An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right
What Happened to the Inspector General?
Has anyone seen Gerald Walpin recently? You know, I watch a lot of news, (likely far more than is good for me) but I haven’t heard a thing about this. Ok… I’ll admit that I didn’t really even know that we still had an Inspector General. After that whole Pink Panther thing, I thought he was… oh, nevermind.
Anyway, in case you hadn’t heard – and judging my the media, you probably haven’t – the Inspector General was fired. Why? Go read this and you tell me.
12 Responses to “What Happened to the Inspector General?”
I'm sorry but linking to a far right blog not known for its honesty or rgiorous reporting will not yield anything but more untruths. I'll wait until some more reliable source reports on this. And I'm not talking about Byron York, the irreputable source of this meme.
Love to see a balanced (chuckle) report?story on this.
There's more to the story, I'm sure, but here's a couple of other biases:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/1109…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/us/politics/2…
I have followed all the developments pretty carefully, because there are “layers” to this and lots of things that do not look very good in terms of both “process” and “content”. If you are truly interested, do as I did and put in a Google Alert on items containing “Gerald Walpin” and then you will get something almost every day… depending on developments.
Too much to summarize, but right now it appears to me the Administration is stonewalling; I think this will turn out be pretty messy for the powers-that-be, partially because they tangled with the wrong guy — highly respected, post retirement age, recipient of award presented by Justices Ginsburg and Stevens not that many years ago for “professionalism”, etc.
It has never smelled right to me, and the more details come out the more it seems to stink. That's my 2 cents, anyway.
So this whole affair started in 2008 under the Bush administration. So either Bush refused to fire one of “his people” for performance issues during an election year….. Or Obama is engaging in a cover-up about an investigation that started under Bush.
What the hell are you talking about?
Yes, the audit was performed in 2008 and its findings resulted in Kevin Johnson being suspended from receiving federal funds.
Why the hell would Bush have any reason to fire him for performance issues or “investigate” him for doing his job?
It was only in 2009, once it was realized the suspension would keep Sacramento out of the porkulus trough that your “performance issues” were raised.
Presidents fire IG and US attorneyswhen they say things they don't like, not for incompetence:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/24/cia.firi…
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/04/03/a-bit-too-…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/us/politics/0…
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/du…
Now if Obamama makes a habit of firing appointees when bad news happens, then go ahead and call him out. But at this time this seems to be an isolated incident…
This paragraph from the NYTimes piece caught my eye.. “Mr. Brown, the acting United States attorney, sent a complaint last April to a federal panel saying Mr. Walpin had withheld “potentially significant information at the expense of determining the truth” while conducting his investigation and publicized the case in a way that damaged the image of the AmeriCorps program (the panel later found that there was no merit to the complaint). Mr. Walpin, a holdover from the Bush administration, was fired by the Obama administration in June.”
It just seems that there were shenanigans in 2008 and that there were concerns about Walpin's report omitting important facts on the St. Hope's issue. I think when your staff raises issues there should be an investigation.
So there were questions in 2008 about Walpin which the Bush administration could have investigated and fired him (or taken whatever other steps were necessary to maintain the integrity of the office).
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/20…
[...] What Happened to the Inspector General? (themoderatevoice.com) [...]
[...] What Happened to the Inspector General? (themoderatevoice.com) [...]
Brown has since been demoted to the #3 position in that office, if I recall correctly, and I believe his allegations about Walpin were found to be baseless by a panel of reviewers. One COULD surmise that Brown was trying to score some points with the powers-that-be, and then was kicked to the curb when that effort came up dry.
I have found no evidence that Walpin was a game-playing type who would have reason to engage in shenanigans. Indeed, the more information comes out, the more it seems that Johnson had some real “problems” in terms of how things were being run, whether or not all of them were related to use of funds, though some were, for sure, even according to the aforementioned Brown, who administered the tender “wrist slap” to which Walpin objected.
This is from notes I cribbed and does provide a time line. It omits much of the background information regarding the State of California having requested the inquiry Walpin was fired over, the head of St. Hope telling of the destruction of records, Kevin Johnson's refusal to even talk with representatives of the IG office doing their investigation, the intervention of Congresswoman Matsui to make sure the Mayor's actions and problems would not result in stimulus money being held back from the City of Sacramento, the active involvement of Michelle Rhee (Johnson's fiancee and now Supt of Schools in DC) as a “fixer”, pressure from an “outside” (hired for Johnson's benefit) attorney to get people to recant statements of what had been going on at St Hope. It doesn't cover the testimony/evidence that KJ offered “hush money” (probably from government funds) to a student who had raised the issue of sexual contact by Johnson while she was working on an assignment for St Hope. It makes no mention of resignations from the St Hope organization in protest over the cover up of things they reported. It doesn't mention the shambles in which records were kept (or not) by St Hope of the money it was getting from Washington. It also doesn't mention the Acting Court of Appeals Judge Brown who was (in my opinion) trying to score points with those who could make him “permanent” by doing their bidding, which in this instance was letting this illegal mess be swept under the rug with a tender “wrist slap”. It doesn't mention, either, that Walpin's replacement as IG was ordered to shred certain documents, and 13 minutes later he replied that he had done so, because they were not supposed to be sent to him; this is not such a big deal substantively because other copies exist and have been obtained by investigators, but the readiness to destroy the documents without even KNOWING that at the time — that's material, I think.
