Zinke Has Special Secretarial Flag Hoisted When He's in the Office

Interior Department chief Ryan Zinke has a special secretarial flag hoisted when he enters the office, in an effort to promote transparency, The Washington Post reported.

It's an arcane military ritual that is unprecedented within the federal government, the Post reports.

However, Zinke's office says it sends an important message to the American people from their Interior leader, a former Navy SEAL commander.

"Ryan Zinke is proud and honored to lead the Department of the Interior, and is restoring honor and tradition to the department, whether it's flying the flag when he is in garrison or restoring traditional access to public lands," press secretary Heather Swift told the Post in an email.

It's also attracting more attention and scorn to Zinke, who's under investigation for his travels on private federal aircraft for official and unofficial business; he's used the private fleet for fundraising stops while toting his wife with him.

"We're talking about Cabinet members and federal buildings, not the Queen of England and Buckingham Palace," Chris Lu, deputy labor secretary in the Obama administration, told the Post. "If we had a secretarial flag at the Obama Labor Department, we never bothered to locate it or use it."

MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough on Friday criticized Zinke for flaunting his "self-importance."

"Here you have Ryan Zinke now acting like the Queen of England, hoisting a flag whenever he's in," Scarborough said on his show. "This self-importance, and sort of this lurch toward tiny dictators, these tiny autocrats. This is Trump's Washington."

The flag — "a blue banner emblazoned with the agency's bison seal flanked by seven white stars representing the Interior bureaus" — gets taken down when Zinke leaves the office, the Post reports.

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