October 24, 2019

IG Says VA Whistleblower Office Mostly Screwed Whistleblowers

Brittany Murray/SCNG via ZUMA

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Ukrainegate is deservedly monopolizing the headlines right now, but let’s not forget all the garden variety corruption still going on under the Trump administration. Take the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example. A couple of years ago President Trump set up an office to protect VA whistleblowers and encourage them to come forward. That’s a great idea for an agency that’s obviously had a lot of problems.

But Trump, of course, has a very personal view of whistleblowing: it only counts if it’s whistleblowing against enemies, not friends. The guy in charge got the message loud and clear:

The office’s first executive director, Peter O’Rourke, instead used his position to stifle claims and retaliate against the employees the new organization had been designed to protect, the IG report found. Mr. O’Rourke, who once directed a conservative political action committee and then consulted for the VA, leveraged his power as head of the whistleblower office to end investigations into allies and failed to provide basic reports to Congress on the office’s operations, investigators said.

Mr. O’Rourke eventually rose to acting secretary of the VA before leaving the department last year. He is now the executive director of the Florida Republican Party.

Even Richard Nixon never quite leveraged the federal bureaucracy to screw his enemies as systematically as Trump seems to have done. It’s really pretty remarkable.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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