The Office of Special Counsel was created after the Watergate scandal to investigate illegal government personnel practices such as reprisals against government whistleblowers and violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal agency resources for partisan political purposes. At the moment, however, the current special counsel, Scott Bloch, is himself under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which on May 5 raided his office and home. Neither Bloch, who remains in his job, nor the White House would comment on the inquiry. Appointed in 2004, Bloch has been variously accused of retaliating against the OSC’s own whistleblowers; of discriminating against the agency’s gay employees; and, when the Office of Personnel Management inspector general looked into this last allegation, of hiring a private technology firm to erase potentially incriminating e-mails.
Among the documents likely to interest prosecutors is a January 2008 13-page draft memo, produced by an OSC oversight task force. The memo, obtained and released yesterday by the nonprofit watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight (excerpts below and on the following seven pages), criticizes the OSC for failing to investigate aggressively a series of Republican National Committee-sponsored pep talks at administrative agencies that appear to have violated the Hatch Act (see below and Pages 2 and 3) and for interfering with a criminal probe into the Justice Department purge of nine U.S. Attorneys (Pages 3 through 7).
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