The Other Scandal: The Americorps IG Walpin Firing

from Fire Andrea Mitchell:

The AmeriCorps/Walpin IG scandal that just wouldn’t go away (despite Obama’s wishing it would)


“We’re not there yet,” one Democratic source on Capitol Hill said last week, when asked about the prospect for hearings on the Obama administration’s firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin. According to the American Spectator and The Other McCain:



Congressional investigators are still conducting interviews in the case, so the question of whether to “pull the trigger” on a full-blown inquiry — with subpoenas for witnesses to testify under oath at committee hearings — has yet to be decided.



The fact that both Democrats and Republicans are involved in investigating the Walpin dismissal is, however, highly significant. With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, bipartisanship is absolutely necessary to getting the truth about the AmeriCorps case, as with the other cases in the smoldering “IG Gate” scandal.



Sensitive political considerations are involved, given the potential fallout from investigations into whether the Obama administration — which promised to be the most “transparent” in history — is trying to muzzle the independent watchdogs tasked with preventing waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies.



In the span of barely a week, beginning with the White House’s quit-or-be-fired ultimatum to Walpin on June 10, two other inspectors general left their posts in what appears to be a pattern of administration pressure against IGs:



• International Trade Commission IG Judith Gwynne was told June 17 that her contract would not be renewed, shortly after Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to ITC asking about a March incident in which “certain procurement files were removed forcibly from the possession of the Inspector General by a Commission employee.” Grassley had also asked questions about the unusual arrangement in which Gwynne was employed by the ITC on a series of six-month temporary contracts, a situation scarcely conducive to the IG’s independence of agency authority.