She had a choice. Fire them and give the position to their friends but that looked bad. So instead sh accuses them of embezzlement to provide herself political cover.
She could have had them just re-assigned to another or a dummy job.
11 posted on 06/04/2016 9:34:22 AM PDT by lepton
("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into"--Jonathan Swift)