State Department officials blocked investigations into potentially embarrassing allegations of misconduct from agency investigators and even inspector general staff during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
A former official in the State Department inspector general’s office who was involved with preparing the sanitized report said agency officials also interfered in probes originating in the Office of the Inspector General.
The suggestions of political interference into investigations conducted at the bureau of diplomatic security first appeared in an inspector general report published in February 2013, just as Clinton was leaving the State Department. A Washington Examiner review of earlier drafts of that report suggested potentially damaging passages were removed from the final document. But the State Department official suggests the intervention went further.
The official, who requested anonymity, said the Bureau of Diplomatic Security initially prevented inspectors from reviewing open case files when they began their probe in late 2012.
High-level officials in the inspector general’s office soon informed inspectors they would not be permitted to review closed cases either, said the former Office of the Inspector General employee.
That forced inspectors to base the entirety of their report off interviews with investigators at the bureau of diplomatic security rather than a review of documents.
An inspector general memo dated October 23, 2012, and shared with the Examiner reveals eight cases the former watchdog official said were the “most egregious” of the investigations that were stymied by agency staff. The official said there were a number of other probes that were met with interference that were not added to the memo.
Detailed notes obtained by the Examiner from more than a dozen interviews of diplomatic security officials that were conducted during the inspection reveal a number of investigators expressed frustration with the limits higher-ups placed on their investigative process.
The eight cases mentioned in the memo included an incident in which at least five members of Clinton’s security detail allegedly solicited prostitutes in a number of countries while on official travel, including on trips to Russia and Colombia. A diplomatic security guard was permitted to continue overseeing Clinton’s security operations at a Moscow hotel after allegedly soliciting prostitutes “despite obvious counterintelligence questions,” the memo said.
A top official in the bureau of diplomatic security “reportedly told [an investigator] to shut down the four investigations” into the accused security guards, three of whom received one-day suspensions before being transferred to other assignments.
At the time of the watchdog’s probe, the Office of the Inspector General had sat empty for more than four years. Harold Geisel had served as the acting inspector general since January 2008, and he continued to serve in an interim capacity until he was replaced by Steven Linick in June 2013.
Another case cited in the inspector general memo focused on a regional security officer in Beirut who was “alleged to have engaged in sexual assaults against embassy local guard force (LGF) members.”
“Reportedly he previously engaged in similar assaults during assignments in Baghdad, and possibly Khartoum and Monrovia,” the memo continued.
Yet an agency official called the investigation into the accused officer a “witch hunt” and allowed investigators just three days to look into the sexual assault charges.
Linick published a subsequent inspection of the eight cases in October of last year in the wake of widespread speculation that several of the investigations had been hampered by political appointees.
Linick’s team discovered the regional security officer in Beirut “had a long history of similar misconduct allegations dating back 10 years at seven other posts where he worked,” the report said.
Investigators in the diplomatic security bureau “encountered resistance” from unnamed senior State Department officials when they attempted to investigate the accused officer, according to the report.
Diplomatic security investigators were instructed to interview a “friend” of the accused who had been in charge of placing the regional security officer in his position, Linick’s team found.
Investigators told the inspector general that the unnamed friend “acted in a manner the agents believed was meant to intimidate them.”
The watchdog concluded there had been “undue influence and favoritism” in the Beirut case, as well as two others.
In another case, an ambassador in Belgium was accused in May 2011 of “ditch[ing] his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” according to the internal memo prepared by the inspector general under Geisel.
The follow-up inspector general review found a number of flaws in the subsequent probe of the Belgian ambassador.
“[Diplomatic security] assigned an agent from its internal investigations unit to conduct a preliminary inquiry. However, two days later, the agent was directed to stop further inquiry because of a decision by senior department officials to treat the matter as a ‘management issue,'” the Linick report said.
“The ambassador was recalled to Washington and, in June 2011, met with the undersecretary of state for management and the then chief of staff and counselor to the secretary of state. At the meeting, the ambassador denied the allegations and was then permitted to return to post,” the report continued. “The department took no further action affecting the ambassador.”
The undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, has fallen under scrutiny in recent weeks as the extent of his ties to Clinton have come to light through a series of critical media reports and the release of a cache of Clinton’s private emails.
Kennedy told the watchdog he didn’t pursue a criminal investigation into the ambassador’s conduct because “solicitation of a prostitute…was not a crime in the host country,” according to the report.
The inspector general found investigators had interviewed just one of the ambassador’s security guards. The bureau of diplomatic security had never actually interviewed the ambassador and “did not follow its usual investigative protocol of assigning an investigative case number to the matter or opening and keeping investigative case files.”
Notes from a May 1 meeting between Oversight Committee staff, Richard Higbie, a senior criminal investigator at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and another whistleblower who requested anonymity reveal claims that a third whistleblower, who has also asked not to be named, was physically walked out of the building after uncovering evidence in what was then a burgeoning investigation into Huma Abedin’s dual employment and use of a private email server.
Higbie said the third whistleblower “had developed grave concerns that very high level cases he had investigated were shut down by Geisel.”
Both Higbie and the former inspector general official said Geisel and Kennedy had a personal relationship and interacted frequently.
Higbie suggested Geisel was subjected to influence from Kennedy, who remains at the State Department as undersecretary for management.
