Free Republic

Remember the Gerald Walpin affair? Republican Sen. Charles Grassley does. Walpin was the inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), the organization that runs the AmeriCorps service program. In June 2009, Walpin received a call from Norman Eisen, who was then the Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform. Eisen told Walpin he had an hour to either resign or be fired. Eisen's call appeared to violate the 2008 Inspectors General Reform Act, which is designed to protect inspectors general from political interference. The Act requires the president to give Congress 30 days'...

An Interview with Gerald Walpin First, a full disclosure: Gerald Walpin is a friend whom I greatly admire and respect. On August 3, 2006, President George W. Bush nominated him as Inspector General (IG) of the Corporation for National and Community Services (CNCS), an office charged with conducting independent audits and investigations of the CNCS and its service programs which include AmeriCorps, Volunteeers in Service of America (VISTA) and Senior Corps. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 2006 and sworn into office in January 2007. On June 11, 2009, President Obama, only five months into his...

''I've got your back." That's what U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts said to his decades-long friend, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in introducing the AG at an April 22 speech at Vassar College. At that time, Judge Roberts was ignoring several legal deadlines to the benefit of Mr. Holder's administration on numerous motions and countermotions in a key lawsuit for which Mr. Holder's underlings effectively were acting as defense attorneys. Pressed by a higher court to justify his delays, Judge Roberts two months later ruled completely in the administration's favor - tossing out the suit, without trial, of Gerald...

A federal agency inspector general fired last year by President Barack Obama amid claims of bizarre and incompetent behavior, Gerald Walpin, has lost the first round in his legal bid to win back his job.On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Roberts threw out a lawsuit Walpin brought in an attempt to be restored to his position at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs Americorps and other programs. Walpin has claimed that his firing was political retaliation for his opposition to wasteful spending by the agency and for his aggressive investigation of a friend of Obama, Sacramento Mayor and former...

One year to the day after illegally firing AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, the Obama administration is scrambling to ward off further embarrassments related to the case. On Friday, Mr. Walpin's lawsuit for reinstatement moved forward another step. For this tempest to be raging a full year later shows how badly the administration botched the situation from the start. On June 11, 2009, President Obama fired Mr. Walpin without explanation to Congress despite having co-sponsored a law as senator that required such an explanation before an inspector general could be dismissed. The most public dispute between the administration and Mr....

Only in the Obama administration would a public official sanctioned for a form of malfeasance be honored as a speaker by the same organization that sanctioned him. It helps, of course, when he is a self-proclaimed Friend of the First Couple. It also doesn't hurt that the administration already found it politically convenient to fire the inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who blew the whistle on his misdeeds.Still, the public should consider it a brazen affront for this administration to feature Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson as a key speaker at a major conference sponsored later this month by the Corporation for...

Only in the Obama administration would a public official sanctioned for a form of malfeasance be honored as a speaker by the same organization that sanctioned him. It helps, of course, when he is a self-proclaimed Friend of the First Couple. It also doesn't hurt that the administration already found it politically convenient to fire the inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who blew the whistle on his misdeeds. Still, the public should consider it a brazen affront for this administration to feature Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson as a key speaker at a major conference sponsored later this month by the Corporation...

Former Inspector General Gerald Walpin, whose dismissal by President Obama last year has been challenged by congressmen as potentially illegal political retaliation, is now stepping up the battle to get his job back, accusing the judicial system of stalling his case and, thus, doing the White House a convenient favor. Court documents filed last week accuse U.S. District Court Judge Richard Roberts of failing to act within federally mandated time requirements and "doing nothing at all" to move the case forward. Similarly, a joint congressional report by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., which found the administration...

Republican senators ought to place an open and immediate hold upon the nomination of Jon A. Hatfield as inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). The legislative hold is necessary not to question Mr. Hatfield's fitness for the job, but to insist that the job itself should not yet be deemed open. The former inspector general (IG), the improperly dismissed Gerald Walpin, filed a motion in court May 20 to force a judge to stop ignoring his lawsuit for reinstatement. Until he receives his day in court, no replacement should be confirmed. President Obama dismissed the...

An updated investigation report on the scandal known as "Walpingate" adds fuel to the suspicion that President Obama may have fired Gerald Walpin, an independent inspector general, as an illegal act of political cronyism and revenge. "Throughout our investigation of Mr. Walpin's removal, the White House has repeatedly communicated that the president was not motivated by inappropriate political reasons," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., one of the authors of the updated report. "The fact is Gerald Walpin led an aggressive investigation of a political ally of President Obama that successfully recovered taxpayer dollars. While firing an investigator who uncovered the...

