berchman Loc: South Central PA

Six months after his internet posts attacking Jews came to light, a U.S. Foreign Service officer remains employed by the State Department. Now, at least 70 of his co-workers sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding his dismissal.

The letter, sent July 28, argues that Fritz Berggren is a threat to Jewish employees at the State Department, and has violated department rules and ethical standards, Foreign Policy reported after obtaining a copy of the letter.

“Not only is his propagation of antisemitic ideas highly disturbing and offensive to Jewish and non-Jewish employees alike, but as Jewish employees, we feel his presence at the Department is threatening,” the letter reads, according to Foreign Policy.

A State Department spokesperson said on Wednesday that the allegations “are taken seriously,” but said department policy was not to comment on individual personnel matters,

“When such allegations are substantiated, the Department may take disciplinary action, up to and including separation, when appropriate,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The Department does not take such actions lightly and must comply with all required procedures before doing so.”

For years, Berggren has maintained a website, featuring screeds against Jews and the L***Q community, and promoting white Christian supremacy.

“Jesus Christ came to save the whole world from the Jews — the founders of the original Anti-Christ religion, they who are the seed of the Serpent, that brood of vipers,” Berggren wrote in an Oct. 4, 2020, post on his website titled “Jews are Not God’s Chosen People. Judeo-Christian is Anti-Christ.”

The Jewish Americans and Friends in Foreign Affairs employee group at the State Department organized the letter along with other Jewish State Department employees.

Blinken, who is Jewish, responded to the letter on Aug. 9.

“I want to assure you that the Department treats reports of alleged misconduct with the utmost seriousness,” Blinken wrote in the letter obtained by The Forward. “As you know, individuals who engage in discriminatory harassment may be removed from consideration for senior-level positions or supervisory duties, and they may face disciplinary action up to and including separation when warranted.”

Blinken also noted the nomination of Deborah Lipstadt, a preeminent historian of the Holocaust, as the department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism as proof of the administration’s commitment to fighting h**e.

The letter to Blinken was sent two days after a carving of a swastika was found in an elevator at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., on July 26. That incident led Blinken and other top U.S. officials to issue condemnations of antisemitism.

“While there is no evidence that Berggren is behind the swastika carved into the Department elevator, his continued employment with seemingly no consequences sends a message of impunity that has undoubtedly contributed to the atmosphere in which someone would dare to do such a thing,” the letter reads.

The letter also noted that Berggren appeared to have violated State Department rules when he displayed his government affiliation in a July 3 post.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/475021/fire-antisemitic-blogger-70-state-department-employees-demand-in-letter/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2810783

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

What a bunch of tripe, where is the evidence that Pompeo was even aware of this individual's posting and where is the evidence that Pompeo loved having him in the State Department? State Department employs about 69,000 people and you are suggesting that Pompeo was supposed to be aware of the bad acts of an individual... I think that he had bigger things to worry about.

Your posting this shows how disingenuous your posts are as well as the shallowness of your thought processes.

berchman Loc: South Central PA

Did you like having a religious fanatic at the head of our State Department?

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

No, I liked having a former head of the CIA and a man who graduated at the top of his class from West Point, a man that understood the dynamics of the global landscape and the threats that face the US as well as the strengths as well as the limitations of US power.... A man that would not say dumb crap like the Taliban will conform because they want to be accepted by the global community!

Blaster34 Loc: Florida Treasure Coast

McCain called Blinken 'dangerous to America and to the young men and women who are fighting and serving it'....."I rise to discuss my opposition to the pending v**e concerning Mr. Antony ‘Tony’ Blinken, who is not only unqualified but, in fact, in my view, one of the worst se******ns of a very bad lot that this president has chosen," McCain excoriated Blinken, who was eventually confirmed to the post in 2015....No wonder the State Department is currently in such chaos and disarray. Blinken, Milley and Austin should all resign immediately for the debacle, chaos and misery they created with the Afghanistan evacuation, if they had any honor or integrity at all, they would.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Religious fanatic? You mean a man who loves God? I can't fault that. Pompeo's on my list of possible Republican nominees for '24. Not necessarily for his religious views, but I think his world view does flow out of them. I'm on board with Pompeo because he's a good man who would be a standard bearer for Republican policies both foreign and domestic who isn't either a clown or buffoon, which is how I describe our former and current Presidents.

InfiniteISO Loc: The Carolinas, USA

Where in this story is Pompeo? How high is this weirdo in the state dept.? You're posting i***tic click-bait.

dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

Did you like having lying corrupt Hillary Clinton at the head of the State Department? Isn't the State Department still missing something like 6 Million/Billion dollars?

I will take Mike Pompeo any day.

Dennis

berchman Loc: South Central PA

How about lying Trump who made the claim that the State Department was missing six billion dollars?

Republican pollster Frank Luntz says Donald Trump hit the bull's-eye during the debate when he attacked Hillary Clinton for “losing” $6 billion while at the State Department.

Luntz, who ran a focus group that watched the Wednesday night debate, said the group’s members gave Trump very strong ratings for the attack.

