A government watchdog whose alleged misconduct has pushed members of Congress to call for his removal has spent more than $250,000 to hire a private law firm to defend his office against what appears to be a wrongful termination case.
Todd Zinser, the Department of Commerce inspector general, was the subject of a more than two-year bipartisan investigation into allegations that he covered up findings of fraud, hired personal friends and allowed staff in his office to retaliate against whistleblowers.
According to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner, Zinser’s office has paid $250,730 to hire Gordon & Rees, a San Francisco-based law firm, to assist with “personnel matters” in the Commerce inspector general office.
The contract with Gordon & Rees was not only to acquire legal support for “a high profile litigation before the Merit Systems Protection Board involving a senior staff,” but also for “an administrative inquiry involving an employee allegedly intimidating another employee.”
A third “employee relations matter” under the firm’s purview required Gordon & Rees to help Zinser’s office prepare a draft proposal to fire an employee “for performance.”
The Commerce inspector general’s office signed a $125,365 contract with the firm on Jan. 30, seeking 500 hours of work.
On April 8, the office signed for an additional 500 hours of “employee relations” consulting work at the same price.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, ticked through a litany of ethics violations her staff had uncovered in the extensive probe of Zinser’s conduct on the House floor March 26.
Johnson asked the president to remove Zinser in a March 31 letter to the White House.
Since then, Johnson said she has personally spoken with Obama about the inspector general whose conduct she called “indefensible.”
“I had a chance to personally mention the Zinser matter to the president recently,” Johnson told the Examiner. “He indicated that he is aware of the situation and I anticipate that he will act soon.”
The White House has not yet returned a request for comment on the conversation and its intentions for Zinser.
During her floor remarks, Johnson criticized the watchdog for hiring a woman believed to be his girlfriend to a senior position that paid $150,000 in salary and lavishing $28,000 worth of bonuses on her despite her history of “serious conduct problems” at the agency.
“I was unaware at the time that Mr. Zinser was spending $250,000 of public funds for a private law firm to defend him and his office in a current case before the Merit Systems Protection Board that involves his former legal counsel,” Johnson said.
“I can understand the potential conflict of having attorneys from the IG’s Office of Counsel defend the IG against their former boss. What I can’t understand is why Mr. Zinser is not utilizing the services of another IG’s office in this regard, as he has done in the past in a previous case against his office by the Office of Special Counsel,” Johnson said.
“The IG Act specifically makes reference to utilizing the legal services of another inspector general’s office and makes no reference to spending taxpayer money on a private law firm. My understanding is the contract with the private law firm also calls for them to draft a proposal to terminate an OIG employee,” she said.
Johnson noted the Commerce inspector general office has two full-time “employee specialists” who are also attorneys.
The Commerce Office of Inspector General employs 11 human resources staff, according to a spokesman with the office.
Four of those officials were hired within the past six months, the spokesman said.
But the office still sought the services of outside attorneys to conduct personnel activities, including a review of allegations of employee intimidation and an effort to terminate a member of the staff.
“Why Mr. Zinser is also hiring a private law firm to engage in this sort of work strikes me as highly questionable,” she said, calling the contract with Gordon & Rees “entirely inappropriate.”
Clark Reid, the spokesman for the Commerce Department inspector general, said the contract with Gordon & Rees was competitively bid. The quarter-million dollar contract billed taxpayers $250 an hour for its legal assistance.
Reid noted his office is required to seek legal counsel outside of the Department of Commerce under the Inspector General Act, which permits the watchdog to contract such work “when it is deemed necessary.” He declined to further discuss the “on-going personnel actions.”
Zinser has faced a barrage of criticism in recent years for his involvement in a number of legal and ethical tangles, including two separate cases of whistleblower retaliation that have brought down senior members of his staff.
One such senior staff, former chief counsel to the Inspector General Wade Green, was terminated in fall of last year after the Office of Special Counsel faulted him for ensuring that a pair of whistleblowers left Zinser’s office “quietly and with no recourse to make protected disclosures about the OIG” by “coercing” them to sign non-disparagement agreements before leaving the office.
The agreements had prevented the employees from speaking to the Office of Special Counsel, Congress or members of the media about actions inspector general staff may have taken against them in retaliation for reporting misconduct within the office, a September 2013 Office of Special Counsel report found.
In a letter to members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in April 2014, Zinser said he had tapped counsel from another inspector general’s office to review the negative Office of Special Counsel report that faulted Green.
The letter shows Zinser had seen fit to rely on government counsel from another inspector general’s office to handle personnel-related issues in the past.
“I obtained the assistance of an independent counsel from another federal OIG to review the findings of OSC,” Zinser wrote in a letter that pushed back on findings that managers in his office had retaliated against the whistleblowers.
A spokesman for the SBA inspector general said the office is still in the process of getting reimbursed for the work it performed for the Commerce watchdog, which he said began in January 2013.
Zinser said in his letter the “independent counsel” ruled the two former employees in question “did not meet the requirements for whistleblower status” and noted “therefore, whistleblower retaliation did not occur.”
Kristin Alden, federal employment attorney , called the arrangement between Zinser’s office and Gordon & Rees “unusual.”
“It’s well known that Zinser has been investigated a lot,” Alden said. “For him to hire [outside counsel] when he’s been accused of all these things, that raises red flags.”
Alden noted agencies and inspectors general that hire outside legal assistance for issues such as termination are typically smaller and need to go outside their own offices because they simply don’t have the resources to handle the problem internally.
Another agency, the Chemical Safety Board, faced criticism for its use of an outside law firm to handle similar matters during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in June 2014.
Arthur Elkins, inspector general at the Environmental Protection Agency, said the former head of the Chemical Safety Board tapped an outside law firm to provide legal assistance while embroiled in an investigation over alleged whistleblower retaliation.
The EPA inspector general probe revealed board employees had used “non-governmental” email accounts to conduct government business. When investigators requested those records from the agency, they were denied based on “attorney-client privilege.”
“The claim of attorney-client privilege from a government agency is extremely limited,” said Rep. Darrel Issa, then chairman of the Oversight Committee, in the hearing last summer.
“Government and government-related documents that are in fact generated under the work of the federal government or paid for during time or with resources of the federal government are not in the ordinary course allowed to become attorney-client privilege,” the California Republican noted.
Rafael Moure-Eraso, the former director of the Chemical Safety Board, succumbed to pressure from the White House to resign in March after the 114th Congress hammered him for allegedly misrepresenting the extent of his private email use in previous hearings.
