employees—and I don’t believe he does—there is little chance that he knows how. In a July 18, 2023, blog post on his Substack account, Ingrassia identified himself as an “Associate,” a term usually reserved for lawyers, at the McBride Law Firm. But he was first admitted to the New York bar as a lawyer on July 30, 2024, and his financial disclosure, required of all federal nominees, states that at the time he had only been a legal assistant (akin to a paralegal, minus the paralegal certificate). It lists no employment as a lawyer during a reporting period reaching back to January 1, 2022. Whether Ingrassia has worked briefly as a lawyer or only as an assistant to one, he does not meet the standard set for the head of the OSC by federal law: “The Special Counsel shall be an attorney who, by demonstrated ability, background, training, or experience, is especially qualified to carry out the functions of the position.” As special counsel, however, he would be supervising attorneys who do meet that standard, not to mention making a salary four times what he reported earning in 2024.

Senate Republicans should be mortified that Trump nominated this legal sproutling to replace Hampton Dellinger III, who served as special counsel from March 2024 until Trump fired him without cause in February. (Trump doesn’t even bother claiming that the firing was for cause.) For one thing, Dellinger has been an attorney longer than Ingrassia has been on Earth. Before he was appointed to the OSC by President Biden, Dellinger had clerked for a circuit court judge, served as legal counsel for the governor of North Carolina, and worked as a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller. As special counsel, Dellinger proved his impartiality by, for example, issuing adverse findings against a top official in the Biden administration. Ingrassia’s experience as a legal assistant, Substack blogger, writer for the far-right website Gateway Pundit, YouTube personality, and other disclosed work presents a stark contrast with Dellinger’s CV.

But worse than his professional mediocrity, Ingrassia lacks the moral character and the temperament to be special counsel. He is less well known as a lawyer than as a fiery, seemingly impulsive social media influencer. A voyage through his social media accounts is enough to make any decent person seasick. “Exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization,” he wrote on December 18, 2023, “but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage—and are conversely hurt the most, at a spiritual level, by its destruction.” In April 2023 he wrote that Nikki Haley “created George Floyd when she removed that confederate flag” from South Carolina’s state capitol building. Six months later, on October 8, Ingrassia, whose given name is Paolo Ingrassia, insulted Haley for having a non-English-sounding name: “It’s rich that we allow ourselves to get lectured by a person called ‘Nimarata Randhawa’ about American values.” A week after that, he shared this on Twitter: “I think we could all admit at this stage that Israel/Palestine, much like Ukraine before it, and BLM before that, and covid/vaccine before that, was yet another psyop.” (That post has since been deleted.) Echoing a dangerous and false smear that the president had propagated against legally documented Haitian refugees, in October 2024 he posted: “THEY ARE EATING THE DOGS, THEY ARE EATING THE CATS IN SPRINGFIELD!”  

Even once Ingrassia was in the public eye, his social media remained hateful. Eight days after his June nomination to be special counsel he reposted a message by the far-right fanatic Jack Posobiec lamenting that “a foreign-born Muslim socialist just won the primary for New York City mayor,” as well as a post by Charlie Kirk, the cofounder of Turning Point USA, that likewise emphasized Mamdani’s religion.

Ingrassia’s bigotry is matched only by his adoration for Trump. “The lionhearted spirit of Donald Trump, his legend, only grows more with each passing day,” he wrote in a Substack post from July 2024, shortly after the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania:

The villains in Ingrassia’s writing are “Marxist judges” and “unelected bureaucrats.” Among the heroes are the members of the violent mob that attacked the Capitol building on January 6, 2021: the account for Ingrassia’s podcast tweeted that Trump should declare martial law to retain power after the 2020 election; Ingrassia himself has said that January 6 should be a national holiday and advocated that the families of each of the defendants prosecuted for their actions that day should receive a $1 million “reparations” payout. The real travesty of January 6, he has suggested, was the prosecution of “innocent American citizens like Tim,” referring to Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who has compared Orthodox Jews to “a plague of locusts.” (In response to questions from NPR, Ingrassia denounced “any hateful or incendiary remark Mr. Hale made” and maintained that his “advocacy for J6ers is not based on any particular remark, but on the principle that all Americans are entitled to due process and free speech.”)

Ingrassia’s financial disclosure indicates that in 2023 he worked as a nonlawyer assistant to an attorney representing Andrew and Tristan Tate. That year Ingrassia pronounced Andrew Tate “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence,” though Tate had been banned from Twitter in 2017 for posting that “if you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare [sic] some responsibility.” The Tate brothers, who deny any wrongdoing, currently face allegations of assault, rape, and human trafficking in the United Kingdom and are under investigation in Romania for a series of similar alleged crimes. (Elon Musk, for his part, lifted Tate’s Twitter ban in late 2022.)

