Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, is quitting, and so is his staff, the Washington Post reported this morning. CNN actually reports that Trump has fired them as part of a housecleaning.
Either way, it makes sense. The Post report states that this is “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” But it also notes that in this case, Kennedy, a career staffer who had served in the position for nine years, had been angling to keep his job under Trump.
It can’t be easy to reassemble the team of senior career staff at the State Department, but it probably would be easy to find someone with a stronger sense of right and wrong than Kennedy, whose came up quite often in connection with things that went wrong at the State Department during the Obama era. That begins with diplomatic security in Benghazi — with which Kennedy was entrusted before the Sept. 11, 2012 attack — but it goes beyond that.
In June 2013, CBS News reported on an Inspector General report that concluded Kennedy had covered up for an ambassador who was potentially compromising U.S. interests by soliciting prostitutes (some of them allegedly underage) in a public park in Brussels. Kennedy is specifically named as part of the cover-up:
In one specific and striking cover-up, State Department agents told the Inspector General they were told to stop investigating the case of a U.S. Ambassador who held a sensitive diplomatic post and was suspected of patronizing prostitutes in a public park.
The State Department Inspector General’s memo refers to the 2011 investigation into an ambassador who “routinely ditched … his protective security detail” and inspectors suspect this was in order to “solicit sexual favors from prostitutes.”
Sources told CBS News that after the allegations surfaced, the ambassador was called to Washington, D.C., to meet with Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, but was permitted to return to his post.
Another item came out more recently: During the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, it came out that Kennedy had attempted to strike a corrupt deal with the FBI over its classification markings on a Clinton email that was ultimately released in May 2015.
Kennedy asked the bureau to lie — to change its justification for the redaction of one of Clinton’s emails to make it look like it was not because the information being redacted was classified. Clinton had already said in public that she had not sent or received classified information on her private, unsecured email account, and at that point no evidence had been made public that this was a lie.
In exchange for this political favor, Kennedy allegedly offered to address the FBI’s longstanding request to station agents in countries where it needed the State Department’s go-ahead. The FBI did not accept the deal. The fact that Kennedy had made the offer was not revealed until election season, when the FBI released documents on its email investigations in late 2016.
Trump’s senior diplomatic team is going to have its hands full, especially given the new president’s propensity to make unwise and undiplomatic statements off the cuff. This has already had consequences less than a week into his presidency.
Perhaps it would be better to have an experienced hand like Kennedy in what promises to be a difficult senior position. But based on his track record, Kennedy’s departure does not seem like a huge loss.
