Masters of corruption

I am reliably informed that the flow of water in the Potomac River is approximately 11,500 cubic feet per second.

At Little Falls, near Washington, DC, that works out to about 7 billion gallons per day. Is it enough? I ask because all the chatter we hear about “draining the swamp” is completely pointless. The swamp that is the Washington establishment cannot be effectively drained. There is no valve huge enough to handle the requisite discharge. The institutional sewers would be overwhelmed by the effluvium.

No, the fetid, corrupt, woke and self-serving bureaucracy that is the seat of government can be disburdened of its accumulated muck only by more vigorous means. Repristination requires that it be aggressively flushed, not passively drained.

In fulfillment of his fifth labor, Hercules required not one but two rivers, the Alpheus and the Peneus, in order to purge the Augean stables of their encrusted filth in a single day, as demanded by King Eurystheus.

Donald Trump has not managed to cleanse Washington in one day, as the mythical hero is reported to have done with those stables. But his administration is working both very fast and very thoroughly. His actions, and the actions of his lieutenants, have been nothing short of astonishing in their velocity and radical nature.

Leadership at the Justice Department has ordered acting US attorney Edward Martin to fire prosecutors who investigated the January 6 protest at the Capitol. All of them. With immediate effect. Many had been hired as temporary employees to staff what became the biggest criminal investigation in American history. No grandmother who ventured near the Capitol that day was safe. On the eve of the presidential transition, the Biden Justice Department made them permanent employees.

Like a fire hose directed at a recalcitrant bit of detritus, the new DoJ directive noted that their continued employment “hindered” Martin in “faithfully implement[ing] the agenda that the American people elected President Trump to execute.”

“The appropriate step,” the order continued, “is to terminate these employees, and to take all appropriate steps to ensure that resources allocated to their hiring and employment” are made available to the incoming team. The directive also ordered that many executive assistant directors of the FBI resign, retire or be fired. We are talking about scores if not hundreds of individuals across the country.

Meanwhile, the newly confirmed director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has publicly stated that the evidence he has seen does not support former CIA director and professional anti-Trump agitator John Brennan in his contention that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to help Trump win.

Brennan was also one of the fifty-odd former intelligence officers who signed a 2020 letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore all the signs of a Russian operation. The letter was organized by Antony Blinken, then Biden’s campaign manager, later his secretary of state. Biden drew on the putative authority of that letter during his televised debate with Trump that year. “You see, fifty-one top intelligence officers say that Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinformation.” It might just have pushed Biden over the line. But we now know Hunter’s laptop and everything on it was Hunter’s.

Then there is the unfolding story of the United States Agency for International Development. Under Biden, its head was Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. This independent agency manages a budget of nearly $50 billion, more than the CIA and State Department combined.

What do they spend the money on? It is supposed to help the United States project “soft power” by injecting US aid to needy entities around the world. But it is not really about aid. What it in fact does, as the commentator Mike Benz has noted, is to coordinate “clandestine operations through foreign left-wing NGOs. What it’s developing is all the activist organizations in foreign countries that the state department is building to gain influence.”

Did they fund Covid-19 research in Wuhan? Why, yes, to the tune of some $200 million, some of which went to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China. It also has a domestic apparat. In 2019, USAID paid $20 million to susceptible journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and, Benz writes, “use[d] that dirt as the basis to impeach” Donald Trump.

Elon Musk is on the case. “USAID is a criminal organization,” he wrote on X, involved in “rogue CIA work” and “internet censorship.” “Time for it to die,” he posted. When representatives of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) attempted to access a secure area of the USAID offices, they were turned away. In response, Donald Trump put USAID’s head of security, John Voorhees, and his deputy on administrative leave.

For readers wishing to know more about USAID and John Voorhees, allow me to recommend Mark Moyar’s book Masters of Corruption: How The Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged The Trump Presidency, which I published last year at Encounter Books. Moyar, a celebrated historian of the Vietnam conflict, now teaches at Hillsdale College. He was employed at USAID during Trump’s first term and witnessed the corruption firsthand and was penalized for calling it out.

One news report noted integration with the State Department, should Trump be successful in bringing it about, “would allow him to align foreign aid with his ‘America First’ vision.” That would mean fewer funds to “cope with climate change and boost gender equality.” I believe that was intended as a criticism. I think Hercules would regard it as an additional current with which to carry out his work.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.