The Missing Watchdogs at State

[Geee]

National Review:

Monday morning, CBS News initially misreported that it “has unearthed documents from the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), an internal watchdog agency, that implicate the State Department in a series of misconducts worldwide.” (Emphasis added.)

 

By mid afternoon Monday, CBS corrected its earlier misidentification of the State Department’s “internal watchdog agency” as the Diplomatic Security Service (officially known as the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, or “DS”). That internal watchdog agency, CBS noted, is in fact the Office of Inspector General. CBS News released a clarification in an “updated” article Monday afternoon:

According to an internal State Department Inspector General’s memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail ‘engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries’ — a problem the report says was “endemic.”

The bigger endemic “watchdog” problem for the Department of State, as I wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on June 5, is that its Office of Inspector General has been without a Senate-confirmed IG for more than five years. Likewise, for years President Obama has been derelict in his duty to fill vacant inspector-general posts at the departments of Labor, Interior, Defense, Homeland Security, and at the Agency for International Development