Friday document drop reveals insight into Americorps IG firing

Byron York reports on some potentially explosive information that came out of a WH document drop on Friday afternoon on the politically motivated firing of Americorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, who the admin tried to paint as senile and unfit for office after the news of his firing was revealed:

Just hours after Sen. Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa released a report Friday on their investigation into the abrupt firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin, the Obama White House gave the lawmakers a trove of new, previously-withheld documents on the affair. It was a twist on the now-familiar White House late-Friday release of bad news; this time, the new evidence was put out not only at the start of a weekend but also hours too late for inclusion in the report.

The new documents support the Republican investigators’ conclusion that the White House’s explanation for Walpin’s dismissal — that it came after the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, unanimously decided that Walpin must go — was in fact a public story cobbled together after Walpin was fired, not before.

Walpin was axed on the evening of June 10, when he received a call from Norman Eisen, the special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform, who told Walpin he had one hour either to resign or be fired. The next day, congressional Republicans, led by Grassley, objected, charging that Walpin’s dismissal violated a recently-passed law requiring the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice before dismissing an inspector general.

Pressed for the reason Walpin was fired, Eisen told House and Senate aides that the White House conducted an “extensive review” of complaints about Walpin’s performance before deciding to dismiss him. According to the new report, Eisen told Congress that “his investigation into the merits of removing Gerald Walpin involved contacting members of the Corporation for National and Community Service [CNCS] board to confirm the existence of a ‘consensus’ in favor of removal.” But Republican investigators later discovered that during that “extensive review,” the White House did not even seek the views of the corporation’s board — the very people whose “consensus” purportedly led to Walpin’s firing.

Other than board chairman Alan Solomont, the Democratic mega-donor and Obama supporter who originally told the White House of his dissatisfaction with Walpin, “no member of the CNCS board had any substantive input about whether the removal of Gerald Walpin was appropriate,” according to the report. Only one other board member, vice-chairman Stephen Goldsmith, was even called by the White House, and that was on June 10, a few hours before Walpin was fired. According to the report, Goldsmith told investigators that “the White House had already decided to remove Walpin and wanted to confirm [Goldsmith's] support for the action.”

Read the whole thing.

Rest assured that if anything remotely close to this happened during the Bush admin, the MSM would have been all over it.

Oh wait – they already were … over the bogus Attorneysgate scandal. Where have they been on this scandal? An Instapundit reader describes it about right (via GayPatriot):

“Just like Nixon, except without the press coverage.”

Yep. I don’t think we’ll be seeing any eager Woodwards and Bernsteins during the Obama administration. In spite of the fact that he really is not an agent of the “good” kind of change he promised (honesty, transparency, and accountability), the MSM has too much invested in their guy to turn their backs on him now. They have a scratch my back, I scratch yours mentality over the corruptocrat sitting in the WH, and that’s not going to change anytime soon – if ever.