Make a complaint about government employees, and you – not them –could end up as the target of a criminal probe.
That’s exactly what happened to Bessie Krone, a 62-year-old disabled widow from Montgomery, Alabama who recently received a expletive-filled letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Instead of finding out who sent her the vile letter and why, the VA’s Office of Inspector General, Division of Criminal Investigations is apparently investigating her!
Krone told me that Special Agents Humes and Hudson from Atlanta interrogated her for nearly an hour and a half at a nearby Arby’s restaurant. “A hamburger does not get as much grilling as I got today,” she told me. “They knew everything about me – how many brothers and sisters I had, when I was born, where my son lives, the number of grandkids I have, my cell phone number, when I went to the store this morning, even the exact time I called The Examiner.”
“So I told them: ‘You’ve investigated me real good. Now go investigate whoever sent that letter and leave me alone.’”
The agents kept pressing her again and again for the name of her alleged accomplice, Krone told me, but she didn’t budge. “They told me that I knew somebody in the VA who was feeding me this information and I needed to tell them who it is. If I didn’t cooperate, I could be charged with being an accessory to conspiracy. I kept telling them, ‘I do not know anybody in that VA office.’”
“They said I had a ‘friend,’ a VA employee who was trying to help me get my claim settled. I said, ‘You just showed me a letter showing that my claim was denied,’” she added.
Krone said she did tell the agents that the only person at the VA to whom she had given her new post office box was service manager Amy Hill, who refused to discuss the letter when contacted by The Examiner.
“Why did you go to the newspaper with this?” Krone said one of the agents asked her.
“My past experience with the VA, sir,” she replied.
“The VA has begun my punishment already,” Krone told me. When she called the VA’s 800 number to get an update, she was told that her claim number had been ordered removed by the same regional office she complained about.” Without a claim number, she won’t get her modest widow’s pension on Oct. 1.
“I will be a 62-year-old disabled homeless person next month,” Krone told me. “My small Social Security check will not be enough to live on and I will have to live in my car or go back to living in a rental shed like I did after my husband (a WWII Navy veteran) died.”
This is how our government treats the widows of men who fought and died for this country. As the daughter of a WWII Army vet myself, I am sickened and appalled.
