President Donald Trump nominated Christopher Sharpley, the acting Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency, to be the agency’s Inspector General in September 2017.
The CIA says the Office of Inspector General “assesses whether CIA offices and programs are effectively executing their mission and comply with Federal law, Executive Orders, and other internal regulations and policies.”
Sharpley withdrew his name from consideration the following July after CIA staffers said he retaliated against them for blowing the whistle on IG officials for allegedly mishandling evidence.
Sharpley denied having any knowledge of the investigations during his Senate testimony, but his signature was on multiple forms related to the investigations of wrongdoing.
“His failure to acknowledge those investigations led multiple senators to stonewall his confirmation,” CNN reported.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/20/politics/cia-watchdog-sharpley-withdraws-nomination/index.html
Sens. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Ron Wyden expressed their skepticism about Sharpley’s claim that didn’t know about the complaints when he testified.
“How is it possible that he could have been unaware of any open investigations against him at the time he testified?” Grassley, R-Iowa, and Wyden, D-Ore., asked in a letter they wrote to others in Senate Intelligence Committee.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/acting-cia-watchdog-steps-down-withdraws-ig-nomination
CNN reported that one of the whistleblowers Sharpley reportedly retaliated against wrote the agency’s rules on how to handle whistleblowers without retaliation. He was put on administrative leave without pay for 18 months before he left the CIA.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/20/politics/cia-watchdog-sharpley-withdraws-nomination/index.html
The withdrawal of Sharpley’s name from nomination shows that “the system does work,” Mark Zaid, attorney and founding partner of Whistleblower Aid, told Government Executive. “It has flaws in it, but when handled properly, the system can work. In this case, we prevented an individual whose job is to protect whistleblowers but instead attacked them, from entering into a formal position.”