When it comes to discussing controversial issues, the Obama administration's idea of dialogue is a curiously one-way affair. According to an Oct. 26 administration court filing, a lawsuit by fired AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin should be dismissed without a trial because the White House already has participated in the "political dialogue" with Congress required by the statute governing IG dismissals. It's odd, then, that the administration continues stonewalling Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, long a champion of independent IGs. On June 10, the Obama administration fired Mr. Walpin, without explanation, just after he filed two reports alleging White...

President Obama's nomination of a major campaign fundraiser as ambassador to Spain has been delayed in the Senate over questions about whether the White House is withholding information from lawmakers about the abrupt firing of a government watchdog official. The nominee, Alan Solomont, served from April until recently as chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, whose former inspector general, Gerald Walpin, was fired by the White House on June 10. Mr. Solomont, a Massachusetts health industry entrepreneur, helped raise at least $500,000 for Mr. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and was among a group of top fundraisers, elected...

When last we left Gerald Walpin, the unfairly fired inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, he had filed a lawsuit on July 17 protesting his dismissal. He submitted technical amendments to his complaint on July 24, and the government was supposed to respond within 60 days. Seventy-five days later, the government still is stonewalling. Justice delayed is justice denied. Government lawyers Tony West, Channing Phillips, Susan Rudy and Kathryn Wyer filed for an extension until Oct. 26, explaining that they were only "recently assigned this case." It's odd, though, that when it suits the White House's...

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has blocked the ambassadorial nomination of Alan Solomont, currently chairman of the board of the government agency that oversees AmeriCorps, in retaliation for what Grassley says is the administration's stonewalling of Congress over documents relating to the firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin. Specifically, Grassley has sought, and been denied, information relating to the White House's role in the decision to fire Walpin. Solomont, a major Democratic donor, is chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which includes AmeriCorps. His term ends in October, and President Obama has nominated him to be U.S....

First it was I.G. Walpin who was investigating BO 's supporter on the misused of Americorp funds. Now it is I.G. Weiderhold for investigating Amtrak’s activities. The Inspector General Act, amended last year and CO-SPONSORED by Barack Obama to: require the President to notify Congress in writing within 30 days the reasons for removing an Inspector General from office. Did Obama knowingly break the law on this one or did TOTUS forget to tell him he couldn't do it.

I just have to wonder what kind of uproar and front page news stories would be coming out daily if the Walpin/Johnson IG Firing Story had happened during Bush's watch. You know the answer to that question. We would be blasted by the story daily, for weeks on end. But under the Obama administration the MSM doesn't utter a peep. Except for Byron York reporting in The Washington Examiner that is. Before I get to his story let's do a recap of the scandal, since it's been weeks and weeks since the story came out. There are four players in...

This nasty administration spent much time going after Gerald Walpin, who until a few weeks ago was the inspector general for AmeriCorps. Walpin's claim was that he was fired because he made the mistake of Investigation a friend of Obama (FOB), Kevin Johnson former NBA star who is now mayor of Sacramento, California, for the misuse of AmeriCorps funds. Because he was investigating the president's friends, Walpin, whose position as an inspector general is supposed to be protected from political appointees and the White House, was fired. Pressed for a reasoning for the dismissal the Administration said the IG seemed...

After seven weeks of trying, investigators looking into President Barack Obama’s abrupt firing of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin are still unable to answer the most basic question of the whole affair: Why did the president do it?

Just six months into his presidency, President Barack Obama's administration is the target of a federal lawsuit, and that by a civil servant who alleges he was dismissed from his post in violation of the requirements of a law that Barack Obama himself once sponsored in the Senate. Yet despite all this, the July 21 Washington Post print edition failed to carry the story, directing readers with this 39-word teaser atop page A15 (The Fed Page) to a Post blog: Former Inspector General Files Suit: Gerald Walpin, an inspector general who was fired last month by the Obama administration, has...

Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service whom President Obama took the unusual step of firing last month, filed a lawsuit against the CNCS on Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia The suit seeks to force "to reinstate Mr. Walpin as the Inspector General and to declare unlawful and ineffective the efforts to date to terminate him from his office." In addition, the suit seeks that Walpin be awarded "costs and legal fees associated with this action" as well as any "further relief as may be appropriate in this...