What remains below is just the timeline with a few comments — all related to the firing itself, and not the background of Walpin's investigation of St Hope and Johnson.
June 10. Walpin was axed on the evening of June 10, when he received a call in his car (a first conversation regarding his “performance”, as far as I can tell) from Norman Eisen, the special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform, who told Walpin he had one hour either to resign or be fired.
June 10. Other than board chairman Alan Solomont, the Democratic mega-donor and Obama supporter who originally told the White House of his dissatisfaction with Walpin, “no member of the CNCS board had any substantive input about whether the removal of Gerald Walpin was appropriate,” and only one other board member, vice-chairman Stephen Goldsmith, was even called by the White House, and that was on June 10, just hours before Walpin was fired. According to the report, Goldsmith told investigators that “the White House had already decided to remove Walpin and wanted to confirm [Goldsmith's] support for the action.”
On June 11, less than 24 hours after Walpin received the call from Eisen, the board held a conference call.
June 12. Ranit Schmelzer, of the Corp for Nat & Community Service press office, sent an email to board members giving them talking points to use if contacted by reporters seeking information about the matter.
On June 13, after having instructed board members that the correct answer was to express support for the firing, the White House, for the first time, solicited the members' actual views on the matter. In an email to the board headlined “Time-sensitive request from White House Counsel re IG matter,” corporation general counsel Frank Trinity wrote, “I was just contacted by Elana Tyrangiel, Associate Counsel to the President, seeking your assistance in responding to questions from members of Congress about President Obama's removal of Gerald Walpin as inspector general. Specifically, the White House Counsel's office would like to compile statements from board members and CNCS staff who were present at the inspector general's presentation to the board immediately before the public board meeting last month.” Trinity said each member would receive a call from White House lawyer Tyrangiel, who “will prepare statements for your review for accuracy.”
June 18. The White House and top management of the corporation had struggled to keep their story straight. By June 18, a week after the firing, with news coverage dying down — it had never been very intense in the first place — they felt they had succeeded. “I understand how much work you are doing to prevent and control damage from the IG matter,” Solomont wrote in an email to Eric Tanenblatt, a board member who had talked to the press. “I want you to know how much I personally appreciate all your efforts.”
November 20. After literally months of withholding lots of documents that were needed for the Senate investigation to be thorough and fair, the White House gave the lawmakers a trove of new, previously-withheld documents on the abrupt firing. Consistent with late-Friday release of bad news, this time the new evidence was put out not only at the start of a weekend but also hours too late for inclusion in the investigative report done by the Senate.
The new documents show the White House scrambling, in the days after the controversy erupted, to put together a public explanation for the firing. Eisen told House and Senate aides that the White House conducted an “extensive review” of complaints about Walpin’s performance before deciding to dismiss him. According to the new report, Eisen told Congress that “his investigation into the merits of removing Gerald Walpin involved contacting members of the CNCS board to confirm the existence of a 'consensus' in favor of removal.” But Republican investigators later discovered that during that “extensive review,” the White House did not even seek the views of the corporation's board — the very people whose “consensus” purportedly led to Walpin's firing. To say nothing of talking with Walpin himself to see what his version of events was.
“Indicate that you support the president's decision to remove IG Walpin,” was Schmelzer's first instruction to the board. Then: “If asked why he was removed, indicate that the president lost confidence in Mr. Walpin.” And then: “If the reporter continues to press, say that you can't get into details on a personnel matter, but you understand there were some performance-based issues.” Finally, Schmelzer advised the board to avoid “getting into any specifics about IG Walpin's performance-based issues. The WH has stayed away from this and has counseled us to do the same.”
A mention of Walpin's “presentation to the board” was a reference to a May 20 board meeting that played a key part in the White House's evolving explanations for Walpin's firing. After initially explaining that President Obama no longer had the “fullest confidence” in Walpin, the White House later changed its story to say that Walpin, who was 77 years old at the time, had become “confused, disoriented [and] unable to answer questions” at the May 20 meeting. Later, the White House cited other “performance-based” issues. But Republican investigators concluded that the key motive behind the firing was unhappiness with Walpin's aggressive investigation of misuse of AmeriCorps funds by Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, California who is a prominent political ally of President Obama.
+++++Stay tuned…..