What a shame, then, that the accusation was untrue.

No auditor has ever claimed that Clinton “lost” $6 billion while she was secretary of state. The accusation doesn't appear in the inspector-general report, nor the underlying audit documents, that Trump and others cite.

Alas, the audit says only that State Department contracts worth about $6 billion were missing some paperwork — and that’s out of a total budget over the same period of $200 billion. In some cases, the files were missing personnel disclosures, or regular performance updates, or technical data. Some were missing “property clearance reports,” “termination dockets,” a “Contracting Officer’s Representative Completion Certificate” or a “Small Business Administration contract completion form.” Others were missing supporting documents. In others, there was inadequate review of overall contract performance. In some egregious cases the relevant contract files were empty.

To conflate this into $6 billion “lost” requires some extraordinary assumptions, plus a good head covering of tinfoil.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-did-hillary-lose-6-billion-at-the-state-department-2016-10-20

mwalsh Loc: Houston

It's not nice to shred a poster's beloved propaganda myth with facts...some posters love to post half t***hs with a bunch of made up crap ladled on top.

Kraken Loc: Barry's Bay

Ladled????? Dennis uses a backhoe.

dennis2146 Loc: Eastern Idaho

You did take my comment as a question did you not?


$6 Bil Vanishes From State Dept. Under Hillary Clinton

In a mind-boggling example of how the government blows—or perhaps steals—our tax dollars, billions vanished from the U.S. State Department mostly while Hillary Clinton ran it, according to a new alert issued by the agency’s inspector general.

Could the former Secretary of State be using the cash to fund an upcoming p**********l campaign? In all, $6 billion are missing and it’s highly unlikely any of the money will ever be recovered. The cash was supposed to be used to pay contractors but it just disappeared and documents that could help track the dough cannot be located. How convenient! The paper trail, which federal law says must be maintained in the case of government contracts, has been destroyed or was never created to begin with.

How could this possibly happen? Like a lot of government agencies, outside contracts are a free-for-all at the State Department with virtually no oversight. Hundreds of millions of dollars are doled out annually for a variety of services and no one bothers to follow up on the deals. This “exposes the department to significant financial risk,” according to the State Department Inspector General, which issued a special management alert this month outlining the lost $6 billion. The watchdog further writes that “it creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file.”

Among the examples listed in the memo is a recent investigation of the closeout process for contracts involving the U.S. mission in Iraq. Investigators could not locate 33 of the 115 contract files totaling approximately $2.1 billion. Even of the files they found, more than half contained insufficient documents required by federal law. In one billion-dollar deal involving the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in Afghanistan, the actual contract was determined to be “incomplete.”

In one alarming case a contract file conveniently omitted that a $52 million deal was awarded to a company owned by the spouse of another State Department contractor employee performing as a specialist. In other cited cases a contracting officer actually falsified government technical review information in a $100 million deal and a contracting officer’s representative allowed nearly $800,000 to be paid on a deal with no official documents to support the payment. It’s the free-flow of public funds under extremely suspicious circumstances.

At the very least the State Department is violating its own policy, according to the inspector general, which divulges that it’s found “repeated examples of poor contract file administration over the years.” The watchdog confirms that “it is the Department’s policy that all contracts, regardless of dollar value, be properly documented so as to provide complete record of: pre-solicitation activities; the solicitation, evaluation, and award process; and [sic] the administration of the contract through closeout.”

This unbelievable report documenting the mysterious disappearance of $6 billion from the coffers of a major government agency brings to mind a similar and equally enraging story reported by Judicial Watch a few years ago. The Pentagon somehow lost $6.6 billion sent to Iraq for post-invasion “reconstruction.”

The money was bundled in chunks of $100 bills and t***sported in turboprop military cargo planes known as C-130 Hercules. About $2.4 billion fit in each aircraft and 21 flights made trips, t***sporting a total of $12 billion in American currency to Iraq. More than half the money has never been recovered, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

A year later nearly half a billion dollars in oil destined for the Afghan National Army vanished. We will never know what happened because the Pentagon improperly shredded records that could have solved the mystery, according to a federal audit that exposed the fraud. The oil was part of a $1 billion fuel program largely funded by the U.S. government, which of course, means it was mostly Americans who saw their tax dollars blown in yet another government corruption scheme.

Waste and fraud are par for the course in most bloated government agencies and JW has exposed a number of alarming examples over the years, both domestically and internationally. They involve practically all agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) scandal-plagued food-stamp program, Medicare and Medicaid, the famously corrupt U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and President Obama’s fraud-infested $787 billion stimulus boondoggle, to name a few.


Dennis

Racmanaz Loc: Sunny Tucson!

What religious fanatic???

berchman Loc: South Central PA

Evangelical Pompeo.

Racmanaz Loc: Sunny Tucson!

You must be delusional, I didn't even know that he was an evangelical, so how could he be a religious fanatic when he didn't even project himself that way? Oh, you must be one of those lunatic atheists who h**e Christians.