A Democratic congresswoman is calling on President Obama to remove the Department of Commerce inspector general after winding down an extensive probe of alleged corruption in the watchdog’s office.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, told the House of the results of a more than two-year bipartisan investigation into the conduct of Todd Zinser, the Commerce watchdog since 2007, in extended remarks on the House floor Thursday.
Among the “overwhelming evidence” she cited against him were instances of nepotism, cover-ups of fraud in his agency and even an after-hours attempt to conceal the paper trail by carting off boxes of potentially incriminating documents.
Zinser has weathered a barrage of criticism during his decades in government, repeatedly fending off allegations that he has punished whistleblowers in his own office and shielded favored employees from consequences when they broke agency rules.
The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology began its review of Zinser’s activities during the 113th Congress by interviewing more than 70 officials who have worked with Zinser, most of them former Commerce inspector general staff, and reviewing thousands of documents.
Congressional investigators had to dig through the 17 boxes of “wildly unresponsive” documents Zinser provided to the committee in order to reach the less than two boxes of relevant materials he submitted.
Johnson noted the investigation into the Commerce inspector general’s conduct resulted from revelations in 2012 that Zinser had willfully ignored a years-long accounting scheme at the National Weather Service, a government agency under his oversight authority.
“Let me be clear: Mr. Zinser came to our attention because of Mr. Zinser’s own misconduct,” Johnson said. “We know from sources on other committees, as well as correspondence he has sent, that he has tried to explain away our interest in his conduct as the result of former IG staff with an ax to grind coming to us with false stories, or even that my own committee staff are personally hostile to Mr. Zinser.”
She outlined what she described as a pattern of favoritism that has colored much of Zinser’s time in the office. For example, he secured an internship for his son’s friend and even pushed senior staff to give him security credentials. The friend was later hired on Zinbser’s staff as a full-time employee.
In 2010, Zinser hired a woman who was widely believed to be his girlfriend. The woman had compiled “significant conduct problems” in another Commerce office and was on the verge of being removed by her supervisors from eligibility for the Senior Executive Service program, the highest level of career executive jobs in the federal civil service.
Zinser touched off a “frantic push” to have the woman transferred to his office before she was stripped of her SES eligibility, although he never contacted her former bosses to inquire why she was being plucked from the program.
Just five weeks later, Zinser promoted the unnamed woman to a senior position in his office, one that afforded her a $150,000 salary, and approved three SES performance bonuses for her totaling more than $28,000 by October 2012.
In response to an inquiry by the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Effectiveness, Zinser insisted he had hired the woman to fulfill a business need in his office and stated his only personal relation to her stemmed from the two of them being ”avid long distance runners and trained together on a fairly regular basis.”
“The combination of misleading claims Mr. Zinser made to CIGIE regarding both his relationship with the close friend he hired and the ‘business’ necessity of hiring her into his office appears to be an intentionally false narrative spun by Mr. Zinser to cover up his own unethical behavior,” Johnson said.
Zinser’s limited oversight successes crumbled under Congress’ scrutiny, according to Johnson.
The Texas Democrat pointed to the discrepancy between a July 2014 inspector general report finding rampant abuse of the Patent and Trademark Office’s time and attendance policies and an earlier report from the same office that praised the patent agency for its “great success.”
“It is difficult to know how auditors from the IG’s office could have so completely missed the signs of waste, fraud and abuse that have now been widely identified in this program,” Johnson said.
The patent office’s abuse-riddled telework program drew the ire of Congress last year and prompted a rare joint hearing of the Oversight Committee and House Judiciary Committee.
Johnson’s congressional probe also sought information about multiple whistleblower retaliation cases that had gone before the Office of Special Counsel.
In one case, the main executioner of the retaliation was, ironically, the inspector general office’s in-house “expert” on whistleblower protection.
Even after the Office of Special Counsel cleared targeted former employees of any wrongdoing that could have warranted the retaliation against them in 2013, Zinser continued to defend their supervisors’ behavior by repeating the original allegations against them in response to congressional demands that the offenders be removed from senior positions.
Six days after the House Science Committee sent Zinser a letter requesting whistleblower retaliation records, the embattled watchdog was seen hauling boxes of files from his office on a holiday weekend using a hand-cart.
“Although we don’t know what was in those boxes, the timing of this removal is extremely suspicious,” Johnson said.
Johnson said Zinser was named in a whistleblower complaint to the Office of Special Counsel in 1996 when he was the deputy inspector general for investigations at the Department of Transportation.
But Zinser kept the case hidden from Congress when he was appointed to the Commerce inspector general position and confirmed by the Senate in 2007.
Johnson said Zinser and his deputy inspector general collected and saved the emails of three senior staff he viewed as enemies, including his former deputy, and sifted through the messages to find “anything he might uncover in his former deputy’s emails that Mr. Zinser might be able to use against him.”
Retaining official emails without alerting the inspector general’s chief information officer violated a policy Zinser himself established in 2012.
Zinser’s history of punishing employees who report misconduct in the watchdog office has left the staff members who spoke to congressional investigators fearing for their jobs.
“We have heard from many whistleblowers that they fear that if Mr. Zinser is not removed, there will be—in the words of more than one of these individuals—’a bloodbath’—in the office,” Johnson said.
“I believe that Mr. Zinser’s wide-ranging misconduct, supported by just a tiny coterie of current senior staff, is sufficient in and of itself to justify immediate removal,” she continued. “I intend to ask the president to do just that.”
