'I'd Like An Answer To My Question': Hawley Grills Witness On Whistleblower Complaint

senator hawley recognized for your questions thank you very much mr chairman uh thanks for thanks for waiting for me and um thanks to the witnesses for being here today it's good to see all of you um ms lerner i want to start with you if if i could are you familiar with the report from wilmer hale their independent investigation regarding allegations of misconduct by three dhs oig employees regarding the nomination of dr kafari i'm aware of the report have you read it um a very heavily redacted version so my office has been contacted by multiple whistleblowers who allege a widespread misconduct uh including i'm afraid you and i want to give you the chance to respond to those always take whistleblower complaints very seriously and they pointed me to the wilmer hale report which i've now read which i have to say is is very very disturbing i mean for those of who don't know it's 108 pages here 70 interviews conducted 42 000 documents reviewed and what wilmer hale found is that a number of dhs oig employees improperly interfered in the presidential nomination and senate confirmation process regarding dr kafari to be the ig at dhs wilmer hale notes in the at the outset of their investigation or the outside of their report rather that of course any citizen has the right to question a presidential nomination in their personal capacity federal employees and their capacity as private citizens have a first amendment right to express their political opinions and may contact lawmakers to do so of course that's very important they go on however it is a misuse of authority for a federal employee to use his or her public office to interfere with a presidential nomination or the senate confirmation process and then they say federal employees should not use their government resources including the email system or access to lawmakers or other government officials for personal gain or for any other unauthorized purposes wilmer hale further reports in in their investigation following their investigation that uh these individuals uh who were opposed to dr kafari's nomination within dhs oig came to you ms lerner to discuss the nomination they wrote to you saying that they had a sensitive matter related to the dhs ig nominee to discuss you all agreed to speak on the phone and following the conversation mus costello one of the complainants sent you a link to a report regarding california coastal university california coast university excuse me i guess the complaint here was dr kafari's phd was not from a suitably prestigious university during the interview ms costello spoke to ms lerner about dr kafari's nomination stated they were doing so because it was in the best interest of the agency ms lerner agreed that they had an obligation to protect the organization and figure out whether others knew that dr khafari's degree was issued by a diploma mill so what wilmer hales found here is that you encouraged you were on government property at the time using government resources on government time that you encouraged what wilmer hale concludes was a serious interference with the presidential nomination process and the senate confirmation process and a pretty serious misuse of government resources i know you didn't sit for an interview wilmerhall said they tried to interview you you wouldn't sit for an interview but we have you here these are serious allegations uh i thought i'd give you a chance to respond i appreciate you giving me the chance i'm not sure your mic is on sorry appreciate you giving me that opportunity uh the most that i could say right now is that the statement of the conversation is not consistent with my recollection of it so you you deny that that you encourage them to spread around complaints using government resources that dr kofari was unqualified for the position that his degree was issued by a diploma mill senator may i may i jump in for a second i'd like an answer to my question i do i i did not encourage i did not take the actions as described in the statement made by ms costello did you improperly use government resources to interfere with the presidential nomination the senate confirmation process i did not did you use any government resources email telephone government property government did you work on this project in government time in my capacity as vice chair and and michael can speak to this as well in his capacity as chair we would frequently be called by individuals working in oig offices who had questions or concerns that they thought that we could shed light on and we would endeavor to you know help the to answer those questions so if you know when we we take calls from people who have a concern and try to steer them in the right direction and that's all that i did here um with with these individuals and and you know i think that's consistent with our obligation as leaders of ziggy and you know at no point was i uh trying to undermine the nomination of anyone uh for a pas position why didn't sigi open an investigation into these allegations why did wilmer hale why would why did there have to be an outside investigation which found evidence of wrongdoing that's a question best directed to the integrity committee um because it was partly your decision wasn't it not to open an investigation no i'm not a member of the integrity committee and the leadership of sigi is purposefully separate from the integrity committee to preserve its independence to conduct investigations of oig folks so when the report says that it's a misuse of authority for a federal employee to use his or her office to interfere with the nomination or confirmation process and the federal employees should not use their government resources including email systems or access to lawmakers or other government officials for any unauthorized purpose you're saying definitively for the record under oath you did never do any of those things i did not you know undermine anyone's nomination for for a pas you didn't use the email system access to lawmakers or any other government resources for any unauthorized purpose i use the email systems to respond to questions from individuals about their you know a situation in their office and and and just attempt to steer them in the in the right direction and and provide guidance to them um as they confronted a challenge that is not in my view inconsistent with my obligations as a public servant well i i'm disappointed that we're here and that this is frankly it's come to this impasse that we have this report from from wilmer hale uh that is quite extensive and quite lengthy you didn't sit for an interview with them they weren't able to get your views on any of this i noticed neither did you mr horowitz i frankly think it's very disappointing and i think the fact that we now have multiple whistleblowers coming to us about this series of events i mean this is this is harrowing reading to be honest with you and it's disturbing reading that it would be this would be happening and i just want to say i'm i'm going to try to get to the bottom of it but i'm i'm disappointed that it's it's come to this and in this setting i appreciate your concern but i would say that mr horowitz and i engaged with people on both sides of that situation who had concerns and wanted to protect both the privacy of both of the the entities that we were involving um and and so that people would feel comfortable coming to us for counseling in situations like that senator let me respond to that um because the serious issue joe kafari by the way used to work in the doj oig as you may know was an agent um i talked with joe both while his confirmation was pending and after he became ig and he can explain to you however much he would like i'd be happy for him to do that how much time i spent with him as did alison on several of those calls to help him as the ig to get settled in and to deal with some of the challenges he was dealing with in terms of that i also talked to him actually on as he can describe to you and uh if you'd like and i think it may be even in that report when he wanted to move forward and sought to move forward with the allegations and how to deal with them with regard to william hale's reach out to us and to me in particular we engaged with the lawyers and asked them to give us some idea of what they were looking to speak to us about as ms lerner just indicated as siggy chair and as vice chair i regularly receive calls from igs from others in the ig community to give them advice guidance views on how they can proceed some of it was as routine as career advice some of it was far more significant and the question i had for wilmer hale lawyers was what information generally in the areas they were looking at and to get at because we do have an obligation to ensure that discussions we have like i had with mr kafari are maintained in confidence when the individual who comes to us would like them to be in confidence and then assess whether there is a need for the investigators to have that information i've got to understand a little bit more before i just sit for an interview with siggy chair and be asked about a variety of conversations that i've had with people who come to me and i frankly view it again as to the ig act provisions that are in the law that as doji let me put this way as doj ig if those individuals that come to me there's an ig act provision that requires confidentiality so i've got to think long and hard about that before making a decision on what to speak to i never ruled it out but the question was uh until the end until there was no an unwillingness to have that discussion but that that was my concern is that we didn't have a um a dialogue and i wasn't comfortable at the time knowing what i was to speak to because frankly i didn't have first-hand knowledge of a lot of what i ultimately ended up reading about in the wilmer hale report at the time reached they reached out to me i was not familiar with my my time has long expired here and the chairman's been very indulgent i'll have some additional follow-up questions for for you uh for the record uh i don't i can't adjudicate your dispute with wilmer hale as to why you did or didn't sit for an interview i'm just noting the fact that they say that you had relevant information in particular you ms lerner had likely had information about these discussions would have been able to shed light you didn't sit for an interview that's your prerogative but but this is the fact is this is serious these are very this is serious what i read in this report i hope this isn't normal it sure as heck shouldn't be and i think we've got some more work to do to get answers here thank you mr chairman

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Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021