Fired AmeriCorps IG responds: White House charges are false

Fired AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin strongly denies the White House’s claim that he was “confused, disoriented [and] unable to answer questions” at a May 20, 2009 board meeting of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the organization that oversees AmeriCorps. In a letter to several members of Congress Tuesday night, Norman Eisen, who is the White House Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, wrote that at the May 20 meeting, “Mr. Walpin was confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions and exhibited other behavior that led the board to question his capacity to serve.” Eisen wrote that Walpin lost the confidence of the Corporation Board, which led to the decision to fire him.

In a detailed conversation Wednesday morning, Walpin said the White House is “grasping at nonexistent straws” to justify his termination as watchdog for one of the Obama White House’s favorite federal programs.

Walpin described an atmosphere in which his investigations into fraudulent and inefficient use of federal dollars were often the cause of conflict with the board and top management of the Corporation.  “The fact that the board doesn’t like what I was doing in order to perform my duties as an IG is not a reason for removing me,” Walpin said.  “In fact, the more diligent an IG is in reporting criticisms of the board and the running of the corporation, the more the board doesn’t want the IG there.  But that’s exactly why the IG position was created.”

In this case, the board and top management were unhappy with Walpin’s aggressive investigation of the misuse of federal AmeriCorps funds by Sacramento, California mayor — and prominent Obama supporter — Kevin Johnson.  The board was also unhappy with Walpin’s probe into the waste of AmeriCorps money at the City University of New York.

Those two investigations were on the agenda of the May 20 meeting.  Walpin believed the board and management were not supporting his findings about the Sacramento and CUNY matters, and he let them know it. “There was no confusion in my opening remarks at the meeting, in which I chastised the board for what appeared to be the board’s refusal to perform its duty, independent of management, in overseeing what management was doing, particularly as it regards determining the merits of the two reports I had issued,” Walpin says.

“I started out by chastising the board and telling them their duty was not just to accept what management says, but to make their independent analysis of those reports,” Walpin continues.  He says board members were “clearly angry at my temerity in telling them they should not be acting in the manner of many for-profit boards, which have been recently criticized.”  Walpin says there was “no confusion whatsoever about our two reports, and our clear findings, which were a major part of the meeting.”

So where did the White House allegation of confusion come from?  Walpin says that he was not feeling well that day, and that he was repeatedly interrupted as he gave a prepared presentation.  “Then at one point, they broke in and said I had to leave the room while they handled something else,” he recalls.  “I left my papers there.  When I came back, they were in disorder.  I attempted to reorganize them and be certain that I was not repeating what I had already discussed.  But I was quickly denied time to review my notes and told that I had to leave because the board was too busy.”

Walpin says no one at the Corporation ever said anything to him about allegedly being confused or disoriented, at the time or any time later.  The first he heard the charge was Tuesday night, in Eisen’s letter.  “The only confusion exhibited was the board members’ confusion as to their responsibilities,” he says.

The letter from Eisen also said the White House “learned that Mr. Walpin had been absent from the Corporation’s headquarters, insisting upon working from his home in New York over the objections of the Corporation’s board.”  Walpin says that charge is false — that the CEO and general counsel of the Corporation “expressly approved” the practice, and that Walpin had also discussed it with the chairman and vice-chairman of the Corporation’s board.

In a conversation last weekend, Walpin explained his telecommuting arrangement.  “For two years, I was totally in Washington,” he explained.  “I would come down from New York City on Monday morning and go back late Friday.”  Walpin said his wife was not happy with the arrangement, so at the beginning of January, Walpin wrote a letter to then-President Bush saying he would resign at the end of January.  According to Walpin, his staff objected to his leaving and asked that he reconsider his resignation.  They suggested that he solve the problem by telecommuting from New York on some days of the week.  “I said I would try it through the end of June to see if it worked, both for the office and for me,” Walpin told me.  “And it worked.”  Walpin changed his plans and decided to stay.

