Harold Geisel, the temporary inspector general of the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s tenure, sought to keep early drafts of a controversial watchdog report under wraps in federal court.
Geisel also invoked an executive privilege in an attempt to protect the drafts from prying eyes, after it became clear watchdogs had gotten a hold of them.
“The use of this information and potentially identifying the source of this information for an unauthorized purpose can seriously damage the OIG’s credibility and independence,” Geisel argued in an affidavit filed June 2013 and obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Geisel claimed the records should be withheld under the Privacy Act and demanded they be returned to the State Department in June 2013.
Sixteen days after he filed the demand in federal court, Geisel was replaced by Steven Linick. The Senate confirmed Linick in September of 2013.
The drafts in question showed the inspector general’s office had removed damaging findings about high-level interference at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which is tasked with investigating allegations of misconduct among diplomatic officials.
Deleted findings that appear in the drafts, but not the final report, suggested State Department officials had at times blocked investigations that might have embarrassed ambassadors or other “rising stars” in the agency.
The inspector general has refused to answer questions about why the passages were eliminated.
Geisel cited “attorney-client privilege” as another reason the documents should remain in the government’s hands.
The records contained a “frank and honest discussion of legal and oversight matters,” Geisel said. He pointed to the deliberative process exemption, which protects from disclosure documents that are created during the government’s decision-making process.
The exemption was designed to “preserve the quality of agency decisions,” according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Richard Higbie, a senior investigator at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security who was involved in the legal battle to obtain the drafts, said the court ultimately threw the case out on summary judgement.
Michael Smallberg, an investigator at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, said the temptation to withhold potentially damaging information from public reports may be “exacerbated” by temporary inspectors general who are hoping to snag the permanent job.
“If you talk to IGs, many of them will tell you they have to perform a delicate balancing act because they report to both Congress and agency heads,” Smallberg said.
Watchdogs are sometimes cautious about putting forward bold findings due to the risk of losing credibility if those findings contain factual errors, he noted.
But inspectors general also risk “going too far in the other direction” by withholding information excessively and creating the impression that they’re covering up for the agency, Smallberg said.
He pointed to several prominent examples of such self-censorship among acting inspectors general.
In June 2013, POGO released a draft version of a Pentagon inspector general report that revealed former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had leaked classified information to the makers of the film “Zero Dark Thirty.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Defense inspector general said at the time the report had not been released nearly two years after it was initiated because it was “not yet completed.”
Lynne Halbrooks was then serving as acting inspector general for the Pentagon.
The acting inspector general at the U.S. Agency for International Development — an arm of the State Department — withdrew his name from consideration for the permanent inspector general position in October of last year after whistleblowers told the Washington Post he had edited unflattering details out of several public reports.
One report had criticized USAID’s decision, under Clinton’s leadership, to pay the Egyptian government $4.6 million in exchange for the release of 16 American aid workers from prisons in that country. The son of then-Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood was among the rescued workers who had been dispatched to Egypt by USAID.
No mention of the controversial payment survived in the final report.
The Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general has also been accused of cutting critical information from final reports.
Robert Griffin, the acting inspector general at the VA, allegedly sanitized information in a report that suggested dozens of veterans had died waiting for appointments that were masked by phony patient records, the Examiner reported in November.
Griffin is presently the VA’s interim watchdog.
He was previously the head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security at the State Department — the same bureau that was the subject of Geisel’s airbrushed inspection under Clinton.
Griffin was ousted in 2007 due to his failure to oversee the Blackwater security contract in Iraq, the Examiner reported in April. Blackwater security contractors killed 14 Iraqi citizens and participated in 17 additional shootings.
