Via PostTV
Hillary Clinton caused controversy after reports revealed she used a private e-mail account during her time as secretary of state. Late-night hosts Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon couldn’t resist a few jokes at her expense.
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Posted: 08:22 PST
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“I have a lot of security restraints on what I can and can’t do,” the then secretary of state tells Savannah Guthrie in an October 2011 interview.
[grabpress_video guid=”40ebb847dd1246006e010e832c81e8601078bb76″]
QUESTION: Why is she using a personal account?
MS. HARF: Uh-huh. Well, let’s – I just have a couple points, sort of top lines, and then follow up with many questions, okay?
QUESTION: Okay.
MS. HARF: First, the notion that the Department didn’t have the content of these emails until she turned them over isn’t accurate. A vast majority of them were to or from State.gov addresses or to addressees. So they were obviously retained and captured in that moment. So that notion is just not accurate and I wanted to put that out there first.
A couple other points: There was no prohibition on using a non-State.gov account for official business as long as it’s preserved. So obviously, that’s an important piece of this. When in the process of updating our records management – this is something that’s sort of ongoing given technology and the changes – we reached out to all of the former secretaries of state to ask them to provide any records they had. Secretary Clinton sent back 55,000 pages of documents to the State Department very shortly after we sent the letter to her. She was the only former Secretary of State who sent documents back in to this request. These 55,000 pages covered her time, the breadth of her time at the State Department.
Secretary Kerry is the first Secretary of State to rely primarily on his State.gov account. So what Secretary Clinton did was by no means unusual. In fact, it had been the practice before Secretary Kerry. So certainly, I know there’s a lot of interest in this. I would also point out that the notion that she had this email account is certainly not news; it’s been reported on for more than two years at this point. So I was a little surprised – although maybe I shouldn’t have been – by some of the breathless reporting coming out last night, but I guess that’s the nature of where we are today.
QUESTION: Okay. So just to address one of the things you said. You said there was no prohibition on using —
MS. HARF: Correct.
Asia celebrates the Lunar New Year on February 19th, ringing in the Year of the Sheep. So what can you expect from the festivities? Lots of red, for starters. Via Post TV:
On Valentine’s weekend, love is in the air. From Presidents Kennedy and Reagan to Bush, here’s a look at how our past presidents have celebrated romance. Via Post TV:
Posted: 18:53 PST
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If you’d like to, you know, send a love note, to the next corridor, the one across town, or to the other side of the world, Diplopundit wants to help. This year, we will publish our readers’ valentines, so get cracking.
Submit your valentine (no more than 50 words) to diplopunditvalentines[at]nym.hush.com. Deadline is Wednesday, February 11, 2015 (midnight). If there is enough interest, the valentines received will go online on February 14.
For now, check out the Valentine’s Day candy conversation hearts. Made in Revere, Massachusetts, this classic candy has been around for almost 150 years!
The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012, requires every IG to appoint an Ombudsman. The Act requires that an ombudsman educate employees about the rights and protections available to whistleblowers.
The State Department IG Steve Linick has appointed Jeff McDermott as Ombudsman for the Department of State and the BBG. Mr. McDermott is a career appointee and his ombudsman duties are in addition to his duties as a senior investigative counsel. He also serves as the OIG’s representative to the Justice Department’s whistleblower protection committee and counsels individual whistleblowers. Within OIG, he works with the Office of Investigations to investigate allegations of retaliation by contractor and grantee employees. He is available to discuss the protections against retaliation and how to make a protected disclosure, but he cannot act as your legal representative or advocate. You may contact him at at OIGWPEAOmbuds@state.gov. Read more here. The “Know Your Rights” video is here. We asked the OIG a couple of questions:
Q: What protection is there for whistleblowers?
The law protects individuals from reprisal for reporting potential misconduct or alleged criminal activities. Reprisal can come in the form of a prohibited personnel practice which occurs when a person with authority takes, fails to take or threatens to take a personnel action against an employee because of the employee’s protected disclosure and can include details, transfers, reassignments, and significant changes in duties, responsibilities, or working conditions.
Q: Are hotline callers automatically considered whistleblowers?
No, whether or not a hotline caller is considered a whistleblower depends first on whether the hotline caller has made a protected disclosure. The caller may be entitled to whistleblower protection if he or she indicates that a personnel action was taken because of the protected disclosure. Under the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Office of Special Counsel may receive and investigate claims for whistleblower protection from federal employees, former federal employees, and applicants for federal employment. In addition, OIG offers confidentiality or anonymity to any individual who contacts the hotline and fears retaliation because of the disclosure. In 2013, Congress created a pilot program whereby employees of contractors and grantees who allege they are retaliated against for whistleblowing can request an investigation by the OIG, and in these cases, OIG does determine whether a complainant qualifies as a whistleblower and whether retaliation occurred because of the whistleblowing activity.
