A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to President Obama on Monday asking him to investigate the Pentagon for allegedly misleading Congress to prevent the passage of legislation to change how sexual assaults are handled in the military.
This year, investigations by the Associated Press and Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group, found that the Defense Department intentionally misled Congress on how often the military prosecutes sexual assaults compared to civilian courts, in order to encourage lawmakers to vote down a proposal to take prosecution decisions out of the chain of command.
The senators previously contacted Defense Secretary Ash Carter asking for an explanation, but were dissatisfied with Carter’s explanation that the two groups doing the investigations “simply do not understand the military justice system” and that the alleged misrepresentation is actually just “a difference in definitions.”
“We are disappointed by Secretary Carter’s letter, which demonstrates to us that the department does not seem to be taking the investigation of these allegations seriously enough,” the letter to the president said. “Given that [Protect Our Defenders] is led by a recently retired former top prosecutor from the Air Force who prosecuted dozens of his own cases and advised junior military trial counsel on countless others, DoD’s claim that his organization ‘does not understand the military justice system,’ is unfair.”
The group of nine senators called on the president to launch an independent investigation into the Pentagon, which they say is “more interested in obfuscating than in investigating the matters at hand.”
The senators who signed the letter are: Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Rand Paul, R-Ky., Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Mazie Hironi, D-Hawaii.
Gillibrand has long advocated to put prosecution decisions of sexual assault cases in the hands of military lawyers, not commanders, to avoid perceived retaliation and the danger of favoritism or readiness playing a role in the decision to move forward on a case.
The proposal has failed to pass the Senate twice. Gillibrand reintroduced the plan as the Military Justice Improvement Act last month, saying that many senators who voted against it did so based on information that has now proved inaccurate.
She has said that the plan will get a vote as an amendment to the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which the Senate is considering this week.
