knows "nothing" about $220,000 settlement
Winsome Packer
Cong Hastings Record sexual harassment settlement exposes byzantine congressional process
by LEIGH ANN CALDWELL / NBC NEWS
WASHINGTON — With new harassment accusations being revealed on a nearly daily basis in Congress, documents obtained by NBC News from the Hastings case shed light on how taxpayer money ends up being used to essentially sweep such incidents under a bureaucratic rug with little accountability. On Capitol Hill, a sexual harassment complaint is a long process. The documents include drafts of a letter approving the settlement and a confidentiality agreement as well as an internal “lessons learned” memo written by a House employment lawyer. And while many of the accusations and details of the case remain in dispute, the eventual settlement is a case study of a process shrouded in secrecy despite being funded by taxpayers.
In 2011, Winsome Packer, a congressional staffer who worked for the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (known as the Helsinki Commission) filed a complaint against the commission, alleging that its chairman at the time, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., made unwanted sexual advances toward her and that she was threatened with retaliation. The details of Packer’s specific allegations are recorded in the complaint she also brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Publicly filed court documents in that lawsuit show that Packer alleged that she “was forced to endure” repeated “unwelcome sexual advances, crude sexual comments and unwelcome touching” by Hastings. In describing the incidents, Packer alleged that Hastings had hugged her multiple times, sometimes in front of witnesses at public events, pressing his whole body against her, and his face to her face. Packer also claimed that after she complained to the commission’s staff director, she was subject to threats of retaliation by both the director and Hastings himself, including “threats of termination.”
Hastings, who has been in Congress since 1993, has denied Packer’s allegations. He called them “malicious” and “absolutely false” in a letter obtained by NBC News. The Office of Congressional Ethics referred the matter to the House Ethics Committee in 2010. After reviewing more than one thousand pages of documents and interviewing eight witnesses, the committee closed the case after finding that while the congressman admitted to having made some unprofessional comments, it had found “no additional evidence supporting [Packer’s ] allegations.”
The federal court also dismissed the case, with prejudice, in June 2014. Both sides maintain they were wronged. But this case, which took four years to settle, shows the system is so flawed that even Hastings’ House-provided attorney issued a retrospective critical of the process. In an internal congressional document obtained by NBC News this week, Gloria Lett, an attorney for the Office of House Employment Counsel, offered some “lessons learned” from Packer’s case that recommended the adoption of new policies to handle such claims.
So how did Winsome Packer end up getting a $220,000 taxpayer-funded settlement in May 2014? And why was that payment, settling sexual harassment claims against a member of the House of Representatives, not included in a disclosure to the House Administration Committee of all such settlement payments in the last five years, provided by Congress’ Office of Compliance, the congressional office that approved the payment?
The puzzle of a byzantine process starts with what Packer says happened when she first made the complaint. Packer claims that from the outset she faced a system that was onerous and intimidating. In an interview, she told NBC News that the process “is designed to totally demolish you and convince you to drop it.” At the beginning, like any accuser who files a complaint with the Office of Compliance (OOC), Packer paid for her own legal representation while it’s the taxpayers who provide free legal counsel for the member of Congress or the office involved in the complaint. Packer completed an initial requirement of a 30-days-or-less, mandatory counseling period for accusers, and then proceeded to a second requirement of a 30-day mediation period. She called that process “worse than the harassment.” She and one of her lawyers describe an attempt to undermine her credibility and intimidate her. George Chuzi, who represented Packer in her first meeting regarding the complaint, said the House lawyers were “unbelievably aggressive.”
Two government-paid lawyers representing Hastings sat across the table, as did her immediate supervisor. According to Packer and Chuzi, among the first things the House counsel said is that Packer is a “liar and an extortionist.” Packer added that the House attorneys also made an initial demand: Packer had to quit. Chuzi said he was “in shock” about the treatment of the accuser. Packer continued to press her case in federal court for three years. How Congress is trying to expose sexual harassment payouts Packer eventually received a settlement payment of $220,000, an amount confirmed by documents reviewed by NBC News and the largest known about since the Congressional Accountability Act was passed in 1995. One document obtained by NBC News details early draft terms of Packer’s settlement, and it is one of few such documents that have become public.
The others have not been released because confidentiality requirements, established by Congress and signed into federal law as the Congressional Accountability Act, bind accuser, accused and other legal entities from disclosing any terms or details. Despite these confidentiality requirements, Packer said she had decided to speak out because the environment has changed for accusers and she has little to lose. Packer, 60, who worked for the commission from 2007 until 2014, said she has not worked since the settlement was reached nearly four years ago, and is now living with her sister in Florida. Prior to her work as a policy adviser to the Helsinki Commission, Packer worked as a GOP staff member on the House Homeland Security Committee from 2003 through 2006. But when NBC News directed questions about the settlement and the payment to the two congressional entities the documents showed were involved in establishing and approving them — the Office of Compliance and the Senate Office of the Chief Counsel for Employment — neither provided answers. In an email, the Office of Compliance’s media representative wrote that “the Congressional Accountability Act requires that the OOC maintain the confidentially of contacts made with the office. The OOC cannot comment on whether matters have or have not been filed with the office.”
The Senate legal office did not respond to questions.