Faking his attendance record was one thing, but that’s not the only way Beale defrauded the EPA. This paragraph comes from the sentencing memorandum filed in the case of the United States of America v. John C. Beale: “In addition to his theft of time—amounting to approximately two-and-a-half years between 2000 and 2012—Mr. Beale has acknowledged that he billed the EPA $57,000 for five trips to California over a two-year period that were unnecessary to the performance of his Agency work and that he should have paid for himself because the travel was made for personal reasons.”
The funds (spent on hotels and first-class plane tickets that Beale claimed he needed because he had a back injury) covered John’s flights to California, where he visited family members in Bakersfield.
There was also the matter of Beale’s handicapped parking spot at the EPA. He asserted that he needed one because he had contracted malaria when he was a soldier in Vietnam. The problem? He never fought in Vietnam and he never had malaria. Again, nobody asked him for documentation. But he told us in his deposition that he knew the symptoms of malaria; “having been a medic in the Army, I treated people with malaria.” The ultimate cost of that parking spot, by the way, was eight thousand dollars.
McCarthy, Beale’s final EPA supervisor, decided to bring the spy-who-never-was in from the cold in December 2010. That’s when she called him to terminate his long-term “research project.” He told us, “She asked me to come back to be working full-time on kind of the regular duties and reassume management of the international work and the climate work for the air office, and basically said things were so busy that we just can’t afford having somebody out there doing an academic project. We need all hands on deck.”
Beale complied—at least for a while. Then he decided to retire. The February 4, 2014, memorandum from the Senate Republican staff of the Committee on Environmental and Public Works states, “May 4, 2011, McCarthy approved a draft email to be sent to all OAR[Office of Air and Radiation] staff announcing Beale’s imminent retirement from the Agency:
I’d like to express my appreciation to JB for managing OAR’s international efforts these past months while we worked through an important period of leadership transition. . . . John will now turn his attention to a few projects where his expertise and experience can continue to add significant value. As you know—John has been a vital part of EPA and the OAR leadership for more years than he cares to remember. He is beginning to look forward to his retirement in the near future—but thankfully has agreed to work on some key efforts in the near term.
Beale wasn’t the only EPA retiree at the time. His old friend and mentor Robert Brenner decided to hang it up as well, and the two planned a joint retirement party, along with a third colleague. The shindig, which took place on September 22, 2011, was reportedly a lavish affair (charged to Brenner’s wife’s credit card) on a yacht that cruised the Potomac River with more than one hundred EPA employees and their guests. Among them was McCarthy.
You think the saga ends there? Nope. Beale supposedly retired at that time. But more than a year after the fancy party, he was still getting a paycheck. Not just any paycheck. He was paid his full $206,000 salary, a sum that included that 25 percent retention bonus. In fact, he was making more than McCarthy. Why was he still getting paid? He never submitted his retirement paperwork.
Ultimately, Beale was caught and prosecuted and pleaded guilty to felony theft of government property. He repaid the whole $886,186 before going to jail in 2013 and liquidated his retirement accounts to pay an additional $507,207 in penalties. He was sentenced to thirty-two months in federal prison and released on June 1, 2016. In his deposition, he told us that he perpetrated the fraud out of greed, and that he always thought there was a “good likelihood” that he would eventually get caught. He added, “it kind of becomes like an addiction. I’m not saying it’s an addiction but it’s similar properties, and I think I made up my mind several times to stop but it never succeeded.”
If his abuse of the system weren’t so egregious, it might have been funny. Jon Stewart found humor in the situation in a segment about our hearings on The Daily Show. In his inimitable sarcastic style, Stewart commented, “This is what’s so wonderful about this story. This man is a liar and boring as [bleep]. . . . That’s what is so fascinating here. It’s an amazing fraud perpetrated by a guy so he could do things we only do when we’ve run out of other things to do! I will commit fraud and then, eh, read a book, maybe ride a bike. There’s nothing on television. Then I’ll make some juice from concentrate. I don’t know. So again, it’s brazen criminal, ordinary life. He’s the secret life of Walter [bleep] Mitty.”
I know of no better story for expressing the lack of accountability you see all over the Deep State. You see, Beale did not make it all the way to retirement because he was incredibly good at this. He made it because the Deep State takes care of its own. Beale was punished only because his behavior went past the egregious to the just plain nuts.
But wait. There’s more, as they say. Remember Beale’s good friend and recruiter Robert Brenner? Apparently Brenner had been totally in the dark about Beale’s nefarious activities. We found out at the hearing that Beale just happened to have spent the past two weeks in Brenner’s guest room after having minor throat surgery. When I heard that during the hearing, I could only sputter, shake my head, and say, “Mr. Chairman, this is just an unbelievable story. I yield back.”
Stewart used that clip of me on the show and shouted as if in disbelief, “This guy Beale just broke the House Oversight Committee! Look at Chaffetz’s face! He can’t take it anymore. He’s like, sorry, guys, I gotta tap out. Lucky for him, somebody else is ready to tap in, baby.” Then Stewart played a clip of my colleague Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who asked Brenner with an incredulous look, “Beale is staying in your guesthouse?” Brenner answered, “Mr. Cummings, Mr. Beale needed a place to live in the area. . . .”
