The White House denied that politics played a role in the State Department’s decision to upgrade Cuba and Malaysia’s record on human trafficking.
“The State Department strives to make the report as accurate as possible, documenting the successes and shortcomings of other governments’ anti-trafficking efforts,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday, referring further questions to the State Department.
Asked whether the White House played any role in the controversial decisions to take Cuba and Malaysia off the worst offenders’ list, Earnest said the president’s staff deferred to the State Department.
“I can tell you that this is a process that lived at the State Department and the White House was very respectful of the ongoing process at the State Department for publishing this report,” he said.
Earnest was responding to a report in Reuters citing more than a dozen interviews with State Department sources that accused State Department senior political staff of repeatedly overruling seasoned human rights experts at the agency in their decisions on the human trafficking rankings of 17 countries, including the upgrades of Cuba and Malaysia.
The report says Malaysia and Cuba were both removed from the blacklist of worst offenders even though the State Department’s own trafficking experts believed neither had made notable improvements.
The Reuters report has spurred outrage on Capitol Hill, with several senators vowing to get to the bottom of the charges that the Obama administration played politics with the report on human slavery and child prostitution.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing on the issue Thursday, and several prominent members have vowed to get to the bottom of the charges.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, said there is no doubt in his mind that the rankings were politicized and slammed the administration for allowing a “bunch of political hacks” to taint the State Department’s report on human slavery and forced prostitution.
“It’s shameful that President Obama allowed a bunch of political hacks to alter the administration’s human trafficking report to the benefit of perennial violators like Cuba and Malaysia,” he said in a statement Monday night.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the panel, said he has a number of “serious concerns” about the human trafficking report.
“If it is true that the administration politicized this report, they must immediately answer a number of questions about why they chose to significantly diminish a tool that has been effective in fighting slavery around the world,” he said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
