Bloomberg is reporting that during Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, there was no “permanent, independent Inspector General” nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to protect the agency from waste, fraud, and abuse.
“For five years, including all of Clinton’s time as secretary, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General never had a confirmed inspector. Instead, it was lead by acting inspector Harold W. Geisel, a former ambassador who was accused of being too cozy to agency leadership by transparency groups like the Project on Government Oversight. Throughout the first half of President Obama’s first term, the absence of a State Department Inspector General while internal scandals and Benghazi rocked the department drew bipartisan criticism.”
So despite bipartisan calls for an Inspector General to be appointed throughout Clinton’s 4 years at State, no such watchdog was ever appointed or confirmed. And yet, almost miraculously, a permanent Inspector General was appointed just months after Clinton left office:
“By September 2013, several months after Clinton left State, the department finally had a permanent inspector, and the department recently released a report documenting how few e-mails the State Department has saved for government records. But the long-time gap, as well as the ones at other agencies, raise questions about what other problems aren’t being investigated.”