Kirk Lippold

Author of Front Burner: Al Qaeda's Attack on the USS Cole | '81 US Naval Academy Grad | USS Cole CO when attacked in 2000 | Private Pilot

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@cdrsalamander The U.S. Navy can’t have a useable sail ship, but the Admirals can certainly have their barges! They are a waste of resources.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

Iran must learn the price of terrorism and their continued violations of international law in the SOH. It’s time to finish this.

[Real America's Voice (RAV) @RealAmVoice]

U.S. SPREADS DESTRUCTION ACROSS IRAN

@KirkLippold argued President Trump concluded Iran repeatedly violated past agreements and that "time only benefits Iran." Expanding strikes on command, logistics, and infrastructure also sends a warning to China over its support.

@stinchfield1776

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@libsoftiktok General Court Martial. Sentence: Reduction in rank, fine, Dishonorable discharge. This is a litmus test for the moral and ethical courage of USAF and DoW leadership.

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@JackCarrUSA The stuff dreams and memories of a lifetime are made of. Wow!

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@cdrsalamander Big time!

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@cdrsalamander @ChuckDeVore Sympathy meter doesn’t move off the left-hand peg. Gaza’s citizens chose to tolerate, then align themselves with Hamas. Their moral and ethical failures are what brought this about.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@pdoocy Congratulations, @pdoocy!

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

An extended interview that covered a lot of issues surrounding the current status of the ceasefire and long-term strategic goals for the U.S., and quite frankly, the world.

[Al Arabiya English @AlArabiya_Eng]

“The United States is LOCKED and LOADED.”

Former USS Cole Commanding Officer Kirk Lippold warns the US is prepared for a “very robust response” if Iran refuses to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

@KirkLippold

[Daniel Hoffman @danielhoffmanDC]

Joining @foxnews at 2:00 pm with @RLHeinrichs and @KirkLippold
With heartfelt thanks to the Tyson’s CrossFit team for inviting me to join them in the Murph workout”body armor” workout. Honoring the fallen with challenge, purpose, and community.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

Spot on analysis. I would add that how the US handles Iran is being scrutinized by China. Their strategic visions of expansion are just as brutal. China is enabling Iran and also contributing to the deaths of Americans. China is an enemy.

[Dan Crenshaw @DanCrenshawTX]

The Iranian regime would love nothing more than for Congress to tie the President’s hands in the middle of a crisis. That’s exactly what the Iran War Powers Resolution would do.

Iran has spent decades funding terrorist proxies, murdering Americans, attacking our allies, targeting commercial shipping, and openly chanting “Death to America.” Now some in Congress want to advertise to that regime that they must pre-approve every possible military response.

That’s not restraint. That’s strategic stupidity.

No one is calling for another Iraq War. But removing credible deterrence from the Commander in Chief in the middle of an escalating conflict only emboldens the regime in Tehran and the terrorists they bankroll.

Peace through strength still matters. Weakness gets people killed.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@cdrsalamander Stasi. 100% pure Stasi. Her roots run wide and deep. Beware the Trojan horses who speak of saving democracy here at home. Their motives are just as suspect.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@johnkonrad @sethmoulton @HungCao_VA Some people never learned manners from their mother.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@cdrsalamander While ADM Cooper’s awards may seem excessive, he did not earn any of them alone. Like all of us who serve, those ribbons are a testament to those who guided, mentored, and served with us to make us better servant leaders. He should proudly wear his full rack.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@LaurieJone39243 @RealAmVoice It is indeed!

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@johnkonrad @timkaine @HungCao_VA This interaction should tell you everything you need to know about why some people are too ill-informed to understand national security and should never be elected into positions of responsibility.

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@cdrsalamander Between this midair and a previous Thunderbird crash, I’m not Mountain Home is a good place to watch an air show . . .

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

@johnkonrad Learning is a must-do skill. It takes practice and failure to get better and master hard (and even simple) skills.

Go learn to use a shovel, twist a screwdriver, or operate a hand tool. You will be wiser and better prepared for life because of your effort.

[Al Arabiya English @AlArabiya_Eng]

Former Commanding Officer of USS Cole Kirk Lippold responds to whether Iran controls the global economy through the Strait of Hormuz amid rising oil disruptions.

#Iran #StraitOfHormuz #Trump @KirkLippold

[Kirk Lippold @KirkLippold]

Great questions during my interview on @AlArabiya_Eng

[Al Arabiya English @AlArabiya_Eng]

Former Commanding Officer of USS Cole Kirk Lippold weighs in on whether Iran is bluffing about further escalation as tensions rise in the Strait of Hormuz.

#Iran #StraitOfHormuz #US @KirkLippold