Trump Nominates a Former Far-Right Podcast Host to Head an Ethics Watchdog

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: New York Times

Trump Nominates a Former Far-Right Podcast Host to Head an Ethics Watchdog

The president picked Paul Ingrassia, the current White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which examines public corruption.


Paul Ingrassia, left, President Trump's new pick to head the Office of Special Counsel, addressed supporters of the Jan. 6 rioters outside a Washington jail in January. Graham Dickie/The New York Times

By Andy Newman
May 29, 2025

President Trump on Thursday nominated Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host now serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, to a new key role: head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent corruption-fighting agency that safeguards federal whistle-blowers and enforces some ethics laws.

The office has had a bumpy ride in the second Trump presidency. In February, Mr. Trump fired the office's head, Hampton Dellinger. Mr. Dellinger sued to keep his job, was temporarily reinstated by a court order, began investigating complaints arising from the Trump administration's mass firings of federal workers and was removed again in March after an appeals court ruled in the administration's favor. The Office of Special Counsel dropped its inquiry into the mass firings in April.

The office had annoyed Mr. Trump during his first term by pursuing allegations of misconduct, resulting in a finding that 13 senior aides had campaigned for his re-election in violation of the law known as the Hatch Act.

Before working for Mr. Trump, Mr. Ingrassia, 30, hosted a podcast, "Right on Point," with his sister, Olivia Ingrassia. In December 2020, as Mr. Trump was contesting his election loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., the podcast posted on Twitter, "Time for @realDonaldTrump to declare martial law and secure his re-election." ... Mr. Ingrassia has represented the "manosphere" influencer Andrew Tate, who is currently facing criminal charges in Romania and Britain, and pushed a false theory that Nikki Haley was ineligible to run for president. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. ... In a Truth Social post on Thursday night, Mr. Trump called Mr. Ingrassia "a highly respected attorney, writer and Constitutional Scholar."

{snip}

Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/andy-newman

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/ingrassia-office-special-counsel.html

---

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ingrassia-22b05810b

Hat tip, the usual Bluesky crowd — Ken White, Kevin Kruse …

[Karasu]

1. MORE RW talking heads who know fuck-all about holding office? Fucking really?

Though this country obviously has no small supply of those...

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Not just a talking head - he's a Jan 6 fanatic, and Andrew Tate's man in the Trump regime

One of Tate’s lawyers now works in the White House as a liaison to the US Justice Department.

Paul Ingrassia was part of a team representing the Tate brothers in a defamation lawsuit they filed against several of their alleged victims.

But Ingrassia also acted as Andrew Tate’s publicist and says he got the self-described misogynist influencer onto a show hosted by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.

Ingrassia effusively praised Tate in online posts. In one dating from July 2023, he echoed far-right online talking points about moral decay in Western countries and called Tate “an extraordinary human being” who was offering “a dying West some hope for renewal”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c70wq044znxt?post=asset%3A663b40d6-32b5-43af-b8a3-c3051d1211b5#post

White House point man at Homeland Security shared ‘martial law option’ post to keep Trump in office

On Monday, ABC News reported that Ingrassia was pushed out of the Justice Department as liaison following clashes between him and the chief of staff over pushing to hire candidates with “exceptional loyalty” to the president.

CNN confirmed that Ingrassia is no longer at the Justice Department and his LinkedIn profile now lists him at Homeland Security.
...
In one post from January 2, 2021, Ingrassia called right-wing commentator Seb Gorka “soft” after Gorka rebuked a post that called for then-Vice President Mike Pence to be arrested and executed by firing squad for not supporting attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
...
Four days after the Gorka tweet, Ingrassia shared a blog post from his podcast that argued for the “martial law option” to keep Trump in power, urging him to use emergency powers to delay Joe Biden’s inauguration. The post claimed Trump had a “moral imperative” to ensure election security and called for a military-run re-vote in key battleground states where he had challenged the results.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/26/politics/paul-ingrassia-trump-administration-liaison-dhs-kfile/index.html

What he does know about holding office is using it to take revenge on people. At "an independent corruption-fighting agency that safeguards federal whistle-blowers and enforces some ethics laws", he will make sure that it attacks anyone blowing the whistle against the Trump regime, and will pervert any "ethics laws" to enable the maximum corruption possible.

[Karasu]

3. Holy shit. Compared to most of the other radio/podcast/"news" personalities in the regime, I knew very little about this

guy. But reading that certainly explained what's really going on here.

I also really should've figured that Andrew Tate would get some kind of proxy in at some point, but...wow.