Ingrassia’s intolerance and racism should be disqualifying for a candidate for any federal office, but he is especially unsuited for special counsel. In a blog post from November 2024 he wrote that the president-elect had been “given a resounding mandate by the American people to take a sledgehammer to the deep state.” Speaking of the federal workers whom he would be responsible for protecting, he has said they are lazy, “like parasites” who “leech off the diminishing lifeblood of the dying Republic.” After Trump’s reelection he wrote an essay for a conservative news site in which he argued that the president should be able to fire civil servants for any reason. “The idea that civil servants are ‘apolitical,’” he added, “has always been hogwash.”

A federal employee who witnesses crimes or other forms of corruption by Trump appointees would think twice before reporting anything to a loyalist like Ingrassia. Employees fired without cause based on their political affiliations would have no reason to trust a man who scoffs at the idea that political affiliation is no reason to fire a tenured public servant. Employees who are Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ+, immigrants, or women or who have non-English sounding names would have to weigh Ingrassia’s public remarks, retweets, and actions before seeking his help.

And the risks that government workers would face from having a man like Ingrassia as their nominal advocate are worse than simply being ignored. If appointed, he could use laws against politicizing the workforce to target employees for their private views, without waiting for any demonstrable misconduct. He could not just deter whistleblower reports but aid in retaliating against those who persevere, for instance by revealing their identities to the White House or others. The implications of such a betrayal could be severe. Whistleblowers and their loved ones are at serious risk of physical harm: Trump’s relentless attacks on the whistleblower who precipitated his first impeachment by reporting on the president’s attempted quid pro quo with Ukraine likely encouraged some of the death threats that the whistleblower’s attorneys received, one of which put the perpetrator in jail for a year.

All of these likely outcomes of Ingrassia’s nomination—discouraging reporting, intimidating potential whistleblowers, undermining the workforce’s capacity to uphold the rule of law—hardly seem incidental. The whole point of Trump putting Ingrassia in the special counsel position is to neutralize that office—or, better yet, to weaponize it.

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The Republican-led Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee scheduled Ingrassia’s confirmation hearing for 9:30 AM, July 24. I arrived at the Dirksen Senate Office Building at 8:00 AM and secured the second spot outside the chamber in a line that eventually grew to stretch a good distance along the wide hallway’s cool marble floor. Breaking the monotony was the occasional sight of senators speed-walking down the hallway toward their next vote or hearing. In an unusual move, the Republican committee majority had stationed two sentinels outside the hearing chamber’s door to prevent the public from entering before the proceedings started. Instead, the first groups they waved in were often boisterous supporters of the nominees.

The lead sentinel, who opened the door for each gaggle of preferred attendees, was a skinny youngster in a crisp charcoal-gray suit, gray shirt, shiny gray on charcoal-gray striped tie, with a tie clip, analog watch, and a lot of product in his short blondish hair. He smirked at his more subdued colleague from time to time, in between pushing the door closed and doing his best to strike an imperious cross-armed pose. When the hearing started and the door remained shut, I asked if he was going to let us into the chamber. With what looked like barely concealed satisfaction, he explained that the chamber was at capacity and there wasn’t even standing room. (C-SPAN video showed there was enough room for standing.)

Barring the public from a public hearing and admitting only partisan cheerleaders was remarkable even by the low standards for congressional antics. But as it turned out, Ingrassia wasn’t even there. At the last minute, between the time I left my house and the start of the hearing, the Republicans had quietly pulled him from the day’s lineup of nominees.

In the hallway afterward I asked the chair of the committee, Rand Paul, if Ingrassia would get a hearing. “There has been a delay,” he said. “We’ll see next week.” Someone asked him the reason for the delay. “That’s all I have for you.” News accounts have reported that committee members asked for more time to study Ingrassia’s record. (Apparently some of the Republicans on the committee felt that knowing he had accused Haitians in Springfield of “eating dogs” and called federal employees “parasites” wasn’t information enough.) The White House insists that the president stands by Ingrassia’s nomination. Then again, the White House once insisted that the president was standing by his selection of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Ingrassia’s nomination may be as doomed as Gaetz’s was—but these days anything can happen.

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Ingrassia’s disgraceful nomination is far from the worst thing the Trump administration has done. But it does demonstrate the thoroughness of its fascist enterprise. Few Americans are aware of the OSC’s existence, and many who learn about it might confuse it with the Justice Department’s ad hoc special counsel offices. But Trump is keenly aware of the power of putting an unqualified loyalist in the government’s top whistleblower protection post.

Trump has made similar moves against other watchdogs. A few days after he fired Special Counsel Dellinger in February, he fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics. That’s something he didn’t do in his first term, even when I held the job and clashed with his hopelessly unethical administration. Since January he has fired eighteen inspector generals, who are supposed to be the people’s eyes inside the government. He has fired Democratic members of bipartisan boards and commissions, betting that the Supreme Court’s politicized right-wing supermajority will cast aside its 1935 precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.

