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Rossello also asked for “a detailed and thorough investigation” into the recruitment process for emergency services, which led to the Whitefish contract, and for the installation of a trustee in the area of procurement and contracts.
The $300 million contract between Puerto Rico’s power utility and the Montana-based energy firm has been criticized in recent days.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is from the same hometown as Whitefish Energy, said he had “absolutely nothing” to do with the company receiving the contract.
It was also reported the contract bars the government from auditing the costs or profits related to the company’s relief efforts in Puerto Rico.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz on Wednesday called for the contract to be voided.
In response, Whitefish Energy said on Twitter, “We’ve got 44 linemen rebuilding power lines in your city & 40 more men just arrived. Do you want us to send them back or keep working?”
The company deleted the tweet and apologized later in the day.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands has gathered outside the office of Robert Mueller in eager anticipation of the special counsel’s first arrest in the Russia probe.
Minutes after news was leaked that charges had been filed, Americans from across the country descended on Mueller’s office to witness firsthand what many called the beginning of the end of the nightmare.
“I can’t believe this day has finally come,” Carol Foyler, who drove from North Carolina, said. “My husband is having surgery today, but I didn’t want to miss this.”
Although the gathering has been largely peaceful, isolated arguments have erupted over which member of Trump’s circle the attendees would like Mueller to arrest first.
A faction shouting “Don, Jr.” started pushing and shoving another group chanting “Jared” before police intervened.
One policeman said that law enforcement had been flabbergasted by the size of the crowd, which could reach a million. “We definitely didn’t see anything like this at the Inauguration,” he said.
2017 may wind up being a terrible year for Donald Trump, but it's a very, very, good year for Richard Neustadt (1919-2003) and the theory of the presidency explicated in his 1960 classic, "Presidential Power."
What Neustadt taught was that the constitutional office of President of the United States is an inherently weak one, but that skilled presidents can nevertheless become enormously influential. The flip side of this, however, is that an amateurish president can barely even exercise the constitutional and statutory authority of the office.
Neustadt introduces his topic by contrasting the presidency with the way the military appears to operate:
President Truman used to contemplate the problems of the general-become-President should Eisenhower win the forthcoming election. "He'll sit here," Truman would remark (tapping the desk for emphasis), "and he'll say, 'Do this! Do that!' And nothing will happen. Poor Ike -- it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating."
Which, as Neustadt tells it, is exactly what happened:
"The President still feels," and Eisenhower aide remarked to me in 1958, "that when he's decided something, that ought to be the end of it ... and when it bounces back undone or done wrong, he tends to react with shocked surprise." 1
It's not hard to imagine Trump there, except instead of shocked surprise the former reality television star apparently prefers temper tantrums and sulking.
Political scientist Dan Drezner argued Tuesday in the Washington Post that Trump is the "weakest commander in chief in modern history" given that he "has no idea how to wield power or issue credible threats." This cluelessness is even more striking given that presidential power over the Pentagon is explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. If Trump has difficulty with getting the military to go along with what he wants -- and he does, as can be seen in their resistance to a transgender troop ban among other things -- then just imagine how little influence he has with every other executive branch agency and department.
Without a more direct way to control the government, Neustadt argues that presidents must depend on what he calls "persuasion" -- better referred to as the skilled use of leverage and bargaining power. Not just with Congress, or within the executive branch, but across the board. This "persuasion" doesn't necessarily mean changing anyone's mind. It may just mean convincing someone in a position of power to do nothing rather than something.
...
So Trump is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, a historically weak president. His professional reputation is in tatters, he's unusually unpopular, and he doesn't appear to come close to having the skills to do anything about it. Exactly the conditions under which Neustadt predicted presidents would lose influence.
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