Erased
Posted on | November 28, 2007
If the Bush Administration has nothing to hide, why do they work so hard to hide it? Here’s the story of Scott Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel, responsible for protecting whistle-blowers in government:
Scott Bloch runs the Office of Special Counsel, an agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing a ban on federal employees engaging in partisan political activity. Mr. Bloch’s agency is looking into whether Mr. Rove and other White House officials used government agencies to help re-elect Republicans in 2006.
At the same time, Mr. Bloch has himself been under investigation since 2005. At the direction of the White House, the federal Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general is looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees and dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination…
Recently, investigators learned that Mr. Bloch erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year. They are now trying to determine whether the deletions were improper or part of a cover-up, lawyers close to the case said.
Bypassing his agency’s computer technicians, Mr. Bloch phoned 1-800-905-GEEKS for Geeks on Call, the mobile PC-help service. It dispatched a technician in one of its signature PT Cruiser wagons. In an interview, the 49-year-old former labor-law litigator from Lawrence, Kan., confirmed that he contacted Geeks on Call but said he was trying to eradicate a virus that had seized control of his computer…
Jeff Phelps, who runs Washington’s Geeks on Call franchise, declined to talk about specific clients, but said calls placed directly by government officials are unusual. He also said erasing a drive is an unusual virus treatment. “We don’t do a seven-level wipe for a virus,” he said.
Whatever he didn’t want us to find, we probably won’t find it now. TPM’s Paul Kiel comments:
The punchline to all this is that even if Bloch were a paragon of integrity, his investigations of administration wrongdoing would be nearly pointless. For instance, Bloch launched an investigation of General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan after she asked her fellow employees “How can we help our candidates?” The comments had come after a political briefing by Karl Rove’s aide. Bloch’s investigation concluded that Doan should be fired. But that was in June. Bloch made his recommendation to the White House, which has done nothing since. And as for Bloch’s wide-ranging probe of Karl Rove’s political briefings to federal officials throughout the government? Don’t count on any results. It’s enough to make a man cynical.
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