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This Trump Appointee Reportedly Keeps A List Of Which Officials Are Loyal To POTUS

by Seth Millstein
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News/Getty Images

In the three months since becoming an adviser at the State Department, Donald Trump appointee Mari Stull made a "loyalty list" of government employees, Foreign Policy reported on Wednesday. According to the report, it's an an attempt to track who personally supports President Trump, and who doesn't.

Stull has reportedly been combing through social media profiles and other records to gather "intel" on the political leanings of Americans who work in the government and at international organizations, such as the United Nations.

It's unclear whether Stull, a former lobbyist and wine blogger, was directed to do this any of this by a higher authority or if she's doing it independently. It's also unclear whether the head of the state department, Mike Pompeo, is aware of her actions. Bustle has reached out to the White House for comment on the report.

Nearly a dozen sources confirmed the claims to Foreign Policy. One of them said that Stull, a senior advisor to the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, is "actively making lists and gathering intel," while another told the magazine that she's "gunning for American citizens in the U.N. to see if they are toeing the line." Sources told Foreign Policy that Stull has also blocked certain employees from meetings with their foreign counterparts and refused to brief them on the outcomes of those meetings.

According to Foreign Policy, Stull's research hasn't been limited to social media profiles. She's also reportedly been investigating individual government officials' records to determine who hired them, when they were hired, and whether they signed off on Obama-era policies. As a matter of fact, many bureaucrats give the green light to policies that they don't personally agree with, as that's the nature of working in government.

The allegations come three months after a whistleblower accused employees at the State Department and the White House of trying to oust civil servants who aren't personally pro-Trump. An Iran expert at the State Department named Sahar Nowrouzzadeh was reportedly targeted by Trump appointees, with White House Liason to the State Department Julia Haller warning colleagues that Nowrouzzadeh was "born in Iran" (she wasn't) and claiming that she "cried when the president won." House Democrats have requested documents from the White House and State Department regarding the alleged purge.

According to Foreign Policy, Stull tweeted after her appointment that the "Global swamp will be drained." However, she has since made her Twitter account private, so her tweets aren't available to the public. Her Instagram account is also private.

In addition to tracking the political loyalties of government employees, Stull has also reportedly alienated colleagues with her general management style. According to Foreign Policy, she requires that all directives from her office be approved by her first, creating a "bureaucratic bottleneck" at the agency, and stripped removed all references to “international law” and “international order” from action items and memos coming from her bureau.

“I don’t know if she thinks international law doesn’t exist if they just take out any reference to it, but that’s not really how things work,” one official told Foreign Policy. “I have in my entire federal career never experienced anything at this level of chaos and dysfunction.”

As a result of Stull's management, three State Department employees have decided to either leave the agency or transfer departments in response to Stull's management style. They are Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State Molly Phee, Erin Barclay, and Nerissa Cook, according to the publication

However, Foreign Policy also reports that Stull enjoys the support of her superior, Assistant Secretary of State For International Organizational Affairs Kevin Moley. As such, it's unlikely that she'll be going anywhere any time soon.