Did Ryan Zinke Try to Fire His Department’s Inspector General for Investigating Him?

A year ago, Mary Kendall, the acting inspector general in the U.S. Department of the Interior, sent a letter to the agency’s boss, Secretary Ryan Zinke, on what her office had determined were the D.O.I.’s “most significant management and performance challenges” (as it is required to do annually, by law). Of the nine challenges discussed, there was one—“promoting and maintaining an ethical workplace culture”—that was unprecedented in the seventeen years that such reports have been issued. “We have identified instances in which some D.O.I. employees, including senior officials, have engaged in unethical or illegal conduct,” the report said. Violations included sexual harassment (an ongoing problem among National Park Service employees) and “the acceptance of gifts from outside sources; conflicts of interest, including the use of public office for private gain; and the misuse of Government resources.” Kendall concluded that her office was committed to continuing its investigations, a promise she has kept over the past year. She is currently leading at least four investigations into the activities of Secretary Zinke himself, including one concerning his ties to a real-estate deal, in Whitefish, Montana, that is backed by the chairman of Halliburton. Last Tuesday, reports emerged that Zinke had dismissed Kendall, who has held her position for close to a decade, replacing her with a Trump political appointee named Suzanne Israel Tufts, who formerly held a post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A department spokesman confirmed Tufts’s move to The Hill, but the source of the news was a leaked e-mail sent by the HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, to his staff the previous Friday. “It is with mixed emotions that I announce that Suzanne Israel Tufts, our Assistant Secretary for Administration, has decided to leave HUD to become the Acting Inspector General at the Department of Interior,” Carson wrote. The subject line of the e-mail was “A Fond Farewell.” The news took a strange turn a day and a half later, when Heather Swift, a senior adviser to Zinke, said in a statement that the D.O.I. had not approved the hiring of a political appointee to replace Kendall. “Ms. Tufts is not employed by the Department and no decision was ever made to move her to Interior,” Swift said. She said that Carson, who is a friend of Zinke’s, had “sent out an email that had 100 percent false information in it.” The White House, she added, had referred Tufts to Interior officials for a possible position in the inspector general’s office, but “at the end of the day, she was not offered a job.” The mixup was explained away as a “miscommunication at the staff level,” according to an unnamed HUD official who spoke to the Washington Post.
Later the same day, coincidentally or not, Kendall’s office issued a report documenting its investigations and conclusions concerning some of Zinke’s alleged abuses of power. Lola Zinke, the Secretary’s wife, had been allowed to ride with the Secretary in government vehicles despite an Interior policy prohibiting the practice among non-governmental employees. (Zinke ultimately reimbursed the department for the taxpayer dollars her rides had cost.) The I.G. found that Zinke had asked his staff to research whether his wife could get a job as an Interior Department volunteer, as a way to make her ride-alongs legitimate and free, according to one ethics official. Zinke “denied that it was an effort to circumvent the requirement to reimburse the D.O.I. for her travel.” The report also documented how the U.S. Park Police had provided a twenty-five-thousand-dollar unarmed security detail to accompany Zinke and his wife on their holiday in Turkey and Greece last summer. (He apparently was concerned about his safety in Istanbul.) Zinke also invited two political contributors, who had hosted a campaign fund-raiser for him in 2014, when he was running for Montana’s lone seat in Congress, on a government-paid trip to California’s Channel Islands National Park. He did not notify D.O.I. lawyers of his financial ties to his two guests...In the meantime, a total of fifteen investigations into Zinke’s alleged misconduct have been opened since he took office, including I.G. inquiries that have already been closed, and others from the Office of Special Counsel and the Government Accountability Office...MORE