We were told by State/OIG that in 2014, the office processed 1,278 Hotline complaints for the calendar year. We understand that this is generally in line with the amount of complaints the OIG processed in 2013. However, a significant portion of the OIG complaints reportedly pertain to visa issues, and those complaints are sent to Consular Affairs for appropriate response and action. Occasionally, the office also receive complaints that do not pertain to Department of State or Broadcasting Board of Governors matters – i.e. Veteran’s Affairs, Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, etc. Those submissions are referred to the appropriate Office of Inspector General and are not counted in State/OIG’s tally of “processed Hotline complaints”.
Some notable whistleblowers have been brought to life on the big screen. Check out the top 10 whistleblower movies via http://www.WatchMojo.com:
UPDATE:
“A Concerned FS Officer” sent us the following for your consideration, appended to this post on 2/9/15 at 15:47 PST:
While “retaliation” is officially forbidden, it is close to impossible to prove. Assignments, for example, are at the Dept’s discretion, needs of the service, etc. and it can just be a coincidence that your whistleblowing and your assignment to the butthole of the world coincide. Same of course for the black hole of promotions.
Once you are a troublemaker, er, whistleblower, be prepared for a non-retaliatory “routine” deep dive into your life. Suddenly there’s a need to audit your travel vouchers back to the Dulles era, DS needs to update your clearance based on info received you can’t see, that sort of thing. All of those moves are well-within the Dept’s routine responsibilities and you’ll never prove they’re connected to your talking to the OIG.
If you are contemplating blowing the whistle, speak to a qualified, outside lawyer first. AFSA has its place, but you need serious advice from someone familiar with the real-world case law, not just Dept practices.
Related items:
— Domani Spero
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Top Most Visited Posts of 2014:
The following posts are our additional picks for the year, just because:
A special note — Drowning in Smoggy Delhi: There’s No Blue Sky, So Where’s Blueair? (Updated) (1/29/2014), we just heard that Mission India has now distributed Blueair air purifiers to embassy employees, and that the lungs are grateful!
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In 2004, Alden P. Stallings, a Foreign Service Officer pleaded guilty for writing false visa referrals. According to DOJ, Stallings was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, Korea as the Deputy Public Affairs Officer when he submitted to the Consular Section 54 referrals in which he provided false information about his relationship with the applicants. DOJ charged that on each of the 54 referral forms, Stallings stated that he recommended the issuance of a non-immigrant visa to the applicant because the applicant was an “important post contact” whom he had “personally known” since a specified date. In fact, on each of the 54 occasions, Stallings knew that his statement on the referral form was false, and that he did not personally know the contact.
At the time Stallings pleaded guilty,he faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and that case effectively ended his career.
But hey, is it true that if you are in a senior position or a congressional representative, a personal intervention on behalf of a rejected visa applicant — who allegedly brought foreign maids into the country under false visa pretenses, and donated money to political campaigns — is A-okay?
Via the NYT:
The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.
The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.
It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuadoraccuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.
[…]
In the spring of 2011, Ms. Isaías, a television executive, was in a difficult situation.Her father and uncle were Ecuadorean fugitives living in Miami, but she was barred from entering the United States after she brought maids into the country under false visa pretenses and left them at her parents’ Miami home while she traveled.
“Alien smuggling” is what American consular officials in Ecuador called it.
American diplomats began enforcing the ban against Ms. Isaías, blocking her from coming to Miami for a job with a communications strategist who had raised up to $500,000 for President Obama.
[…]
Over the course of the next year, as various members of the Isaías family donated to Mr. Menendez’s re-election campaign, the senator and his staff repeatedly made calls, sent emails and wrote letters about Ms. Isaías’s case to Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Mills, the consulate in Ecuador, and the departments of State and Homeland Security.After months of resistance from State Department offices in Ecuador and Washington, the senator lobbied Ms. Mills himself, and the ban against Ms. Isaías was eventually overturned.
[…]
David A. Duckenfield, a partner at the company who is now on leave for a position as deputy assistant secretary of public affairs at the State Department, said Ms. Isaías worked for the firm but declined to comment further. Another senior executive at the firm said she must work outside the office because he had never heard of her.
[…]
“There are rigorous processes in place for matters such as these, and they were followed,” said the spokesman, Nick Merrill. “Nothing more, nothing less.”A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, declined to comment, saying that visas are issued free from political interference by other federal agencies.
Mr. Boehm, the former Pennsylvania prosecutor, said Senate ethics rules allowed members of Congress to reach out to the administration on behalf of a constituent. “Members of Congress do a lot for their constituents,” Mr. Boehm said.
“These folks are not his constituents,” he added, referring to Mr. Menendez.
See the whole report here: Ecuador Family Wins Favors After Donations to Democrats.
Pardon me? Ah, yes, the vomitorium is next door to the right, please don’t make a mess.
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