Allegations that a top official at the State Department proposed a ‘quid pro quo’ with the FBI in order to declassify a Hillary Clinton email is leading to more scrutiny of his tenure at State, as well as President Obama’s record of ethics enforcement at departments across the executive branch.
Obama chose not to nominate an official watchdog at the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure as secretary, while she was secretly sending emails using a private server in violation of federal law. Full-fledged inspectors general must be Senate confirmed so they have the job security and independence to thoroughly investigate alleged misdeeds.
Republicans are now charging that the lax ethics environment at State during Clinton’s time, and the lack of strong IG oversight there, allowed Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary of management, to step in and cover for Clinton, as well as to interfere in internal watchdog investigations. Republicans, along with Donald Trump, are now calling on Obama to fire Kennedy.
“[State] went without an inspector general for an awful long time, and it was sure convenient for Mr. Kennedy to roam free and hire lawyers from the outside to assist in the corruption at State,” Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., told the Washington Examiner this week.
“He also tried to declassify information that he knew was classified information and had a personal incentive to cover this up,” he added.
Pompeo was referring to the State Department’s decision to hire a pair of lawyers from Williams and Connolly, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton in the email investigation, to handle Freedom of Information Act requests for her emails. He was also referencing the charges that Kennedy engaged in a quid pro quo effort to barter with the FBI to declassify a Benghazi-related Clinton email in exchange for allowing the FBI to send agents to Iraq.
“There has been zero accountability inside the State Department for anyone of this,” said Pompeo, a vocal Clinton critic and member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. “Whether it was for Benghazi information itself or the cover up that took place, each in its own right never held any senior people accountable. Certainly, Patrick Kennedy was never held accountable.”
While GOP anger over the alleged quid pro quo has focused mostly on Kennedy, government accountability groups have said Obama bears direct responsibility for lax ethics environment at State. A loose enforcement of agency rules and federal law, they say, allowed Clinton to maintain her private email server because Obama failed to appoint an inspector general at State for the entire four and a half years Clinton was secretary.
State is hardly the only federal agency that went years without Obama nominating a full-fledge IG.
Despite Obama’s pledge to run most transparent and accountable government in history, he allowed the Interior Department to go more than six and a half years, from the beginning of 2009 to mid-2015, without an inspector general, according to an IG vacancy tracker put together by the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation went more than three years without Obama nominating its watchdog, while the Central Intelligence Agency went nearly a year and half, and IG vacancies at the Commerce and Energy Departments both exceeded a year.
“The inspector general role in all departments is very important – they root out a lot of public corruption. There was certainly a need for a full-fledged, full-time inspector general” at State during Clinton’s tenure, said Matt Whitaker. She’s a former U.S. attorney appointed by President George W. Bush who serves as executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
Obama waited until nine months after the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi to name a State Department IG, and only then after harsh scrutiny of the vacancy.
“The White House is saying that the State Department has responsibility for making sure their officials and staff follow the law, but the White House is responsible for making sure they have the tools to do that and they fell down on that job in making sure they have the No. 1 tool, and that’s an inspector general,” John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan open-government group, told the Examiner in an interview last year.
“We have to understand why the agency lapse was so long and whether it was intentional,” Wonderlich said at the time.
Michael Smallberg, a POGO investigator, said the lack of independent oversight at State discouraged whistleblowers to come forward and lodge complaints because they are naturally afraid of reprisals.
“The president has a responsibility to find a qualified nominee in a timely fashion,” Smallberg said. “When you are looking at a vacancy and there are questions about systemic waste, fraud and abuse, I think it’s fair to ask why the president hadn’t acted quickly to fulfill those obligations.”
The White House has repeatedly pointed out that the State Department had an acting IG, Harold Geisel, serving in the watchdog role. But a POGO investigation found that Geisel had close ties to Kennedy and other in upper-management when he ran the IG office.
A POGO investigation found that Geisel was close personal friends with Kennedy, under secretary of state for management, and that he worked with top officials at the agency to suppress negative information in what critics argued was a multi-layered cover-up.
In one instance, the ambassador to Belgium, a big campaign bundler for President Obama, was accused of soliciting child prostitutes, and other State Department employees were accused of other unrelated sexual misdeeds.
Efforts to investigate the accusations were blocked by top agency managers, including Kennedy and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, according to whistleblower allegations. Then, a lower-level IG investigator’s report on the top brass’ tactics was whitewashed, scrubbed of any damaging information before it became public,” the POGO probe found.
Nick Pacifico, a POGO program manager, argues that acting inspectors general who are not Senate confirmed are more easily compromised.
“Our mindset is that acting IGs are trying to become permanent IGs and they lose some of the independence that is so important for internal watchdogs to have,” he said in an interview. “They’re auditioning for the top job – they’re not trying to ruffle any feathers when they are deputy IG or active IG in waiting.”
CBS News in 2013 also reported on an internal State Department inspector general’s memo that cited eight specific examples of upper management influencing, manipulating or simply calling off investigations.
The memo cited the Belgium ambassador’s child prostitution allegations, charges that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards, and the charge that members of Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” – a problem the report called “endemic.”
In addition, the memo provided details about an “underground drug ring” operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and alleged that it was supplying State Department security contractors with drugs.
Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator with the State Department’s internal watchdog agency, also came forward and reported that upper management quashed many of their investigations into potential criminal wrongdoing, including the case looking into the allegations against the Belgium ambassador.
“We were very upset,” she told CBS News at the time. “We expect to see influence, but the degree to which that influence existed and how high up it went, was very disturbing.”
