Three senators have called for an investigation into a potential cover-up of documents that led to the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill.
Sens. David Vitter (R-La.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) today wrote Kevin L. Perkins, chairman of the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, stressing that they believe the Interior Department’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall “failed to ensure an independent, impartial and complete investigation into the Administration’s offshore drilling moratorium and related activities.”
Kendall, they noted, was reportedly involved in the so-called 30-Day Report, “which erroneously indicated that independent peer review experts endorsed the Administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.” Then, Kendall conducted an oversight investigation of the report.
“This raises serious questions about the independence and integrity of the Acting Inspector General’s efforts on this matter and her compliance with applicable law,” the senators wrote. “Even more troubling are facts tending to show that the Acting Inspector General stymied a full and complete investigation and an accurate and complete report pertaining to these matters.”
They noted that in documents obtained by the House Natural Resources Committee, Kendall revised the draft OIG investigation report to strike a sentence stating the role of President Obama in requesting the 30-Day Report, and proposed striking entire pages of findings, including those detailing the White House role in revising the report “to give the untrue impression that the Administration’s political decision to impose a six-month drilling moratorium was reviewed by independent peer review experts.”
“We would ask that your committee’s investigation into this matter evaluate each and every edit suggested by Ms. Kendall for potential impropriety and lack of impartiality on her part,” the senators requested, adding that the Interior Department and Office of the Inspector General have refused to comply with House Natural Resources Committee subpoenas for documents surrounding the 30-Day Report.
The senators requested that the Integrity Committee, which meets quarterly, convene within the next 30 days to review the allegations of impropriety.
“The moratorium crushed thousands of jobs – many of which Louisiana is still suffering from – and now we’re seeing extremely alarming evidence that the investigation I requested on the job-killing moratorium may not have been independent and could have involved the acting IG tampering with the facts,” Vitter said. “It’s pretty outrageous and offensive to know that politics seems to be likely influencing the office of the IG in addition to the science.”
NO say it is not so…..The liberal progressive folk in charge would never hide the truth to forward a “cause”
Better late than never, I suppose.
The voters in the Gulf States will have their revenge come November. How Obama can ever maintain that he’s “creating jobs” is anybody’s guess when he is, in reality, destroying thousands of them in the Gulf area. Shows you that Obama is willing to sell out an entire section of the country just to please some nuts in his base. Disgusting.
Obama has not only halted most gulf drilling he’s done it with the complicit MSM who’ve not so much as uttered a word about this outrage and instead like the good little Pravda robots they are point out how the USA is producing ‘more crude than ever before’. Imagine a Republican POTUS halting a project like some greenie wind-farm project – something favored by the left – the MSM would be shrieking like finger-pointing zombies.
With the gulf moratorium, killing keystone, cancelling offshore contracts (refusing to issue others), closing refineries, coal mines and coal burning electric plants, Obama has done more than any enemy of the state in killing off our entire energy production.
Seems they believe they can do anything they want with the MSM on the payroll, or, even worse, they just do it of their own accord, intentionally not reporting the facts or the truth as it really is.
This is how nations get subverted and destroyed from within, with self-righteous do-gooders thinking they are “protecting gaia” and “saving plant-life”. In reality, they have climbed atop a very high horse of being invited to the right parties and getting to interview the right people.
What’s really funny is that to a conservative, their highfalutin attitudes and self-assuredness are worthless and just window-dressing for what amounts to the same zit-faced high school kid who never had a date, wasn’t athletically good enough to be on a sports team and has no marketable skills, other than being a teleprompter-reader (yes, the talking heads on the news use them too) and looking like they know what they’re talking about, rather than actually being intelligent and able to recognize crap when they hear it.
Maybe it’s something in the water but over the years people have been able to convince themselves of anything. Orson Wells convinced radio listeners that Martians had landed in New Jersey. Brian Williams and countless other news pukes have convinced themselves they’re intelligent and capable of carrying on a conversation with someone who actually is.
It’s not so much, even that a left-winger just wants to “do a good job” wherever they get hired but they want to “make a difference”. And that difference has to do with being an activist and selling crap for a living, thinking that because they get paid for it, it makes them a “professional”.
When Obama fires IG’s that produce results he doesn’t like, why would it be surprising that an IG would act this way to save their job?
Libertyship46 wrote, “Shows you that Obama is willing to sell out an entire section of the country just to please some nuts in his base.”
I am afraid that such insinuations about motive are far off the mark. If Mr. Obama is following the Alinsky playbook, he never misses an opportunity to create a crisis. In this case, Mr. Obama builds his re-election base by creating unemployment. Who would vote against the person who is feeding them with endless unemployment benefits. One would have to be of a pretty stout constitution to vote against self-interest and perhaps the survival of one’s family. Now that’s a motive to which I can give credence. Every anti-growth measure Mr. Obama has taken can be seen as a means of gaining votes.
“the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency?”
Seriously?
I always thought it was illegal to fire an IG.
What happened?
There’s at least seven open IG positions that have never been filled, nor even recruited for, by this administration. Another ‘unprecedented’ in degree, duration, and lack of intention to follow the law. Nice way to have a spotless record on corruption, say hey! If the country had a press, folks would know about such crooked crap.
It’s part of the “most transparent administration in history.”
If the IGs aren’t there, you can’t see them. Voila!
I’ve 2 Louisiana friends who’ve packed up and moved out-of-state altogether for work. For there’s nowhere-to-be-seen employment in the seafood/ oil/ water activity tourism there once was.
As per this report.. what about Salazar and the DoI’s coupled incompetence both pre and post-spill?
Salazar is another Mother Gaia boob whose memorandum’s blatantly say as such. His department’s lack of inspection’s may have further lead to the spill to occur.
I don’t know why they are demanding an investigation. The Congress has “investigations” all the time, and nothing is ever done to the people or organizations being investigated even when wrongdoing is found. It’s a waste of time and taxpayer dollars when all they do is express shock about the misdeeds being investigated and never make any attempts to correct the problems.
Absolutely right.DC is just a club that ultimately protects itself.Hearings and investigations are just for looks nothing will ever happen.I am so ashamed it has come to this.
Halting migration from Democratic party slow-catastrophes like the cumpulsory union blue state cities are becoming, into the right-to-work sunshine states is –you can be sure –a wish of the union controllers, and would help explain ”Fast and Furious”, as, depopulating an area thru factional gang gunfighting was the goal of Eric Holder’s client Chiquita in smuggling arms to both sides (sound familiar?) of what was made to look like a ‘political conflict between communists and right wing death squads’ in the early 2000s Colombian banana war –in which Eric Holder was up to his eyeballs protecting Chiquita, right up until the tap for AG.
Maybe he was working out the techniques in Colombia so Fast and Furious could hit the ground running. Thank the Tea Party and the 2010 election –or we the people would probably have never even heard of Fast & Furious. Among other things (shiver).
Re that return migration from borderlands and the gulf back to the Detroits, or at least to the somewhere where the ballots can be more reliably tampered: works even better if air conditioning gets too expensive (hello, 57 so far but only for starters shut-down coal-powered electricity generating sites) –the sunshine states could revert pretty quickly to the slow-pace and too-hot-to-really-work-in-the-summertime era before the air conditioning revolution.
Fox News: Ron Paul is much bigger than people know
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSmiZam4uxg&feature=relmfu