As for Beale’s supervisor, Gina McCarthy, on July 18, 2013, the Senate confirmed her as the thirteenth administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a post she held until Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2017. I had several more encounters with her over the years. Read on.
Sexual Harassment and Porn at the EPA
While John Beale may have been one of the most outrageous cases of abuse at the EPA, sadly it was not the only one. During my time on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, we held at least four hearings looking into mismanagement and incompetence at the EPA.
One of the agency’s middle managers, a man named Peter Jutro, was the subject of our gathering on April 30, 2015. I started the hearing by saying, “Mr. Jutro was the acting associate administrator for the EPA Office of Homeland Security. He also happens to be a serial sexual harasser.”
Patrick Sullivan, the assistant inspector general for investigations in the EPA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), testified before us that day. In his statement he wrote, “In August 2013, we received an allegation that Jutro, the Acting Associate Administrator for the EPA Office of Homeland Security[,] engaged in a series of interactions involving a 21-year-old female intern from the Smithsonian Institution . . . who reported him to a supervisor and indicated that she was uncomfortable and scared.”
Jutro’s side of the story, according to Sullivan, was that
his initial contact with the intern took place on or around July 16, 2014. Jutro confirmed that he gave the intern his business card, so that she could contact him regarding career questions. He stated that, after several failed attempts to meet, they finally met for lunch at a restaurant on July 30, 2014. Jutro stated, during lunch, that he invited the intern to his office, so they could talk where it was less noisy. Once in his office, Jutro confirmed he asked the intern what turned her on and what excited her.
He explained to the OIG that he asked these questions from a career standpoint. Jutro admitted he took a photograph of the intern’s face and toes.
Contrary to what the intern sai
d, Jutro denied brushing up against her, attempting to kiss her, or grabbing her buttocks but conceded that he might have put his hand on the small of her back as they walked through security. He admitted to wiping something off the intern’s face during lunch but he did not feel it was inappropriate.
However, we found that wasn’t the only time Jutro engaged in what was, even in the best light, inappropriate behavior. Continued Sullivan, “From 2004 through July 2014, Jutro engaged in unwelcome conduct with 16 additional females, which included touching, hugging, kissing, photographing, and making double entendre comments with sexual connotations.”
Sixteen more women. At least thirteen of them made formal complaints to their bosses or appropriate senior-level officials at the EPA.
What happened to Jutro? Was he reprimanded? Fired? No. He got promoted. Finally, when he was confronted with the allegations and asked to submit to questioning, he avoided due process by retiring—with his full government pension, no less. These days he is a private consultant. His website, where he blogs about subjects like the future of bees, understanding the farm-to-table movement, and the tree of life, touts his tenure with the EPA yet makes no mention of his ignominious departure from the agency.
Perhaps that’s because he didn’t see anything wrong with his behavior. Mother Jones included an email from Jutro in a September 2, 2016, article, in which he denied wrongdoing. “It is true that I have hugged many people, both men and women, and have done so since childhood. My parents were German Jewish refugees who detested the coldness of their former country in the 1930s and strongly encouraged this warmer behavior in me. I also learned to sometimes kiss a person on the cheek or head as a greeting or farewell. In no case was there ever a sexual component to this. I recognize in retrospect that my behavior might have made someone uncomfortable and I feel bad and embarrassed about that, but it was never my intent. There may be actual sexual harassment at EPA, but I was not a part of it.”
More infuriating is the fact that the EPA management did nothing about this man. When confronted about EPA’s lack of action, supervisors either tried to justify the lack of oversight or offered no plausible explanation for it.
It would be one thing if Jutro were the only serial sexual harasser at the EPA who committed his crimes and paid no penalty for them. Unfortunately, there are others. Only four months later, on July 29, 2015, we found ourselves holding yet another hearing about sexual harassment, cover-ups, and employer retaliation at the EPA.
This case centered on an EPA scientist named Paul Bertram. Like Jutro, Bertram was an older man (sixty-two) who forced his attentions on a younger woman. This time she was a twenty-four-year-old research fellow. As I explained in the hearing, “[T]his perpetrator, Mr. Paul Bertram, inappropriately hugged her, rubbed her back, grabbed her, rubbed her hands, touched her knees, kissed her, made suggestive comments, and engaged in unsolicited physical and verbal contact.”
This happened countless times over a period of years. The consequence? They moved the sixty-two-year-old’s cubicle.
This wasn’t the scientist’s only offense. Ross Tuttle served in human resources in the EPA’s Region 5 office, where Bertram worked. It was his job to investigate the complaint, he told us. “I obtained the names of more than a dozen other female interns that had worked in this same organization going back to the year 2000. . . . From their statements, I learned that not only had this employee been systematically sexually harassing female interns (going back to at least the year 2000), but an email I received from a current employee and male colleague of the perpetrator stated that the perpetrator had been ‘disciplined’ by his university for this same kind of behavior during his Ph.D. program.”
