The State Department whistleblower is Aurelia Fedenisn. She worked in the department’s inspector general’s office until her retirement in December 2012. According to USA Today, she has sought protection as an official whistleblower after the State Department directly threatened her, once at her home. It threatened her with criminal charges when she turned over documents to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) showing evidence that the department had watered down her report, in which she alleged that the department at the highest levels had scuttled eight investigations into a range of criminal wrongdoing.
Dallas lawyer Damon Mathias, who represents Fedenisn, said Fedenisn hired him after two diplomatic security agents spoke in a threatening manner to her teenage children at her home in a Virginia suburb of Washington. The agents arrived at the home to talk to Fedenisn about documents Fedenisn had given to Cruz and told the teens that they demanded to speak to their mom immediately, Mathias said.
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Mathias says Fedenisn’s claim is that agents from State’s Diplomatic Security and other divisions engaged in very questionable and possibly criminal conduct; the Inspector General has been hampered in performing its oversight role; “and the findings they wanted to put in the report end up being left out,” Mathias said. “So you have a coverup of the coverup.”
When Fedenisn and her lawyers met with lawyers for the Office of the Inspector General, the government lawyers demanded she hand over the documents or they would refer the matter to the Department of Justice and Fedenisn would face criminal prosecution, Mathias said.
“They made it clear that they would go after her criminally,” he said.
“We refused to turn over the documents” and Fedenisn is now seeking whistle-blower protection, he said.
If this online bio is accurate, Aurelia Fedensin is a 23-year State Department officer who also served in the US military reserves as an intelligence officer. That’s not the typical profile of a crank or someone who just makes things up. The allegations Fedenisn’s IG investigation uncovered include the accusation that Obama bundler turned US ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman sought the services of prostitutes routinely, including underage girls. Gutman denies, and State denies any cover-up, neither of which are dispositive of the charges. State’s new spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, worked on the Obama campaign and has a history of saying things that are provably false. She comes to the job with no prior experience in the foreign service at all.
Fedensin’s investigations also include accusations that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail used prostitutes when they traveled with Clinton on her million mile march around the world. They also include allegations that State Department officials engaged in an underground drug ring in Baghdad, Iraq. The overarching accusation within all of this is that the State Department at the highest levels scuttled all eight investigations. Specifically, that career officer Patrick Kennedy and Clinton loyalist Cheryl Mills engineered the death of those investigations.
The State Department took Fedensin’s whistleblowing extremely seriously. CBS, which originally broke the story without naming Fedensin, reports that ”Two hours after CBS News made inquiries to the State Department about these charges, investigators from the State Department’s Inspector General showed up at [Fedenisn’s] door.” That’s apparently when they threatened her kids.
With all of this swirling around, there’s a decent argument to be made that the State Department’s two scandals — this one plus Benghazi, which has a body count and includes the then Secretary of State blaming a terrorist attack on a movie — make it the top overall scandal going. It has four dead Americans and now at least three threatened Americans, and an inspector general who is now seeking what amounts to asylum in the care of Congress against the executive branch that allegedly threatened her.
It’s hard to say where all of this goes. The US State Department, Justice Department, Treasury Department, National Security Agency and military are all caught up in serious scandals, any of which would dominate headlines if not for the presence and interference from all the other scandals. It looks like our government is in the beginning stages of a collapse.
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