In a brazenly Nixonian move, the Obama Administration dismissed Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General charged with oversight of the financial affairs of AmeriCorps, the government-sponsored community service organization created by the Clinton Administration in 1993.
Michelle Obama allegedly had a hand in Walpin’s dismissal, which came directly on the heels of two comprehensive and embarrassing reports by Walpin that detailed massive waste and fraud in two of Americorps’ biggest projects — St. HOPE Academy, and the Teaching Fellows Program, run by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. Michelle Obama is also reported to be grooming candidates for chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which is the organization that runs AmeriCorps.
It seems that Gerald Walpin was doing his job a little too well. I guess the Chicago Machine doesn’t put up with that level of honesty. Apparently Americorps (or whatever it will become in the near future under an almost inevitable arranged marriage to ACORN or some other Democrat-controlled political organizing machine, thanks to the new Give/Serve Act) is too valuable to Obama’s grand community service/political indoctrination scheme for it to be tainted by the whiff of scandal, particularly financial malfeasance. As a student of Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama knows that a villain can never be effective as an organizer.
(h/t Michelle Malkin, who has more on the story here, including excerpts of an interview with Gerald Walpin by Byron York.)
ADDED: More from Byron York:
In dismissing Walpin, the president seemed to trample on the law — a law he himself had co-sponsored as a senator — that protects inspectors general from political influence and retribution. In addition, it appears that at least part of the reason Walpin was fired was for the tenacity he showed in investigating misuse of AmeriCorps money by a friend and supporter of the president, Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, California [and the director of St. HOPE Academy]. Walpin got the goods — evidence of Johnson’s serious misuse of federal dollars — and the inspector general ended up getting fired for his troubles.
Read it all.
