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What Cain and Abel Tell Us About the War Between Priebus and Scaramucci
Scaramucci's off-the-cuff biblical reference is full of interpretive possibilities.
Were Trump and his family and Manafort and Flynn and Donald Junior all Punked Too? Or is it something else?
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How Did Rick Perry Get Punk'd?
How Did Rick Perry Get Punk'd?
It seemed pretty easy for two Russian pranksters
to trick him into thinking he was on the line with the Ukrainian Prime
Minister.
Not just any prank call. A prank call that Energy Secretary Rick Perry thought was with the prime minister of Ukraine—a country at the cross hairs of the most elevated U.S.-Russia tensions since the Cold War—and a prank call during which he discussed such geopolitically sensitive topics as cyberattacks, potential pipelines for Russian gas and the Paris climate accord.
“When you have this kind of high-level, minister-to-minister call, with a country that is strategically important like Ukraine, especially given that Russia is on the front page of newspaper in the country—you would run this through the State Department, the NSC,” says Jeff Navin, former acting chief of staff and deputy chief of staff at the Department of Energy from 2011 until 2013. “These aren’t the kinds of things you cowboy into.”
But that appears to be what happened on July 19, when Perry was pranked by two well-known Russian hoaxers, Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetsov and Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov. They led him through a wide-ranging conversation that flitted from those very real topics to a couple made-up ones, like a bogus new biofuel made from a mix of alcohol and pig manure and supposedly invented by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. “These individuals are known for pranking high-level officials and celebrities, particularly those who are supportive of an agenda that is not in line with their governments. In this case, the energy security of Ukraine,” an Energy Department spokeswoman told The Washington Post. It sounds ridiculous now, but it’s also the kind of stumble that pokes a big hole in Americans' presumption of basic government competence. So: Aren’t there safeguards to protect this kind of thing from happening?
Usually, yes, according to those who have organized and overseen these kinds of calls.
Navin, who admitted he had no idea how Perry’s office in particular would handle the scheduling or logistics of calls, described a process that he was familiar with at the Department of Energy that entailed numerous layers of planning and sign-off between staff at the National Security Council, State Department, DOE and their counterparts in the other country. In a typical case, he said, the NSC would coordinate with the State Department, and there would be a pre-call at the staff level with the Ukrainian Embassy. The Ukrainian Embassy would then go to relevant Ukrainian officials. If that had happened in this case, he says, the Ukrainian Embassy would have said it hadn’t heard about any such call.
Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former senior adviser to former national security adviser Susan Rice, described a similar experience. “It's rare that a senior official could call in directly, unscheduled and unknown, and his counterpart would just take the call without some prior layer,” she says—in her case, it would have been the Situation Room or the State Operations Directorate that would have verified that the call was coming from the correct place.
David Wade, former Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff, outlined similar proactive layers if that kind of call came into the State Department. “Typically, at the State Department it might come up as a request through either our Embassy or their Embassy, or a request to the Desk Officer or Assistant Secretary,” he wrote in an email, “and then it would be coordinated logistically through the Operations Center that connects government to government calls. Typically, you’d pick up if a prank was on the works.”
So what happened? Navin pointed to a recent Vanity Fair story about distrust between the two kinds of DOE employees: career staffers and political appointees. To him, it looked like the same distrust was at work here. The secretary’s schedule is handled by the scheduling and advance team, made up of political appointees; the career international affairs staff, though, would be the ones who would typically negotiate calls between a foreign official and the secretary on an energy-related matter. But it didn’t appear to Navin that those career staffers had weighed in on this call at all.
“A central part of this crisis in Ukraine is driven by energy,” he says. “This is the kind of thing where you’d want all the career experts in the country.” Wade echoed the same thought: “Bottom line, this is why it’s good to have sub-Cabinet officials and the permanent bureaucracy.”
Perry and the rest of the political staff at DOE may have learned their lesson, but not before giving his skeptics plenty of fodder for distrusting his understanding of the department or his ability to run it, which was already magnified this week because of that Vanity Fair article.
“He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,” a DOE staffer told the writer, Michael Lewis. “He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.” Someone also told Lewis that Perry had spent only a few minutes with former Secretary Ernest Moniz, the one person who might be able to adequately prepare Perry for the role.
The prank call has done little to assuage these kinds of doubts about how prepared or interested Perry is in being at the DOE at all. Navin mirrored one of Donald Trump’s speech lines: “In Russia, they are literally laughing at us right now.”
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