One well-respected expert at a conservative think tank tells National Review that neither she nor her co-workers had heard of most of the names on the list. But she did know Schmitz. “He’s just a nut,” she says, requesting anonymity in order to speak freely. “I mean, he’s just widely held in contempt throughout Washington. And he was held in contempt when he was at DOD.”

She details an apparent obsession Schmitz has with Baron von Steuben, a Prussian noble and founder of the modern office of inspector general. Schmitz once replaced all inspector-general seals in his offices with the Steuben family motto, and in 2005 he tried to use taxpayer dollars to attend a ceremony honoring the baron in Potsdam, Germany. She says that’s part of a strange preoccupation his family has with all things German. “They’re obsessed with Germany in a way that’s really unhealthy,” she says. “His father was a member of the John Birch Society. There’s just a lot of weirdness there.”

As an afterthought, she adds: “He’s also not a foreign-policy expert by any standard — doesn’t really know anything about foreign policy. Previously, he was in the field of aviation law. The whole thing is just bizarro.”