Have you ever heard of promoting your problem? Jay Inslee, governor ecology, of Washington has. It seems it is the Democrat way. Follow along and let’s see if we can explain it for you.
President Biden has made his selection to oversee the federal unemployment benefits. The benefits are part of the president’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief proposal. So who is she? What are her qualifications? What is her work history? Is this a patronage appointment?
Early life and education
Her name is Suzi LeVine. Suzan Gail LeVine was born November 17, 1969. LeVine was born near Philadelphia and grew up in Ventnor, New Jersey. She did her undergrad at Brown. Levine has a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a B.A. in English. She also has an Honorary Degree from EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
Work history
Levine started in technology with college summer internships at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon’s Data Storage System’s Center. Her first full time job was working on operating systems at Microsoft. There she worked on MS-DOS. Then she was part of the launch of Windows 95.
She ran communications for the Expedia IPO staying with Expedia until 2005. She was VP of Sales & Marketing in the Luxury Travel Division. In 2009, she went back to Microsoft where her focus was on education until 2012. Perhaps more importantly she was a prolific fundraiser for Obama-Biden 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
She became the United States Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein on May 30, 2014. She resigned her post in Bern on January 20, 2017. In July 2018, she joined Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s cabinet. She became Commissioner of the Employment Security Department (ESD).
Bloomberg Law reports Washington state ESD Commissioner Suzi LeVine has begun her job as “interim political head of the Employment and Training Administration.” This is the federal workforce agency helping oversee unemployment benefits in the coronavirus relief bills.
Washington State ESD…
The Federalist reports, LeVine’s history in Washington state make her ill-suited for the position. Consider this; her department in Washington State, a state with a population of about 7.7 million people, lost $600 million in coronavirus relief funds. Where did it go? To a long known Nigerian fraud group known as “Scattered Canary.”
According to the U.S. Secret Service, Washington was the primary target state of the ‘… Nigerian fraud ring exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to commit large-scale fraud against state unemployment insurance programs.’
The group, which historically targeted other American aid funds such as for students, Social Security, and disaster relief, used information from other breaches in Washington to create bogus joblessness claims and hike up the system’s number of claims,” the Federalist reported.
“Under LeVine, ESD, overwhelmed with a sudden and ‘unusual’ surge in state requests for financial help despite the falling national number, quickly pushed through the payouts for the claims, intentionally and knowingly skipping the identity verification processes that usually occurs during an unemployment payout ‘waiting week.’
As a result, LeVine later reluctantly admitted the fraud and temporarily suspended all benefit payments for a couple of days, completely cutting off legitimate claimants as the department and law enforcement began the financial cleanup and attempted recovery from the bogus claims.”
The cleanup
Washington conducted five audits of the missing funds. The first finding that a software liability allowed Scattered Canary to fraudulently claim hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid. Washington was able to recover $357 million of what was lost. This left $243 million missing from the fund. LeVine also had to announce that other fraudsters took $1.6 million in state aid.
Not only was LeVine the head of the department when these failures occurred, she allegedly tried to interfere with the audits. The Seattle Times reported that State Auditor Pat McCarthy said LeVine imposed “significant constraints” on her attempts to audit the ESD.
McCarthy said LeVine tried to limit “interviews with key ESD employees and delay[ed] access to important documents.” McCarthy eventually had to threaten to report LeVine’s “management interference” if she was not able to conclude her audit.
Conclusion
LeVine did not face firing for the scandal. That is on Jay Inslee. Instead she is being receiving a promotion, a position, possibly temporary, in the Biden administration. The strategy is promoting your problem.
Note: LeVine made donations of “hundreds of thousands of dollars to Biden’s 2020 campaign and other ‘Democratic causes.’ She was as a deputy national finance chair for the Democratic National Committee with her husband in 2017,” according to the Federalist.
