“Why Isn’t The White House Letting Him Go?”Career officials are in open revolt over at the Office of Special Counsel.
The underlings are outraged at their boss, Scott Bloch, who is under investigation by the FBI. The one man in the Bush Administration who is supposed to investigate whistle blower complaints is himself accused of retaliating against whistle blowers.
“We’re trying to deal with this by decapitation,” one official told TPM. “The big question is: Why isn’t the White House letting him go?”
Meanwhile, Bloch is desperately trying to improve morale.
Against the advice of career officials in the office — some of whom have been subpoenaed in the investigation — Bloch is convening a day-long “retreat” in Alexandria, VA, flying in officials from offices in Dallas, Oakland and Detroit, for a pep talk.
During the training session, Bloch himself will give a talk entitled: “Training on Accountability, Efficiency, OSC’s Independence, and “What a Whistleblower is.”
The meeting was scaled back from Bloch’s original idea of a multi-day retreat out in the Shenandoah Valley.
“He brought up the idea and said, ‘What does everybody think? And everybody just kind of sat there,” the official said.
We’ll post the agenda for next week’s retreat shortly.
Late Update: One former OSC official points to the afternoon session on “E-Discovery Training” and says it’s “ironic in the extreme, given the accusations of his own attempted destruction of computer files that were requested in connection with the investigation of him!”
Bloch reportedly hired Geeks on Call to erase his email files.
Late Update: Here’s the agenda.