Compelling Evidence of the OGE's Attempt to Lose Mr. Mineta's CY2000 Financial Disclosure

If you read the four white papers described in yesterday's blog posting (especially this one ), you know that I believe that the U.S. Office of Government Ethics tried to help Mr. Mineta out by "losing" his Calendar Year 2000 Public Financial Disclosure report, only to "re-find" it after the Project on Government Oversight called them on it in POGO's FOIA appeal letter. That particular disclosure, of course, was the only one for which Mr. Mineta was required by law to provide details of his profit of up to $1 million in Trimble Navigation stock options.

Think that maybe I'm just making all this up? Think again. Listen to these two recorded conversations I had with Ms. Denise Shelton, an Ethics Assistant with the OGE whose job is to fulfill requests for copies of financial disclosures of government officials and legislators:

1. February 23, 2007 (recorded discussion) -- I called Denise shortly after I received a copy of the OGE's initial response, dated Feb. 12, 2007, to POGO's Freedom of Information Act request, in which the OGE seemed to say that they no longer had Mr. Mineta's CY2000 disclosure. As you'll hear, Denise tried very hard to find that disclosure but couldn't, and didn't know why it wasn't anywhere in their records. She also confided that she was the person who destroyed disclosures that were over six years old, and kept a list (which I called a log) of those documents. She also said that she had no record of ever destroying Mr. Mineta's CY2000 disclosure. In other words, she found no record that the CY2000 disclosure had ever even existed. I immediately relayed this information to Scott Amey, POGO's General Counsel, who mentioned this amazing admission in his March 12, 2007, FOIA appeal letter to OGE.

2. April 26, 2007 (recorded discussion) -- After the OGE responded in a letter dated April 12, 2007, to POGO's FOIA appeal letter, I wanted to check with Denise to make sure that she could now find the CY2000 disclosure. Listen to what she says now about not keeping a record of what disclosures are destroyed, and how she got in trouble for saying that. Think maybe that someone at OGE was pretty upset by POGO's FOIA appeal letter, and Denise's admission to me that she kept a list of the disclosures she destroyed?

By the way, I don't think for a minute that Ms. Shelton did anything wrong, ethically or legally. These shenanigans are the responsibility of someone much higher up in the OGE chain of command. It's especially ironic when the very agency chartered with ensuring we have an ethical government plays such unethical games.

Jerry

P.S. For those "geeks" among my readers, these conversations were recorded using a voice modem on my computer in combination with the excellent TRx Recorder software from Australia. While editor of a twice-monthly newsletter for the National Transportation Operations Coalition for seven years, I recorded hundreds of similar discussions. Doing so is entirely legal in both Texas and Washington, DC, both of which legally permit one party consent recording.