Donald Trump’s presidency has set record levels for staff turnover, with aides being driven out by an intractable boss, forced to resign due to ethical breaches, or some combination of both. And while the former scenario is impossible to prevent—Trump’s personality and leadership style haven’t changed in 50 years—the latter could easily have been avoided, if the Trump transition team had done its job. A trove of nearly 100 documents from the transition’s vetting process sheds some light on why so many unsavory characters have slipped through the cracks. According to Axios, much of the vetting was foisted onto Republican National Committee researchers, who apparently performed only a cursory headline search before signing off on a name.

Traditionally any potential candidate for an appointment goes through a three-part gauntlet: an FBI background check, a “scrub” of their finances by the Office of Government Ethics, and the transition team’s own “deep dive,” often led by seasoned lawyers. However, sources on the RNC vetting team told Axios that in many cases, their preliminary sweep of the public record “was the only substantial vetting in Trump’s possession when he announced his picks.” That led to the botched selection of people like Andrew Puzder, whose nomination to labor secretary tanked after he was slammed for hiring an undocumented immigrant housekeeper, questionable business practices, and alleged spousal abuse. (His ex-wife rescinded her claims.) Though neither is mentioned in the document trove, the process also presumably failed in the cases of former White House aide Rob Porter and former acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, both of whom were accused of domestic abuse. (Both deny the claims.)

The RNC report did raise several red flags that Trump ultimately ignored, such as former State Secretary Rex Tillerson’s extensive ties to Russia; former Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price’s lack of “management ability”; and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s “business conflicts of interest.” All three eventually got jobs in the administration, and Price and former interior secretary Ryan Zinke were ousted for ethics violations that were predicted in the vetting files: Price for questionable use of chartered jets, and Zinke for shady real estate transactions and ethics abuses. The document for Kris Kobach, who’s currently in the running to fill the vacant top spot at the Department of Homeland Security, listed “white supremacy” as a potential liability, citing claims that Kobach has ties to white nationalist groups.

The slapdash nature of the process set the tone for the rest of the Trump administration’s staffing drama, filled with glaring and easily avoidable missteps. Chris Christie, who had been in charge of the transition before Jared Kushner reportedly maneuvered him out, highlighted the absurdity of the process when Axios gave him a copy of his own vetting file. “The interesting part of this, which shows you how disorganized they were, was they had an entire vice presidential vetting file on me [from the campaign],” he said, referring to the period when Trump was reportedly considering him as a running mate. “[They] had all of my tax returns, had all of the stuff from the U.S. attorney years and my years as governor. That’s what makes this even funnier, that they would go through this.”

Perhaps most telling is the order in which the RNC listed these “red flags”: potential ethics entanglements second, instances in which nominees had criticized Trump first. Documents for Zinke, for instance, slotted in his criticisms of Trump as “un-defendable” near an allegation that he’d misused Navy funds for personal travel. The first page of former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s vetting report covered her entire record of Trump criticism, followed by notes about whether she’d illegally lobbied for a health care organization as governor of South Carolina. Rick Perry, the vetting team noted, “described Trumpism as a ‘toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition.’” A source told Axios that in many instances, Trump “knew about the insults, and picked the insulters anyway.” With such a narrow pool of contenders in the first place, he probably didn’t have much of a choice.

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