Charge – Trump adviser brother of teacher sex superstar mary kay letourneau downplayed holocaust
Accusations of anti-Semitism have emerged against Joseph E. Schmitz, a member of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisory team.
The allegations against Schmitz include that he downplayed the devastation of the Holocaust and dismissed Jewish employees when he was the inspector general for the Department of Defense, according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.
The allegations have surfaced because McClatchy obtained the text of a complaint filed by Daniel Meyer, a senior intelligence community official and a former employee with the Defense Department inspector general.
In the complaint, Meyer alleged that, during his tenure as inspector general from 2002 to 2005, Schmitz declared: “I fired the Jews.”
Meyer, who now manages the Obama administration’s intelligence agency whistleblower review process, also alleged that Schmitz minimized the extermination of the Holocaust during a conversation with high-ranking Defense Department official John Crane.
“In his final days, he allegedly lectured Mr. Crane on the details of concentration camps and how the ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews,” Meyer wrote in the complaint, which remains under federal review.
Crane refused comment on the allegations, but told McClatchy that he would comment if “required to testify under oath.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, did not comment directly about Schmitz but told McClatchy that he is “very worried about what” Trump “says from time to time and the nature of the people who are around him.”
Schmitz flatly denies ever uttering the remarks attributed to him.