DOJ Barrs White House Spy From Premises. Totally Normal!

WTF is going on at the Justice Department?

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

How far off the rails is the Trump administration? Well, the DOJ has barred at least one Health and Human Services employee from the building after she tried to dig up restricted information on election investigations. So … pretty far!

The Associated Press reports:

Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.

Stirrup was one of the enforcers cum “White House liaisons” parked at the various executive agencies by Johnny McEntee, the 30-year-old former body man Trump put in charge of the Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP). McEntee was himself escorted off the White House premises in 2018, purportedly over a gambling problem. But in 2020 he returned to lead a post-impeachment loyalty purge of anyone disloyal to the president — they weren’t about to let another Alexander Vindman happen.

As part of McEntee’s crackdown, he installed Trump loyalists to be the president’s eyes and ears at the agencies, rooting out the theoretical Fifth Column of Deep State saboteurs, among both career and political appointees.

Stirrup’s first deployment was to Health and Human Services, where the former Capitol Hill staffer got herself promoted from White House liaison to HHS to acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). What Stirrup lacked in immigration and high-level managerial experience she more than made up for in her loyalty to Trump. Plus, she was tight with Stephen Miller and willing to carry out the administration’s child separation policy.

Sponsored

Technically, Stirrup remains an employee at HHS, although she was seconded to the Justice Department a few months ago to crack the whip and report back to the White House.

Turns out lifelong party apparatchiks are less concerned with good government and impartial justice than old-fashioned ratfucking.

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The effort came as Trump continues to level baseless claims that he won the election and alleges without evidence that massive voting fraud was responsible for his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.

Stirrup had also extended job offers to political allies for positions at some of the highest levels of the Justice Department without consulting any senior department officials or the White House counsel’s office and also attempted to interfere in the hiring process for career staffers, a violation of the government’s human resources policies, one of the people said.

Bill Barr, who seems to have belatedly realized the jig is up and he’ll have to go back to civilian life, has enough trouble fending off Trump’s advances without a spy in his own house, which is why the Justice Department barred Stirrup from the building some time within the last couple of weeks.

But don’t cry too hard for her. Just minutes before the AP broke the story, President Trump appointed Stirrup to a three-year term on the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors, according to the Daily Beast. Because who better to investigate “the morale, discipline, curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods” of our future airmen than a real life spy?

Sponsored

Can’t make this shit up.

Trump aide banned from Justice after trying to get case info [AP]


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.