The Political Chase

State Dept. Corrupt Too

Bush and Cheney make Nixon look like a saint. We can now officially add the State Department to the list of Bush-Cheney Administration Scandals and Corruption.

In similar fashion to the Justice Department, where Alberto Gonzales was the chief law enforcement officer, the State Department’s Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard, “has repeatedly thwarted investigations and censored reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration,” according to charges made by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). Waxman is Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government.

Waxman sent a scathing 14-page letter (pdf) to Krongard, detailing the charges against him. The Oversight Committee published a summary of the letter on its Web site:

Since your testimony at the Committee’s hearing on July 26, 2007, current and former employees of the Office of Inspector General have contacted my staff with allegations that you interfered with on-going investigations to protect the State Department and the White House from political embarrassment…

The allegations made by these officials are not limited to a single unit or project within your office. Instead, they span all three major divisions of the Office of Inspector General — investigations, audits, and inspections. The allegations were made by employees of varied rank, ranging from line staff to upper management…

Some of the specific allegations include the following:

• Although the State Department has expended over $3.6 billion on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, you refused to send any investigators to those countries to pursue investigations into wasteful spending or procurement fraud and have concluded no fraud investigations relating to the contracts.
• You prevented your investigators from cooperating with a Justice Department investigation into waste, fraud, and abuse relating to the new U.S. Embassy in Iraq and followed highly irregular procedures in exonerating the prime contractor, First Kuwaiti Trading Company, of charges of labor trafficking.
• You prevented your investigators from seizing evidence that they believed would have implicated a large State Department contractor in procurement fraud in Afghanistan.
• You impeded efforts by your investigators to cooperate with a Justice Department probe into allegations that a large private security contractor was smuggling weapons into Iraq.
• You interfered with an on-going investigation into the conduct of Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of Voice of America and a close associate of Karl Rove, by passing information about the inquiry to Mr. Tomlinson.
• You censored portions of inspection reports on embassies so that critical information on security vulnerabilities was dropped from classified annexes and not disclosed to Congress.
• You rejected audits of the State Department’s financial statements that documented accounting concerns and refused to publish them until points critical of the Department had been removed.

Pretty ugly, isn’t it?

The allegations are based on testimony Waxman received from seven “current and former officials on Krongard’s staff, including two former senior officials who allowed their names to be used, and private e-mail exchanges obtained by the committee.” The Post published the following exchange of emails “between staff members as they discuss Krongard’s decision not to cooperate with the Justice Department on the embassy probe.

“Wow, as we all [k]now that is not the normal and proper procedure,” an investigator wrote to Assistant IG John A. DeDona. DeDona forwarded the e-mail to the Deputy IG, William E. Todd, saying, “I have always viewed myself as a loyal soldier but hopefully you sense my frustration in my voicemail yesterday.”

Todd wrote back: “I know you are very frustrated. John, you need to convey to the troops the truth, the IG told us both Tuesday to stand down on this and not assist, that needs to be the message.”

DeDona responded: “Unfortunately, under the current regime, the view within INV [the office of investigations] is to keep working the BS cases within the beltway, and let us not rock the boat with more significant investigations.”

Waxman included a subpoena in his Hallmark Greeting Letter for various and sundry documents, letters, work product, etc.

I’m beginning to wonder if there are enough people in Congress to support the number of investigations required to review the Bush administration’s massive corruption that went unchecked for six years.