For signs of ideological deviation

The Trump people have planted an agent in the State Department to vet people for Loyalty to Trump.

A senior advisor to the State Department appointed just two months ago has been quietly vetting career diplomats and American employees of international institutions to determine whether they are loyal to President Donald Trump and his political agenda, according to nearly a dozen current and former U.S. officials.

Of course loyalty to a particular president is not supposed to be a criterion for career diplomats, in fact it’s decidedly supposed not to be, but hey, the rules don’t apply when Trump is emperor.

Mari Stull, a former food and beverage lobbyist-turned-wine blogger under the name “Vino Vixen,” has reviewed the social media pages of State Department staffers for signs of ideological deviation. She has researched the names of government officials to determine whether they signed off on Obama-era policies — though signing off does not mean officials personally endorsed them but merely cleared them through the bureaucratic chain. And she has inquired about Americans employed by international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations, asking their colleagues when they were hired and by whom, according [to] the officials.

Are you now or have you ever been disloyal to Our Divine Leader?

Stull also requires that every directive issued by the office be reviewed by her first, causing a bureaucratic bottleneck and even stalling issues that appear to be priorities of the White House.

According to two officials, she has stripped all references to “international law” and “international order” from action items and memos coming from the international organization bureau.

Ah here we go again – just a few days ago Trump people were sneering at the “rules-based international order” in connection with the G7 meeting. They’re all authoritarians all the way down. There are no rules, there is only the will of the führer.

Stull was largely unknown in diplomatic circles in Washington until her appointment in April. Her bio cites her work as a lobbyist in the food and beverage industry, which included work for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. More recently, she served as a senior fellow at American Opportunity, a Virginia-based conservative group affiliated with former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.

She also previously worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization as a partnerships and outreach advisor. But several diplomatic sources said that she left the organization on contentious terms.

Stull’s conservative politics can be gleaned from her decade-old wine blog, where one trip to the wine store for bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne became a vehicle for knocking former President Jimmy Carter and promoting the expansion of oil drilling sites in the United States.

On her Twitter feed, Stull has criticized the U.N. as “bloated” and “biased,” dismissed the U.N. Human Rights Council as an “abject failure,” and derided UNESCO, the organization that supports international education, culture, and history, as the U.N.’s “seedy underbelly.”

So no wonder the emperor’s people hired her for the State Department.

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