In the Wednesday morning interview, Walpin said that after the Corporation’s CEO and general counsel OK’d the arrangement, Walpin was at a meeting in which he heard that some board members had questions about it.  Because of that, Walpin arranged a conference call that included Corporation chairman Alan Solomont and vice-chairman Stephen Goldsmith.  “I talked to Solomont and Goldsmith specifically about this arrangement,” Walpin says.  “They all agreed that the policy of the government is to favor tele-working and reconcile work with family obligations.  They said, ‘OK, you go ahead, and we’ll see how it works.'”  Walpin says no one objected to his telecommuting after that.

As for another charge from the White House, that he showed a “lack of candor in providing material information to decision makers,” Walpin says that is “a total lie.”  Finally, as to the White House charge that Walpin engaged in “other troubling and inappropriate conduct,” Walpin says he understands what the White House is saying.  “From their viewpoint, my criticisms of the Corporation’s operations and the board of directors’ failure to perform its duties is troubling,” he says.

The White House suggestion that Walpin, who is 77 years old, is somehow mentally not up to his job and cannot perform his duties has caused great skepticism among Republicans on Capitol Hill.  GOP investigators have talked to Walpin and found him entirely sharp and focused.  “He has been collected and coherent,” says one investigator.  “What the White House described is not the experience that we have had in dealing with him.”  (That is also my own experience, having talked with Walpin for a total of about two hours since the weekend.)  In addition, Walpin has also performed well in recent high-profile media appearances. 

Lastly, even if Walpin had been confused and disoriented during one particular meeting, critics of the White House do not believe that would justify ignoring the requirements of the law governing how inspectors general are fired.  That law requires the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice, plus the cause for the firing.  In Walpin’s case, the White House called Walpin out of the blue, gave him one hour either to resign or be fired, and only later notified Congress, and then without giving any cause for its action. Only last night, after a lone Democrat, Sen. Claire McCaskill, said the White House “failed to follow the proper procedure” and requested a written explanation for the firing did the White House respond. 

UPDATE 2:15 PM EDT Wednesday:

I’ve just talked to someone else who was in the room at the May 20 meeting in which Walpin was, according to the White House, “confused, disoriented [and] unable to answer questions.”

In the days leading up to the session, Walpin had been working on a response to a complaint by Lawrence Brown, the acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento, criticizing Walpin’s handling of the case.  Then, the morning of the meeting, there came a report in the Sacramento Bee that Rick Maya, a man who worked with Kevin Johnson in the St. HOPE project, claimed that Johnson’s emails had been deleted during the time of Walpin’s investigation.  It was important news, and it suggested that AmeriCorps should press its investigation even more aggressively.

When Walpin criticized the management and board’s handling of that and other matters, the witness says, the board pushed back.  “The chair, after hearing all this, criticized [Walpin’s] report and said, ‘We don’t appreciate your telling us how to do our job,'” the source says.

After Walpin was interrupted, the source remembers him being tripped up by two questions.  One referred to a statement that Walpin had cited, and Walpin looked in his notes and couldn’t find a reference to it.  The other question was about the ethical constraints on an investigator like Walpin; Walpin, according to the source, hesitated to answer. “I thought he was tired,” the source says. 

The witness doesn’t remember whether the questions were confusing, or whether Walpin had actual difficulty.  But one member of the Corporation board did inquire, although not with Walpin himself, about whether Walpin was OK.  The conclusion was that Walpin was “tired and on his way to sick.”  In the interview above, Walpin said he was not feeling well by that afternoon.

Given what we know about events, it is hard to see how the White House has taken the May 20 meeting and turned it into the foundation of the decision to fire Walpin.  Congress, or at least Republicans in Congress, will want to know more.
 

UPDATE 4:30 PM EDT Wednesday:

Meanwhile, Sen. McCaskill has issued a statement saying the White House has now complied with the law requiring notice of Congress before firing an inspector general.  “The reasons given in the most recent White House letter are substantial,” McCaskill writes, “and the decision to remove Walpin appears well founded.”

-Byron York