February 28, 2018

Hope Hicks Is the Latest Trump Aide to Abandon a Sinking Ship

Andrew Harrer/CNP via ZUMA

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Many of us thought that Hope Hicks would be the last person standing in the Trump administration, going down with the ship like Ron Ziegler.¹ But no:

Hope Hicks, the White House communications director and one of President Trump’s longest-serving advisers, said Wednesday that she plans to leave the White House in the coming weeks….Her resignation came a day after she testified for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee, telling the panel that in her job, she had occasionally been required to tell white lies but had never lied about anything connected to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Multiple White House aides said that Ms. Hicks’s departure was unrelated to her appearance before the committee. They said that she had told a small group of people in the days before the session that she had planned to leave her job.

I’m sure it’s true that her departure isn’t directly due to the questioning she underwent yesterday. At the same time, the Cyrillic script has been on the wall for a while. I’d be surprised if she didn’t decide some time ago that she should get out while the getting was good and her reputation was still intact. She probably knows as well as anyone that there’s a lot more for Mueller to find.

So: aside from family, are there any senior White House aides from Trump’s first day in office who are still around? Yes! It’s a little tricky deciding who’s really “senior” in Trump’s inner circle, but here’s my slightly idiosyncratic list. The names in bold are still around:

  • Hope Hicks
  • Keith Schiller
  • Steve Bannon
  • Stephen Miller
  • Reince Priebus
  • Katie Walsh
  • Rob Porter
  • Sean Spicer
  • Don McGahn
  • Kellyanne Conway
  • Gary Cohn
  • Dina Powell
  • Michael Flynn
  • KT McFarland
  • Mick Mulvaney
  • Marc Short

Ten out of 16 have departed. That’s a pretty remarkable attrition rate.

¹Ron Ziegler was Richard Nixon’s press secretary, famous for—oh forget it. It doesn’t matter.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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