Read the full story: New York Post
Driven out by whistleblowers, Acting Inspector General of the Veterans Administration Richard Griffin finally resigned last week. Good riddance. Griffin had whitewashed and concealed information about inadequate care and phony waiting lists and tried to retaliate against truth-tellers. But don’t expect real improvement at the VA. Griffin’s successor is another bureaucratic lifer, Lin Halliday. She’s been collecting a paycheck from the VA Inspector General’s Office since 1992, while the deadly problems festered. President Obama seems to like that approach. On July 2 in Wisconsin, whistleblower Ryan Honl — a Gulf War veteran — urged Obama to appoint an independent inspector general: “If they just pick someone new from inside the agency, it will be business as usual and the problems will continue.” But Obama brushed him off, saying VA Secretary Robert McDonald “had it covered.” Sorry. That’s just not true. Only the president can appoint an inspector general. Federal law requires that the Veterans Administration and other departments have outside inspectors general to guard against corruption and mismanagement. Obama simply refuses to appoint them, allowing the vacant offices to be filled instead by “acting” IGs like Griffin and Halliday. They’re lapdogs instead of watchdogs, compliant temporary placeholders from inside the system…
Daniel Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, a good-government group, said for Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure at the State Department, Obama refused to appoint a permanent IG. Consequently, “oversight” at State was in the hands of the ultimate insider, acting IG Harold Geisel, who’d served as an ambassador under former President Bill Clinton and remains a close friend of the Clintons: The very definition of a lapdog.
