Thread: Heather Nauert, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, withdraws fro

Heather Nauert, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, withdraws from consideration



February 16, 2019

Anne Gearan






President Trump’s pick to be the next United Nations ambassador withdrew from consideration Saturday, the State Department said.



The department’s spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, had been tapped to succeed Nikki Haley at the United Nations, but her name was never formally sent to the Senate for confirmation.

“Today Heather Nauert withdrew herself from consideration for the nomination of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. The President will make an announcement with respect to a nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations soon,” deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said in a statement.



The withdrawal is related to the employment of a nanny who was in the country illegally, said three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.



But according to a person familiar with Nauert’s situation, the nanny was in the country legally. She was a Jamaican national employed by Nauert and her husband 10 years ago. The Nauerts paid her salary in cash. When they discovered she was not paying taxes, they insisted the tax bill be paid, the person said.



Nauert flagged the nanny situation to Diplomatic Security at the outset of the vetting process, and was assured it would not be a sufficient matter to derail her confirmation, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.



Nauert, a former Fox News journalist, served as State Department spokes***woman during the tenure of Rex Tillerson, who was forced out last year, and for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“I am grateful to President Trump and Secretary Pompeo for the trust they placed in me for considering me for the position of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,” Nauert said in the release.


“However, the past two months have been grueling for my family and therefore it is in the best interest of my family that I withdraw my name from consideration,” she said, an apparent reference to the lag in submitting her formal nomination and opposition by some senators to her nomination.


“Serving in the Administration for the past two years has been one of the highest honors of my life and I will always be grateful to the President, the Secretary, and my colleagues at the State Department for their support,” Nauert said.


Nauert’s husband and children had remained in New York while she served in Washington. It is unclear if she will return as spokeswoman.


In the same statement, Pompeo praised Nauert for “unequalled excellence.”



“Her personal decision today to withdraw her name from consideration to become the nominee for United States Ambassador to the United Nations is a decision for which I have great respect,” he said.



Carol Morello contributed to this report.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.ca685dc47ee2

They paid her in cash...did they give her a 1099?

Heather Nauert nomination sunk by nanny issues


Josh Rogin, The Washington Post


Published 7:27 pm PST, Saturday, February 16, 2019

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Photo: Rob Kim, Getty Images


NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 24: Michelle Wie (2nd R), 2014 U.S. Women's Open Golf Champion, with hosts Heather Nauert, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Maria Molina, play golf at "FOX And Friends" at FOX Studios on June 24, ... more


State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert withdrew herself from consideration to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Saturday, saying in a statement that "it is in the best interest of my family." Behind the scenes, her nomination faced complications because Nauert hired a foreign-born nanny about 10 years ago who didn't have the proper work visa and Nauert didn't pay proper taxes on time, according to two officials involved in her nomination process.



President Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate Nauert to be America's top diplomat at the United Nations this past December, but he never officially sent the nomination over to the Senate for consideration. That's because her security investigation was delayed while the administration tried to figure out how to deal with the revelation that Nauert had hired the nanny despite the nanny's lack of a proper work visa, and the fact that Nauert didn't pay taxes on the nanny at that time, the officials said. But Nauert paid the back taxes years later, they said. The officials requested anonymity to discuss internal and sensitive information. Nauert declined to comment.


One of the officials said that Naeurt voluntarily disclosed the nanny issue to investigators as well as to senior officials at the beginning of her vetting process. The issue would likely have been part of the public record during her Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing, if she ever had one. On top of the already tepid response that Nauert's expected nomination provoked from Senate Democrats, her confirmation process would have been grueling for her family, the officials said, so Nauert was honest when she said in her statement that she decided to withdraw with her family's interests at heart.


The nanny issue wasn't caught in her first security investigation, when she became State Department spokeswoman in 2017, the officials said. The investigation process for a Senate-confirmed position is more rigorous and a U.N. ambassador needs a higher level of clearance, they said.

The mere fact that Nauert's paperwork had never been produced for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was already causing frustration and suspicion on Capitol Hill. Just hours before Nauert's announcement, Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., the Foreign Relations Committee's ranking Democrat, told me in an interview that Nauert's nomination was delayed due to a vetting problem.

"There clearly is a problem when you don't send her paperwork over for a critical post," he said. "This isn't an ambassador to wherever, this is a global-stage role. And you don't go around telling the world 'this is going to be my nominee' and then never send anything over."
Menendez didn't know at that time that Nauert was about to take herself out of consideration. But he warned that Democrats were going to thoroughly vet her themselves and that he was skeptical of her qualifications for this senior diplomatic role.

"I question in the first instance . . . that she has the expertise to be United States ambassador to the United Nations," Menendez said. "Being a spokesperson is basically spinning what someone else tells you. Leading the world at the United Nations from a U.S. perspective is a totally different thing."

In her Saturday statement, Nauert said, "I am grateful to President Trump and Secretary Pompeo for the trust they placed in me for considering me for the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. However, the past two months have been grueling for my family and therefore it is in the best interest of my family that I withdraw my name from consideration. Serving in the administration for the past two years has been one of the highest honors of my life and I will always be grateful to the president, the secretary, and my colleagues at the State Department for their support."



https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/artic...s-13622908.php

Nannygate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Nannygate" is a popular term for the 1993 revelations that caused two of President Bill Clinton's choices for United States Attorney General to become derailed.

In January 1993, Clinton's nomination of corporate lawyer Zoë Baird for the position came under attack after it became known that she and her husband had broken federal law by employing two undocumented workers from Peru as a nanny and chauffeur for their young child.

They had also failed to pay Social Security taxes for the workers, the so-called "Nanny Tax", until shortly before the disclosures. While the Clinton administration thought the matter was relatively unimportant, the news elicited a firestorm of public opinion, most of it against Baird. Within eight days, her nomination lost political support in the U.S. Congress and was withdrawn.

The following month, Clinton's choice of federal judge Kimba Wood for the job was leaked to the press, but within a day it became known that she too had employed an undocumented immigrant to look after her child. Although Wood had done so at a time when this was legal, and had paid Social Security taxes for the worker, the disclosures were enough to cause the immediate withdrawal of Wood from consideration.

The Clinton administration then said that the hiring practices for household help would be examined for all of the more than thousand presidential appointments under consideration, causing the whole process to slow down significantly.

Determined to choose a woman for the Attorney General post, Clinton finally selected state prosecutor Janet Reno, who was confirmed and served through all eight years of the administration.

The Nannygate matter caused wealthy Americans to ask each other if they too had a "Zoë Baird problem", as the hiring of undocumented workers and the paying of household help off the books were both commonplace. Two fault lines, gender and class, were exposed in the discussion over Nannygate: in the former, a double standard was seen wherein female appointees faced a greater risk of being questioned and disqualified based upon their childcare arrangements, while in the latter, affluent professional women who could afford live-in childcare arrangements were seen as trying to get away with an illegal act.

Nannygate-type controversies have subsequently affected other political appointees both in the U.S. and in other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nannygate