Pelosi calls for VA chief to resign

Speaker, groups cite watchdog report on smear campaign

“It is unfair to expect accountability from the nearly 400,000 VA employees and not demand the same from its top executive.”

— James W. “Bill” Oxford, American Legion national commander

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie to resign Saturday, after a report that he orchestrated a smear campaign against a congressional aide who said she was assaulted at a VA hospital.

“The VA Inspector General report makes clear that Secretary Wilkie engaged in an extremely disturbing cover-up campaign of sexual assault against a veteran,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement. “He has lost the trust and confidence to serve, and he must immediately resign.”

The country’s leading veteran groups — including the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America — echoed the call, saying Wilkie had breached their trust and could no longer effectively lead an agency responsible for the care of 9 million veterans.

“It is unfair to expect accountability from the nearly 400,000 VA employees and not demand the same from its top executive,” wrote American Legion National Commander James W. “Bill” Oxford. “Wilkie failed to meet the standard that the veteran who came forward with the complaint deserved. By the promises set forth by his own department, the American Legion believes Secretary Wilkie should resign.”

Oxford also called on acting Deputy Secretary Pamela Powers and top public affairs officials James Hutton and Curt Cashour to step down after Inspector General Michael Missal found they had repeatedly tried to discredit the veteran.

Even Concerned Veterans of America, one of the most muscular arms of the conservative Koch network and a Trump administration ally, criticized the secretary and his senior aides, saying that “VA leaders should always put the veteran and the integrity of the institution ahead of themselves.”

A White House spokesman declined to comment.

VA press secretary Christina Noel said in a statement that Wilkie “will continue to lead the department” and cited his success achieving “landmark improvements in Veterans’ trust, quality of care and employee satisfaction,” as well as a “historic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Since Wilkie has just weeks left in his term, the growing calls for his resignation may be mostly symbolic. But they highlight the way the veterans community is changing.

While the overwhelming number of veterans still hail from the Vietnam era, a new generation of those who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is increasingly vocal and digitally savvy. Additionally, women are the fastest-growing veterans group, and the new inspector general report casts doubt on the VA’s public pledge to support women.

Wilkie, 58, has faced criticism before. Last summer, he rejected calls to remove gravestones bearing Nazi swastikas at a pair of federal veterans cemeteries, saying it was his duty to preserve the historical markers. (He eventually relented under pressure.)

He has doubled down on his opposition to updating the VA’s motto so that it’s gender-neutral. And Wilkie, like President Donald Trump, has opposed stripping Confederate names from American military bases, an issue that came to a head Friday with Senate passage of a sweeping military policy bill that would require the names be stripped in defiance of Trump’s veto threats.

The calls for Wilkie’s resignation come after a 10-month investigation by the department’s Inspector General, which found that he repeatedly sought to dig up dirt on Navy veteran Andrea Goldstein, a senior policy adviser to House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mark Takano, D-Calif., after she reported in September 2019 that a man groped and propositioned her as she waited in line at the VA hospital in Washington, D.C.

Wilkie and his senior aides spread false and disparaging claims about Goldstein in and outside the agency, investigators found, as they ignored an often-hostile atmosphere of harassment for female veterans at the medical center.

Wilkie told his staff that Goldstein had filed frivolous complaints of assault in the Navy and that Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, had given him some of this damaging information from when they served in the same command.

Wilkie, Powers and other senior agency officials refused to fully cooperate with Missal’s inquiry, the report said, impeding investigators from determining whether Wilkie had violated government policies or laws as he tried to discredit Goldstein.

Wilkie this week denied wrongdoing in a response to the report and described conversations about the Goldstein case as “confidential internal deliberations among VA staff” that were none of the investigators’ business.

Goldstein’s underlying assault case was closed last January without criminal charges.