Lori Chavez-DeRemer, as Donald Trump’s now-former secretary of labor, had no use for narrow job descriptions when you are serving American workers. The mission came first.
Take her office staff. Lori understood it was critical to free up her valuable time. So she assigned staff to drive a department car to her house in the middle of the workday to hang her laundry, organize her shoes and purses, and most importantly, fetch her wine.
As a good boss, Lori knew how to unwind with the team, so she and her top aides would have a taste in her study during office hours. Staffers who declined got teased. Really, nobody likes a buzzkill.
Yet not everyone appreciated the team-building. More than three dozen witnesses called the office environment “toxic, intimidating and humiliating.” You know the type.
Lori had no use for whiners. Or for security agents who were “too old,” “physically unfit” or “overly rule-bound.” Good thing there was one who was reliable.
He ran her detail, and the two got, well, close. Close enough to spend parts of nights in each other’s hotel rooms, the inspector general found. Nothing romantic. Just round-the-clock protection.
On a personal trip home to Oregon, Lori asked for an “off-the-record” stop at a club featuring “partially nude dancers.” She pulled cash from her purse and told her driver, a junior agent, to tip a performer. He balked. Overly rule-bound, clearly. So his boss—Lori’s close bud—ordered him to comply, and the driver reluctantly dropped the bills, one by one, onto the woman.
Lori also reportedly told female staffers to “pay attention” to her husband, Shawn. He was already paying plenty to them. At least two accused him of unwanted sexual advances, and he got banned from Labor Department headquarters. (Prosecutors passed on charges.)
Lori believed in work-life balance too. Heavy on the life, and on the taxpayers’ tab. Her “America at Work” tour hit Las Vegas five times, with some trips logging under two hours of work. And during the shutdown, with federal workers going unpaid, she spent three nights at a $529-a-night Palm Beach spa for a gala at Mar-a-Lago. The trip was personal—until a meeting was cleverly tacked on and it went on the government’s dime.
Lori retired from left public service right before the IG came to interview her. Now, she’s fighting for workers’ rights with a PAC she founded to elect a “pro-worker Republican coalition,” guided by “the policy approach of Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Donald Trump.”
The mission comes first.
