Joe Biden has ripped President Donald Trump for terminating the State Department’s inspector general even though he said he didn’t “recall” the Obama’s administration’s firing of an inspector general back in 2009, Fox News reports.
During a Yahoo News virtual town hall meeting held last Tuesday, Biden vowed not to fire any inspectors general if he were elected.
But when he served as vice president, the Obama administration fired several internal auditors.
"Inspector generals were designed to make government honest," Biden said.
The Obama administration went through several inspectors general, which drew criticism at the time.
"There has been a series of departures of inspectors general this year, prompting critics to charge that agencies are trying to quash criticism from the officials who are supposed to be their own in-house watchdogs," Politico reported in 2009.
One of the inspectors general, Gerald Walpin, was investigating “irregularities at St. HOPE, a California nonprofit run by former NBA star and Obama supporter Kevin Johnson” in 2008. The nonprofit had received an Americorps grant. The money was allegedly supposed to pay for tutoring services and theater and arts programs for local students. But Walpin and his team found the money was being used to pay staff salaries and for other unapproved expenses. Walpin determined that Johnson should be suspended from receiving taxpayer dollars.
The situation got more complicated when Johnson was elected mayor of Sacramento and the suspension threatened to block the city's access to stimulus dollars from the Obama administration. That’s when an Obama-appointed attorney helped smooth the situation over without Walpin.
“I can only say that I became a thorn in the side of someone, because I was doing my job,” Walpin had told Glenn Beck in an interview.
Walpin was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing in the Johnson probe.
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