New IG faces conflicts, scrutiny
Questions raised about watchdog at State Dept.
WASHINGTON – The State Department’s newly installed inspector general, Stephen Akard, has no investigative or oversight experience and faces a slew of potential conflicts of interest, according to an internal State Department email.
Akard has another job at the State Department: director of the Office of Foreign Missions, a political appointment he’s held since 2019. In that job, which he plans to keep, Akard reports to Brian Bulatao, a top adviser and longtime friend of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s.
Pompeo and Bulatao attended West Point together in the 1980s, and they cofounded a business, Thayer Aerospace, in the 1990s. When Trump named Pompeo as CIA director, he tapped Bulatao as the spy agency’s chief operating officer. When Pompeo became secretary of state, he brought Bulatao with him as the agency’s undersecretary for management.
In July 2019, Pompeo described Bulatao and his other business co-founders as “my best friends in the whole world.”
Akard – who is serving in an acting capacity as the IG after Trump ousted his predecessor – is an ally of Vice President Mike Pence. An Indiana native, Akard served on the state’s economic development corporation when Pence was governor.
“This is just astonishing,” said Walter Shaub, who served as director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics before resigning over disagreements with the Trump administration. Inspector generals are supposed to be completely independent of the agencies they oversee, he said, but Akard is a Trump political appointee and part of the State Department’s management team.
“I’ve just never seen anything like it,” said Shaub, a senior adviser to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is investigating two highly contentious matters that touch directly on Pompeo’s actions: allegations that he used a State Department employee to run personal errands for himself and his wife, and questions about the State Department’s decision to greenlight a highly controversial $8 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
At Pompeo’s urging, President Donald Trump announced May 15 that he was firing Steve Linick.
Democrats in Congress accused Pompeo of trying to shield himself from Linick’s inquiries. Pompeo flatly rejected those assertions, saying Linick’s ouster was not retaliatory.
In an email obtained by USA TODAY, Diana Shaw, the State Department’s deputy inspector general, acknowledges the possible conflicts of interest and said Akard is working to address the issue. She said the complexity of disentangling his conflicts and identifying issues on which he will have to recuse himself could delay oversight work.
Shaw did not respond to emailed questions. The IG office’s spokeswoman did not return a voicemail seeking comment, and the State Department’s press office also did not respond to emailed questions.