This week marks the sentencing of Scott Bloch, the former head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) for willfully withholding pertinent information from a congressional investigation.
At the moment, it seems that the U.S. Attorney’s Office intends to support Bloch’s request that he only receive a sentence of probation for his crimes. In response, the attorneys representing Bloch’s victims have written a letter to Judge Deborah A. Robinson, the presiding judge, asking that he receive a sentence that more “appropriately reflects the severe, long-lasting, and broad impact of his actions.”
This protest of Bloch’s light sentence by the opposing attorneys is more than appropriate. While Bloch has only pleaded guilty to the crime of withholding information, the scope of his misconduct goes far beyond that. Bloch routinely ignored and even dismissed whistleblower complaints, retaliated against whistleblowers on his own staff by either “reassigning” or flat-out firing them, and illegally removed language clarifying OSC’s jurisdiction over sexual orientation discrimination complaints from the OSC website and official documents. When these instances of misconduct led to a congressional investigation of the OSC, Bloch hired a private technology company to conduct a 7-layer memory wipe of his own computer and several other OSC laptops, making the information held on it virtually irretrievable.
As head of the OSC, Bloch left hundreds of whistleblowers without a place to turn to for help, defied the very mission of his own organization, and impeded a federal investigation. To give him a probationary sentence for crimes that damaged the lives of hundreds of people would be little more than a slap on the wrist.
As POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian pointed out in her statement today, “There have been athletes who have received stiffer penalties for lying about steroid use.” Just to point out how light this sentence really is, baseball player Miguel Tejada got a probationary sentence in addition to a fine and community service for lying to Congress about his steroid use, a crime which was much less significant in scope and impact. Why should a man who essentially made a mockery out of an entire government agency get a lighter sentence than a baseball player who lied about cheating?
Stay tuned for Bloch’s sentencing and POGO’s response.
In the meantime, read POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian's statement on the issue here; or check out this summary of some of Bloch’s more egregious transgressions.
-- Rick D'Amato
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