November 18, 2024 12:34 PM UTC

Is Gabe Evans Okay With Trump Skipping Background Checks?

• 2 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As CNN reports, in addition to demanding the U.S. Senate abandon its responsibility to confirm Cabinet nominees, Trump 2.0 is in several notable cases sidestepping the usual process of vetting nominees via background checks conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigations:

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.

Trump and his allies believe the FBI system is slow and plagued with issues that could stymie the president-elect’s plan to quickly begin the work of implementing his agenda, people briefed on the plans said. Critics say the intrusive background checks sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.

The discussions come as Trump has floated several controversial choices for high-level positions in the US government – including Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.

Incoming President-re-elect Donald Trump’s disdain for the FBI is well known after the agency proved resistant to being fully co-opted for political purposes during Trump’s first administration. But in the case of we-still-can’t-believe-we’re-typing-this Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz, we’re talking about someone who was up until very recently under active investigation by the Justice Department. That investigation did not result in charges, but reportedly informed an Ethics Committee investigation whose findings Gaetz is now desperately trying to keep under wraps.

Safe to say, the FBI would have a lot to say about Matt Gaetz that the Trump administration, if they want to keep Gaetz as the nominee, doesn’t want to know. And that’s why Trump doesn’t want Gaetz to undergo an FBI background check before he becomes the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Although Rep.-elect Gabe Evans will not be voting on Trump’s nominees and at this point we don’t know for sure if anyone will, Trump’s brazen moves to bypass the normal vetting process for his nominees should certainly be of concern. During a debate in the Colorado House last spring over consumer debt legislation, Evans took to the floor of the House to explain his own experience in the Army in charge of “the security clearances for about 200 soldiers.”

So this was something that I had to do quite frequently, when I was a personal security manager for the military, I oversaw the security clearances for about 200 soldiers and one of the most important things when we’re doing these personal security assessments is actually whether or not that soldier happens to have any outstanding debt. Because in order to protect classified information, the classified information, that soldiers with a security clearance would have access to the first thing that we- I say we that being the, the entities that are tasked with protecting that classified information- the first thing that we need to do is examine any debt that that service member may have to make sure that they’re not susceptible to potentially being influenced by foreign powers…

That experience raises a very simple question for Gabe Evans: if it’s so important to conduct background checks on soldiers to “make sure that they’re not susceptible to potentially being influenced by foreign powers,” isn’t it at least as important to ensure Trump’s Cabinet nominees are not similarly vulnerable? This seems true to us whether you’re talking about Matt Gaetz’s sexual kompromat or Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard’s apologetics on behalf of a long list of America’s sworn enemies.

In the wake of Trump’s stunning victory earlier this month, the nation has been confronted with the prospect of every kind of institutional norm being once again upended–this time with the knowledge of the process that comes with Trump’s first-term experience. Having secured the “quadfecta” of power in Washington over all three branches of government and both chambers of Congress, it’s going to be up to Republicans with some residual loyalty to the country over the person of Trump to put in place whatever guardrails will exist for the next two years.

Every day will be a new test of Gabe Evans’ values. This is the first.