Federal agencies have Inspectors General as a kind of internal check on abuse. The point is to have an independent “watchdog” with oversight authority who can ensure agencies’ integrity, while preventing fraud and mismanagement.
When it comes to the State Department’s IG office, things haven’t gone according to plan. Instead of a watchdog that prevents and roots out wrongdoing, we have an IG who helps cover the scandals up.
A top House Democrat began an inquiry on Tuesday into accusations that the State Department’s inspector general repeatedly interfered with investigations into fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, including security defects at the new United States Embassy in Baghdad.
Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent the inspector general, Howard J. Krongard, a 14-page letter spelling out accusations made by several current and former employees of Mr. Krongard’s office who documented their charges with e-mail messages. […]
“One consistent element in these allegations is that you believe your foremost mission is to support the Bush administration, especially with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than act as an independent and objective check on waste, fraud and abuse on behalf of U.S. taxpayers,” Mr. Waxman wrote. He invited Mr. Krongard to respond to the accusations at a committee hearing on Oct. 16.
Before yesterday, I’d never heard of Krongard, but given Waxman’s revelations, I suspect we’ll all be getting to know him very well in the coming weeks. Even by the Bush administration’s embarrassingly-low standards, the State Department’s IG is scandalous to the point of embarrassment.
Each example of alleged wrongdoing is more painful than the last.
* Refused to send “any investigators” into Iraq and Afghanistan to “pursue investigations into wasteful spending or procurement fraud.”
* Stalled investigators from cooperating with a “Justice Department investigation into waste, fraud, and abuse relating to the new U.S. Embassy in Iraq.”
* Used “irregular” and incomplete investigative procedures to help exonerate a prime contractor of the U.S. embassy in Iraq of charges of labor trafficking.
* Impeded investigators’ efforts to cooperate with a Justice probe into allegations that a “large private security contractor was smuggling weapons into Iraq.”
* Interfered with an on-going investigation “into the conduct of Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of Voice of America and a close associate of Karl Rove.”
* Censored portions of inspection reports on embassies so that information on security vulnerabilities was “not disclosed to Congress.”
The report adds that under Krongard, the IG office has seen an “exodus of trained staff” as “people come to work every day fearful” of his “daily antagonism.”
Of all the examples of alleged misdeeds, I think the most breathtaking charge dealt with him covering up slave labor used to build the U.S. embassy in Iraq.
There have been allegations that the contractor First Kuwaiti used forced labor building the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. So Krongard looked into it.
Only he had a peculiar method, according to Waxman’s investigation. First, he insisted on doing the report entirely by himself and shut out his staff. And instead of seeking out the source of the allegations, he allowed the contractor to choose the employees that he’d interview. He ultimately interviewed six employees.
The result? Krongard declared that he found no evidence of human trafficking.
But when Waxman sought the investigative materials that Krongard had generated in the course of his probing investigation, Krongard only turned over 20 pages total (after a subpoena from Waxman). Of those 20 pages, only six of them were Krongard’s own work product — sketchy handwritten notes from his interviews with the contractor’s handpicked witnesses.
Where does the Bush gang find these guys? Hacks ‘R Us?