Clinton Takes Aim at Another Government Watchdog [View all]
MAR 4, 2016 6:00 AM EST
By Josh Rogin
The Hillary Clinton campaign has gone on the attack against the government official who conducts oversight of the State Department she used to run, accusing him of partisanship and misconduct without any direct evidence. That strategy could backfire by politicizing the role of the government's inspectors general and undermining needed State Department reforms.
This is not the first time Team Clinton has accused a federal inspector general of trying to foil her presidential ambitions. In January, the campaign publicly accused the inspector general of the intelligence community of acting in concert with two Republican senators to leak details of now-classified information found on her private e-mail server. This week, the Clinton campaign set its sights on Steve Linick, who has served as the State Department’s inspector general since 2013.
Linick has never been regarded as a partisan official. President Barack Obama appointed him as the State Department IG and the Senate confirmed him. Before that appointment, the role had remained unfilled for more than 5 years and there was only an “acting” IG at state the entire time Clinton was secretary, a career foreign service officer.
When he joined the State Department, Linick brought with him Emilia DiSanto, who worked for him at the office of the inspector general for the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Previously, DiSanto worked as an investigator for Charles Grassley, a Republican and one of senators pushing for more transparency in the Clinton e-mail controversy.
After the newspaper the Hill published an anonymous accusation this week that Linick’s office had an “anti-Clinton bias” and that Linick was “excessively deferential” to DiSanto, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta added that the anonymous source’s accusations raised “serious questions about the independence of this office.”
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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-04/clinton-takes-aim-at-another-government-watchdog
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