Trump hasn’t only gone after watchdogs; last week his enemy of choice was inconvenient facts. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a discouraging jobs report for July and corrected its reports for May and June to show that job growth had been weaker than initially thought, Trump promptly fired the bureau’s commissioner. The same instinct likely drove his administration to gut news programming at the Voice of America and fire members of the National Intelligence Counsel, forecasters with the National Weather Service, historians on the obscure State Department Historical Advisory Committee, and even the director of the National Portrait Gallery, whom Trump accused of being “highly partisan and a strong supporter of DEI.” By installing White House staffers on the National Capital Planning Commission, meanwhile, Trump has given himself the chance to pressure Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates by criticizing him for the cost of a renovation project within the commission’s purview.

I’ve been tracking these internal attacks on government integrity, and they are too numerous to list with any comprehensiveness. To give just a few more examples, the administration has initiated several technical changes designed to strip career federal employees of protections against unwarranted or retaliatory firings, rewritten rules on layoffs, hidden the details of ongoing layoffs from the public, launched an enormous reorganization of government without even claiming to have the necessary statutory authority, created a new type of federal employment—this one called Schedule G—to allow political appointees to fill jobs normally held by career employees, mandated that applicants for nonpolitical jobs respond to essay questions that probe their political leanings, and asked law enforcement and intelligence job applicants who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021.

Drowned out by bigger shocks, this seemingly bureaucratic tinkering mostly gets reported only by the niche cadre of expert journalists who cover the functioning of government, but it warrants close attention. In the aggregate, these firings and administrative changes are designed to make it possible for the administration to replace public servants with political loyalists like Ingrassia, who, whether or not the Senate confirms him as special counsel, already holds a government job: since February he has been the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

Cramming the workforce full of Paul Ingrassias at all levels will transform it into a weapon that the president could wield against the public. Gone will be the protection of a civil service law that expressly permits career federal employees to refuse patently unlawful orders—but which the administration claims won’t cover employees who fall under one of Trump’s two new employment categories. (That claim is now the subject of lawsuits, as is the administration’s insistence that it can exclude these employees from the protection of other civil service laws barring whistleblower retaliation, political affiliation discrimination, and hiring for reasons other than an applicant’s qualifications.) Gone too, if the administration prevails in the litigation, will be anyone who would want to refuse unlawful orders in the first place.

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If Paul Ingrassia embodies this comprehensive assault on democracy, another man may illustrate its cost. Joseph Tirrell served his country for over a quarter of a century, first in the military and then in the civil service. With hard work and talent, he rose to the highest level of executive positions open to career officials. For the last seven and a half years he served as the Department of Justice’s deputy ethics official and then as its top ethics official. Leading a department’s ethics program is a hard, thankless job; often it means saying no to presidential appointees who want answers to ethical dilemmas other than those dictated by the government’s strict rules. But by all accounts he carried out his responsibilities faithfully. “The work I did as a Federal ethics official means everything to me,” he told me when we talked in late July.

On July 11, without warning, Attorney General Pam Bondi terminated Tirrell’s employment. She didn’t accuse him of any performance deficiency or misconduct. As the administration has illegally done with other nonpolitical senior executives, she issued a terse letter stating only that the firing was based on Article II of the Constitution—the part that talks about presidential powers.

Ordinarily Tirrell would have been able to turn to the special counsel. But with Dellinger gone, an official in the Executive Office of the President acting as special counsel, and Ingrassia’s nomination pending, it seems unlikely that going to the OSC would trigger a meaningful investigation. Following Dellinger’s firing, the OSC dismissed about two thousand pending complaints against the Trump administration.

Lacking a reliable alternative, Tirrell filed a lawsuit in federal court. The court filing indicated that Tirrell also filed an appeal with the Merit Systems Protection Board to exhaust all appropriate administrative remedies, but it adds that the Trump administration’s actions have ensured that the appeal “will be futile.” Tirrell and his attorneys can hardly be blamed for feeling that way. Trump fired a Democratic MSPB member in February, and since early May the board has been short of the quorum it needs to issue a final decision in Tirrell’s case. If the Senate restores a quorum by confirming Trump’s nominee for one of the two vacant slots on that board, the decision will be rendered by a pair of Republican members. Nor, for that matter, is there any guarantee that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, will ultimately uphold the laws Congress enacted to protect tenured officials from arbitrary termination. The one certain thing is that the litigation will be a long uphill slog.

Tirrell is one among tens of thousands of federal workers whose professional lives and personal finances have been upended since the start of Trump’s second term. Trump’s powerful budget officer, Russell Vought, said last October that he wanted federal workers “in trauma.” The families of these workers are surely traumatized, too. They are all reeling from the administration’s retribution against patriots who put the public’s interest and the rule of law over the ambitions of a man who would be king.