Trump: Interior Secretary Zinke to step down at end of year


READ MORE

US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that his interior secretary will step down in the coming weeks. 


Ryan Zinke, who is facing federal investigations into his travel, political activity and potential conflicts of interest, will leave the administration at the end of the year, Trump said on Twitter.


His exit will be the latest in a series of high-profile departures from Trump’s administration.


The president highlighted that Zinke’s tenure – less than two years – was substantially longer than that of some other former top officials in the administration.


“Ryan has accomplished much during his tenure and I want to thank him for his service to our Nation,” the president said, adding that a replacement would be announced next week.


Under scrutiny


Trump did not give a reason for Zinke’s departure.


The former Navy Seal and former congressman from Montana is one of several members of Trump’s cabinet to come under fire over expenditures, including reports that his department was spending nearly $139,000 to upgrade three sets of double doors in his office – a cost he later said he negotiated down to $75,000. 


He has also faced criticism over costly US Park Police helicopter flights last year that allowed him to return to Washington, DC for a horseback ride with Vice President Mike Pence, and several other flights on non-commercial aircraft.


Zinke, 51, has run the Department of the Interior since early 2017. He pursued Trump’s agenda to promote oil drilling and coal mining by expanding federal leasing, cutting royalty rates and easing land protections.


Zinke was among Trump’s most active cabinet members, cutting huge wilderness national monuments in Utah to a fraction of their size and proposing offshore oil drilling in the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic. He became a favourite of the US energy and mining industries and a prime target for conservationists and environmental groups.


Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer applauded Zinke’s departure in a tweet.


“Ryan Zinke was one of the most toxic members of the cabinet in the way he treated our environment, our precious public lands, and the way he treated the govt like it was his personal honey pot,” Schumer said. “The swamp cabinet will be a little less foul without him.”



In July, the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General began investigating a Montana land deal between a foundation Zinke set up and a development group backed by the chairman of oil service company Halliburton Co, which has business with the Department of the Interior.


In late October, that investigation was referred to the US Justice Department for a possible criminal investigation, according to multiple media reports. The Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior have declined to comment.


There are two other continuing investigations of Zinke’s conduct. Interior’s watchdog is examining whether the department purposefully redrew the boundaries of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in a way that would benefit a state legislator who owns adjoining property.


The watchdog also is investigating Zinke’s decision to block casinos proposed by two Connecticut Native American tribes. Critics allege he made that move, overruling his staff’s recommendation, shortly after he met lobbyists for MGM Resorts International, which owns a new casino in the region.


Zinke has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.


Series of departures


The announcement on Zinke came just a week after another impending high-profile departure was made public. Trump announced earlier this month that his chief of staff, John Kelly, would also be leaving the White House. 


Trump on Friday tapped Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to fill the chief of staff job on an acting basis, setting him up to be the third person to hold the post since the president took office in early 2017.


A series of other top officials have left the Trump White House, including a secretary of state, two national security advisers, an attorney general and the head of the US environment agency.


Article source: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/icelandic-low-cost-airline-wow-halting-flights-to-israel-this-winter-1.6268987


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more