The State Department is looking into Stuart Karaffa, a State Department employee who was caught on video by Project Veritas discussing his work for the Democratic Socialists of America during work hours — a potential violation of the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from political activity while on duty.
“I can confirm Stuart Karaffa is a management and program analyst with the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday. “We take seriously any allegation of a violation of the Hatch Act and financial disclosure rules and are closely reviewing this matter.”
Project Veritas published a video on Tuesday morning that is first in a series of exposing the “Deep State” — or federal employees bent on resisting the Trump administration’s agenda within their federal bureaucracies, often working with former officials and other outside actors to leak their stories to the media.
Breitbart News published an exclusive investigative report on Monday evening that revealed career diplomats at the State Department convened a secret meeting with at least ten civil servants to solicit criticism about a Trump appointee while she was overseas on a work trip.
Shortly after that meeting, Foreign Policy published a piece on June 13 alleging that the appointee, Mari Stull, a senior adviser at the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, was scouring social media accounts of U.S. employees at the State Department and the United Nations and compiling a “loyalty list” of those who were loyal to President Trump.
Breitbart News learned that some of the civil servants who participated in the meeting felt uncomfortable about the meeting, and intend to lodge complaints against the career diplomats who convened it and pressured them to gripe about Stull.
Breitbart News also spoke to several friends of Stull, including two Democrats, who say Stull would never compile such a list. One Democrat friend, a human rights lawyer, said Stull even forwarded her resumé to the United Nations for a job.
On Tuesday morning, several prominent voices on the right tweeted out Breitbart News’s story, including the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr:
Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the former chairman of the House Oversight Committee and now a Fox News contributor, penned an op-ed on Tuesday blasting the Deep State for their resistance against the Trump administration
In the piece, entitled “The Deep State is real – I’ve seen it up close and it’s far worse than you can imagine,” Chaffetz wrote:
What I witnessed and wrote about in my new book –“The Deep State: How an Army of Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda” – was a bureaucracy that allowed agencies to become weaponized in the service of political battles.
In the beginning, that meant protecting President Obama by using federal power to target political opponents or by covering the tracks of the corrupt or incompetent within his administration. By the time I left Congress, the Deep State’s focus had shifted to thwarting the administration of the newly elected President Donald Trump.
“The Deep State is not just a conspiracy theory,” he added. “No less than our very system of separation of powers and checks and balances is at stake.”
“While we still have a president willing to check Deep State power, we must act to stop those who are part of the Deep State from undermining the most successful government in the history of the world,” he wrote.
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