Tuttle and several other Region 5 employees graphically testified about how the district’s senior management retaliated against them for blowing the whistle on Bertram. When they reported the harassment, or tried to do their jobs, these employees were shouted at, told to “stand down,” instructed to violate the law, and called “insubordinate” for refusing to do so. Worse, they were shuffled into dead-end positions and given meaningless tasks that gave them no chance for advancement. Behind their backs, they said, management called them “troublemakers” and “activists.” Their careers were derailed, they were reassigned, or they were demoted.
I questioned EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, John Beale’s former boss, about this when it was her turn to testify at the hearing. These are excerpts from our exchange.
Chaffetz: Do you believe the three witnesses that were here . . . do you believe they were retaliated against?
McCarthy: No, I do not.
Chaffetz: We heard nearly two hours of testimony, and you believe that their statements are false.
McCarthy: No, I did not indicate that.
Chaffetz: Well, they said that they were each retaliated against, and you said that is not the case.
McCarthy: I indicated that what I look at is the entire facts around the case. And, clearly, we had confusion in how we investigated it, but they were part of a large team that actually recommended removal of that employee, and they are no longer in federal employ. . . . There was nothing to retaliate, and retaliation will not be tolerated.
It went on and on like this. I talked about all the other cases and the fact that none of the cases was referred for criminal prosecution even though the conduct was against the law.
McCarthy had nothing but excuses and bureaucratic-speak. I finally had this exchange:
Chaffetz: It is against the law. It is against your own policies and procedures. What these people testified to is they had to step up, go to the mat, and say—offering a reprimand is not sufficient.
McCarthy: The employee was removed, sir, not reprimanded. He was removed from service.
Chaffetz: The problem is they had ten victims to get to that point. Now, I grant it, you were not the administrator the entire time. I understand that. But this predator, the quote we heard, this was a predator who was fed a steady diet of interns. The first time it happened he should’ve been fired, and he should’ve probably been referred to the authorities for criminal prosecution. It happened ten times, and you never did that.
McCarthy: I am aware that eleven years ago there was an issue raised. And it was handled appropriately, is my understanding—
Chaffetz: Appropriately? He got a promotion. He continued to work there.
McCarthy: He was carefully watched. The very minute we had any indication of impropriety, which was the recent issue, we took prompt action.
Chaffetz: You moved his cubicle four spaces away. You think that is appropriate?
What do you say to the mother and father who sent their twenty-four-year-old to the EPA, she is starting her career, and she is harassed? Look at her statement. And you did the appropriate thing by moving her four cubicles away?
McCarthy: Human Resources recommended the same thing as every manager, which was to actually proceed to removal.
Chaffetz: That is not what initially happened. It was in his record that they had had ten complaints, ten sexual harassment complaints, against this gentleman, and he was allowed to continue to be there. And, as we heard testimony, a predator who was fed a steady diet of interns.
I said at the time, and I still believe it’s true, “One of the most toxic environments we have is at the EPA. The mission of the EPA is to protect the environment, protect the people. The problem is the EPA doesn’t protect its own employees.” As we have seen, it doesn’t police its employees, either.
In our April 20, 2015, hearing, besides looking into Peter Jutro’s misdeeds, we also discussed three EPA employees who watched pornography at work.
One of them, fifty-four-year-old Thomas Manning, from Lafayette, Indiana, was an EPA information technology (IT) specialist. He used one of the agency’s laptops to surf the Internet for pornography. By his admission, he collected more than fifty thousand images and videos. Before returning the laptop to the EPA, he tried to erase his illicit activity.
However, some evidence of that activity was uncovered when the computer was reassigned to another employee, who reported it to his supervisor. Besides the agency laptop, Manning kept a personal hard drive locked in a drawer in his office with tens of thousands of pornographic images.
Manning was caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to thirty months in federal prison. He was one of the few who faced the consequences of their actions. At our hearing, we were told of an unnamed employee who downloaded seven thousand pornographic files onto an EPA server and twenty thousand more onto his laptop. When questioned by a special agent for the OIG, he admitted that he watched between two and six hours of sexually explicit material daily while at work. Unbelievably, he told the agent he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong because all his assigned work was done. Even more unbelievably, Inspector Patrick Sullivan informed us, “During the period he viewed the pornography, he received several performance awards, including awards up to $2,000 and a time off award.”
This employee was put on paid administrative leave in May 2013. It took nearly two years—until March 2015—for the U.S. attorney’s office to decide they weren’t going to prosecute him. The following month he retired.
So far, we’ve seen how the Deep State wastes money and does their best to keep outsiders from seeing what they’re up to. Here we see what happens when their problems are uncovered: paid administrative leave, retirement with full pension, or nothing at all.
Sullivan went on to discuss another unnamed employee whose hardcore viewing habit was exposed by a child who was in the office during Bring Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day and happened to see what was on his laptop. This guy claimed he only watched pornography at the office for one to four hours a day. “About 3,500 pornographic images were recovered from the employee’s laptop and external media,” Sullivan testified, and approximately 30 to 40 percent of the data on his external media devices was devoted to indecent material. Like his smut-viewing colleague, this employee went on paid administrative leave and was not prosecuted by the U.S. attorney’s office.
The Deep State Page 4