(CNN) - Under fire from Congress for allegedly unethical practices, the acting inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Charles Edwards, has been reassigned, sources tell CNN.
Last Thursday, a senior DHS official tells CNN, Edwards "formally requested a voluntary reassignment ... to another career position, in another office within the Department. In line with existing protocols and procedures, that request for a voluntary reassignment was processed, and based on the employee's experience and technical background he has been reassigned to a career position at Science and Technology."
In June, as CNN reported at the time, the chair and ranking Republican on the Senate subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight described a number of potentially damaging allegations against Edwards, one of which was the allegation that he was susceptible to political pressure to the point that an investigation into Secret Service misconduct in Cartagena, Colombia, was scrubbed of damaging information. In the public report about the misconduct, whistleblowers told the senators, damaging information was “intentionally changed and withheld."
Other allegations by Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, included that Edwards “violated anti-nepotism laws and policies” to employ his wife, Madhuri Edwards, as a supervisory auditor in his office. Beyond that, Edwards is alleged to have misused staff to help his wife pursue a Ph.D. at a local community college, and intervened improperly to allow her to telecommute from India for seven months with an office-issued international BlackBerry phone. The allegations against Edwards also suggest that he retaliated against staff who “brought or attempted to call attention to (his) misconduct," the senators said.
Edwards could not be reached for comment.
“Inspectors general are supposed to serve as the eyes and ears of taxpayers within our agencies, guarding against waste, fraud, and abuse of power, and we expect them to abide by the same high standards of behavior they apply to agency officials," Sens. McCaskill and Johnson said in a joint satement.
"We hope that Mr. Edwards’ departure will pave the way for a new level of accountability and transparency within the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, and we plan to continue rigorous oversight to achieve that goal,” they said.
By KELLY COHEN | DECEMBER 17, 2013
Acting Deputy Inspector General Charles K. Edwards has resigned, according to officials with the Department of Homeland Security.
Edwards has been the subject of a Senate
probe of numerous allegations ranging from misusing agency money for
personal travel to favoring his spouse for government positions.
Carlton Mann, the current assistant IG, will now be the acting deputy IG, DHS said.
Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson called on Edwards to resign in an Oct. 30 letter.
McCaskill is chairman and Johnson is ranking minority member of the
Senate's subcommittee on financial and contracting oversight. Edwards
was to appear before the committee Dec. 19.
Updated 15 minutes ago
LOS
ANGELES — OK, enough with the grainy footage, the first-person accounts
and questionable evidence. Spike TV is looking to get to the bottom of
this whole Bigfoot mystery once and for all with its next reality
competition series, “10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty.”
Not
surprisingly, the series, which premieres Jan. 10, hasn’t attracted a
whole lot of what you would call studious, academic types. Instead, you
get a whole lot of angry, sexist rednecks yelling at each other in the
woods. What better way to attract a notoriously camera-shy, quite
probably mythical creature, than to have a bunch of people arguing in
the woods?
But it makes for watchable TV.
Dean Cain hosts
the show, which claims to offer the biggest cash prize in TV history.
Though prize underwriters Lloyd’s of London probably aren’t losing much
sleep over this one. The conditions for winning are definitive visual
and DNA proof of Bigfoot’s existence.
Two scientific experts will
be on hand for the series: Todd Disotell, a biological anthropologist
who runs New York University’s molecular primatology lab and Natalia
Reagan, a primatology expert.
According to Spike, DNA evidence
will be processed using a mobile DNA lab. If no definitive proof is
found, the group that presented the “most compelling evidence and
theory” will be awarded a $100,000 research grant to keep searching.
The
series is just the latest in Hollywood’s recent preoccupation with
Bigfoot. As the Los Angeles Times wrote last year, Bigfoot has been the
subject of Animal Planet’s series “Finding Biggoot,” the ”iCarly”
episode “iBelieve in Bigfoot,” a horror film called “Exists” from “Blair
Witch Project” director Eduardo Sanchez and the documentary film
“Sasquatch: The Quest.”
Any chance that $10 million prize will actually get awarded? Keep dreaming, Bigfoot lovers.
