Donald Trump wants the federal government to give a job a Virginia attorney who was forced to resign from a state government job over a fraud allegation.
The job Trump has tapped the guy for: you guessed it, investigating fraud.
“Appointing an official clearly unconcerned with ethics, transparency, or accountability is directly at odds with the mission of an office that last year recovered more than $7 billion for American taxpayers. We ask that you therefore immediately rescind the nomination of T. March Bell as HHS IG,” Virginia House Democrats Don Beyer, Gerry Connolly, Jennifer McClellan, Bobby Scott, Suhas Subramanyam and Eugene Vindman wrote in a letter to Trump.
Good luck getting somebody to read it to him.
ICYMI
This T. March Bell guy resigned under pressure from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality back in 1997 after a legislative audit found he couldn’t justify a nearly $8,000 payment to a former employee.
Bell went on to low-level jobs on Capitol Hill and in the first Trump administration before a stint as the president of the so-called Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, a self-styled “Christian organization” that claims to be guided by “the Bible’s timeless truths about the purpose of our work and how to make wise decisions with all that we’ve been given.”
He was the hatchet man for House Republican efforts in 2016 to make an issue out of allegations about Planned Parenthood selling fetal tissue for medical research.
This guy is Trump’s guy to be the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Holy bejeezus.
“Further, Bell’s recent behavior suggests that he continues to believe that he should not be beholden to Virginia law, Virginia taxpayers, or the standards that Virginians expect of public officials,” the congressional Democrats noted in their letter to Trump, which has way, way too many big words for it to ever make sense to him.
It seems that, in addition to the fraud and the fake investigations, Bell was hired in 2022 as a senior advisor to the Virginia Secretary of Public Safety, drawing a $125,000 annual salary from Virginia taxpayers, without anybody ever really knowing what he was doing to earn that taxpayer-funded salary.
“Despite taking a position ineligible for the limited exceptions to Virginia’s open records law, Bell secured the Governor’s support in improperly blocking the release of any information regarding his taxpayer-funded role. While willing to draw a salary from Virginians, Bell was apparently unwilling to disclose exactly why he was drawing that salary, either voluntarily or in accordance with Virginia law,” the lawmakers wrote.
But, yeah, sure, this T. March Bell cipher should be in charge of investigating the HHS.
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Chris Graham
