After Sessions & Kelly, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Is Set To Leave Trump Administration

It’s only been a few days since Donald Trump announced that his chief of staff, John Kelly, is set to depart from the White House, yet the president finds himself taking to Twitter once again, this time to announce that Interior Secretary will leave the administration at the end of this year.

“Secretary of the Interior @RyanZinke will be leaving the Administration at the end of the year after having served for a period of almost two years,” Trump tweeted.

He also thanked Zinke for his tenure, adding that his successor will be announced next week.

“Ryan has accomplished much during his tenure and I want to thank him for his service to our Nation. The Trump Administration will be announcing the new Secretary of the Interior next week.”

This is quite a shakeup of Trump’s cabinet. In November, Trump fired his Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with Matthew Whitaker, who is known to have a disparaging view of the Mueller investigation. Zinke was instrumental in pushing Trump’s sweeping changes to America’s environmental framework and oversaw mineral extraction and conservation on roughly 500 million acres of public land.

But Zinke, a former Congressman from Montana, is the subject of several federal investigations, according to the New York Times, “one of which his department’s top watchdog has referred to the Justice Department, a potential step toward a criminal investigation.”

Embattled interior secretary Ryan Zinke steps down after series of scandals https://t.co/se2KazGzGV

— The Guardian (@guardian) December 15, 2018

One of the most problematic deals he oversaw during his tenure as the Interior Secretary was a real estate deal involving his family and a development group backed by Halliburton — one of the world’s biggest oil companies — which stood to benefit massively from Zinke’s policies. It is alleged that in response to Zinke making Halliburton profit, the company’s chairman, David J. Lesar, helped him sign a deal which would profit Zinke’s family.

Zinke has denied the allegations previously, saying that he had followed “every procedure, every policy, every rule” while signing the deal.

Last month, Trump was asked if he planned to fire Zinke owing to his involvement in a litany of court cases, to which Trump had responded with a resounding “No”. But since then, something seems to have changed in Trump’s relationship with Zinke for him to have dismissed him. Whether that is down to a personal breakdown of faith, something Trump values highly, or an inside knowledge of his actual involvement in dubious deals, is something we don’t know at this point, but with the departures of first Sessions, then Kelly and now Zinke all within a period of a month, Trump is surely shaking things up at the White House.