Bogus Bonuses Still Abound in Federal Government. Just Look at Bruce Ohr.

As we noted back in 2013, when John Beale applied for a job with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, he claimed he had worked for former senator John Tunney of California. He didn’t, and nobody bothered to check. Beale said he served in Vietnam, where he contracted malaria, and therefore needed a handicapped parking spot. He didn’t serve in Vietnam and didn’t contract malaria. Nobody checked those claims either, and Beale got his handicapped parking spot, along with a job as an EPA “policy advisor.”

In 1994, Beale claimed he was a secret agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, but the mighty EPA failed to verify. That lapse enabled Beale to take more than two years off, with full pay, claiming he was in London, India, and Pakistan when he was actually kicking back at his vacation home in Massachusetts. Beale pulled off his CIA ruse for nearly 20 years, performed little if any work, and still drew retention bonuses. Beale continued to draw an EPA paycheck until 19 months after his retirement dinner cruise on the Potomac River, and 23 months after he announced he would retire. Beale also got retention bonuses even after he retired. As one representative asked in hearings shown on C-SPAN, “was that so he wouldn’t retire again?”

More recently, over at the federal Department of Justice, Bruce Ohr lost his Associate Deputy Attorney General job in 2017. According to a June 7 report by Alex Pappas of Fox News, Ohr received a pay raise of $2,600 in 2018, a year after his demotion. In 2017, Ohr received a “performance bonus” of $28,000, and the year before that a bonus of $14,520. Whatever one thinks of the Russia collusion story, complicated as a John le Carré novel, the timing of the bonuses seems a bit strange, and that is not the only oddity here.

The revealing DOJ documents, it turns out, were not produced by the DOJ Inspector General, a congressional committee, a government whistleblower, or the New York Times. The documents were the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, an independent group that uses the open records or freedom of information laws and other tools “to hold to account politicians and public officials who engage in corrupt activities.”

If this revelation winds up on C-SPAN, it just might draw more viewers than the hearing for EPA-CIA-Vietnam fake John Beale, who ripped off taxpayers for more than $1 million but retained his generous government pension.