He’s threatened reporters, distorted scientific evidence, and ignored the law. Now Hillary has hired him — of course.
The Loathsome Cowboy rides again
Ken Salazar, President Obama’s disgraced former interior secretary
and a former U.S. senator from Colorado, was named Hillary Clinton’s
White House transition chair on Monday. The pick confirms that a Clinton
presidency would not only be Barack Obama’s third term ideologically,
but also culturally. As in the Democratic culture of corruption.
Ken Salazar is a thug. Before stepping down as Obama’s interior
secretary in 2013 “to spend time with family,” Salazar threatened
violence against a Colorado Springs Gazette reporter who had the
audacity to challenge one of the ten-gallon-hat-wearing bureaucrat’s
cronyism-tainted deals.
At issue: How rancher and reported Salazar business associate Tom Davis
profited handsomely from the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and
Burro Program. Not long after Salazar took office, Davis paid $10 apiece
for more than 1,700 federally protected horses who roamed on public
lands. He then turned around and sold them for slaughter near the
Mexican border for $154,000, despite having signed a contract
prohibiting him from doing so.
When Gazette reporter David Phillips (now at the New York Times) asked
about the controversy at an Obama Election Night event in November 2012,
Salazar snapped:
You know what, never do that. This is a — this is the Obama — You
know what, if you do that to me again, I’m going to punch you out. OK?
Don’t ever, ever, from the Gazette or anybody else do that to me again.
Set me up. You know?
Caught on tape by Philipps and another witness, Knuckles Salazar issued
an “apology.” But neither he nor Davis, who said he had previously
hauled cattle for Salazar for years, ever answered for their actions. An
inspector general determined Salazar’s department “failed to follow its
own policy of limiting horse sales and ensuring that the horses sold
went to good homes and were not slaughtered.” No penalties, no
prosecution, no nothing.
Ken Salazar is a liar. He trampled the rule of law, defied court orders,
and doctored scientific conclusions in the name of environmental
protection. Have you forgotten? After the BP oil spill in 2010, the
Obama White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s
entire deepwater-drilling industry. The sweeping ban — inserted into a
technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green
extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost
wages.
The order was supposedly based on recommendations from an expert
oil-spill panel. But that panel’s own members (along with the federal
judiciary) called out Obama’s environmental team for misleading the
public about the scientific evidence and “contributing to the perception
that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually
were.” Salazar and eco czar Carol Browner oversaw the false rewriting of
the drilling-ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed
panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.
Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Interior
Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on
offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Feldman singled out the
Salazar-run agency’s culture of contempt and serial “determined
disregard” for the law.
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