Will day of justice finally arrive for Park Police whistleblower Teresa Chambers?
By Joe Davidson, Washington Post, April 23, 2010
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Like a dogged cop in pursuit of an elusive suspect, Teresa C. Chambers is still seeking justice.

The former U.S. Park Police chief might be a bit closer to it after Wednesday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that threw out one of the charges that led to her firing in 2003.

More than six years later, Chambers feels she is closing in on a final ruling that will vindicate her relentless effort to clear her name and allow her to return to work.

"My goal has always been to go back to my job as chief of the Park Police, and that is what I still seek," said Chambers, currently police chief in Riverdale Park, Md.

But more than her individual goal, the Chambers case is significant because of what it says about how the federal government, under both the Obama and Bush administrations, treats employees who speak truth to power. What Chambers has suffered reveals the unsightly way Uncle Sam deals with whistleblowers, even those whose disclosures seem mild.

Chambers was gagged, suspended, then fired after my Washington Post colleague David A. Fahrenthold wrote an article on Dec. 2, 2003, with the headline "Park Police Duties Exceed Staffing."

It was a good piece, but not a big expose. The story reported that Chambers said traffic accidents had increased on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, where two, instead of the recommended four, officers often were on patrol, that she didn't have enough cops to protect all the national park land in the District and that unarmed guards would help protect monuments.

These innocuous remarks got Chambers in big trouble. Though they don't seem too different from budget and staffing statements that public officials often make, she was compelled to defend her comments as information protected by the federal Whistleblower Protection Act. The court agreed, which means she should not have been fired on the basis of those comments.

For Chambers, it's been a long, expensive and tiresome trip through administrative and judicial procedures. It shouldn't take so long for justice to be served. And this trip is not done yet. She was fired by the Interior Department on the basis of six charges, two of which were previously dismissed by an administrative judge. The court's decision to throw out another charge leaves three standing.

A department spokeswoman kept silent about the case Thursday, saying, "We do not comment on personnel issues."

But even if the three remain, they may not be strong enough to warrant dismissal.

The court found that her statements, which now are covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act, were "a contributing factor in the agency's decision to take adverse action against Chambers."

So, the court decision continued, the question now is "whether removal remains a reasonable penalty." The court sent the case back to the Merit Systems Protection Board to consider that question.

On that point, the court's decision included an excerpt from testimony of the "deciding official" in the Chambers case, whom she identified as Paul Hoffman, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Interior Department.

In that testimony, the witness said three charges, including one the court dismissed, "all together aggregated to the point that I felt it (sic) was justified in removal." The three charges included the one the court rejected. With that one gone, it may be hard for the Interior Department to continue to defend its firing of Chambers.

Why would the Obama administration want to follow the Bush administration's lead on that?

After all, this is an administration with officials, including President Obama, who have trumpeted the important role whistleblowers play in keeping government honest. With this case in particular, when Rahm Emanuel, the president's chief of staff, was a congressman from Chicago, he cited Chambers and others as "examples of individuals losing their jobs for telling the truth."

"We are at loss to explain why the Obama administration is continuing this case," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which is representing Chambers.

Can the Obama Interior Department demonstrate that the Bush administration would have been justified in firing Chambers on the basis of the three remaining charges?

Says Ruch: "We think they are going to be hard-pressed to do that."

The court's decision can be found with this column at http://www.washingtonpost.com/fedpage.

chatterbox
Gagging the Fuzz
The Park Police chief is being fired for telling the truth about her budget.
By Timothy Noah, Slate.com, Dec. 30, 2003, at 6:47 PM ET
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If you've ever wondered why so much that you read in the newspaper is attributed to anonymous government sources, consider the sad story of Teresa C. Chambers, the first woman ever appointed to run the U.S. Park Police.

When Chambers was given the job in 2001, a press release issued by the National Park Service praised her to the skies. "I am very excited that Chief Chambers has accepted this historic challenge," said Park Service Director Fran Mainella. "She is a highly qualified professional law enforcement officer." Chambers had a quarter-century's experience in police work in Prince George's County, Md., and in Durham, N.C., where she was chief of police immediately prior to her Park Police appointment. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Park Police Chief Chambers kept a cool head when a nut drove a tractor onto the Mall and said he was going to set off a bomb made of ammonium nitrate; the man (who turned out to be bluffing) was taken into custody without a shot being fired. (The last time something like this had happened, a man threatening to blow up the Washington Monument had been shot and killed by a police sniper. See "The Ballad of Tractor Man.") As recently as Dec. 4, President Bush told Chambers (at a ceremony to light the White House Christmas tree) that she was doing a great job.

That was then. Today, Chambers is on "administrative leave" from the Park Police, and the agency has begun proceedings to fire her. Her offense was to answer questions posed to her by the Washington Post about the Park Police's lack of sufficient resources to patrol adequately national parkland in and around Washington, D.C.

The interview appeared Dec. 2 in the Post's metro section under the apparently treasonous headline, "Park Police Duties Exceed Staffing." (Chatterbox commends Post writer David A. Fahrenthold, who has taken the lead on its vigorous coverage of the Chambers Affair.) The state secrets Chambers blurted out were that traffic accidents had increased along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which now had two Park Police officers patrolling it instead of the previous four; that homeless people and drug dealers were moving into smaller parks in residential areas; that two particularly rough areas now had two regular cruisers, rather than the needed four; that Park Police newly assigned by Congress to guard Washington's monuments were working 12-hour shifts and were being granted an insufficient number of bathroom breaks; and that she hoped to get an additional $19 million in next year's budget.

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it. Surely, though, the Park Police chief would have had little reason to worry that she lacked sufficient stature to voice a few truths that were mildly inconvenient to her superiors and to appropriators in Congress. Indeed, when Chambers' predecessor during the Clinton administration, Robert E. Langston, said much the same thing—understaffing at the Park Police, and within the National Park Service generally, is an old story—nobody even noticed, much less suggested that he was out of line.

Perhaps you're wondering what Chambers is getting fired for. Chatterbox phoned the National Park Service press office to ask, but spokeswoman Elaine Sevy told Chatterbox that she didn't know, and that if she did know, she couldn't tell me, because it's a confidential matter. Only Chambers is permitted to know why she's getting fired. But she can't tell Chatterbox, either, because she's been prohibited by the department (which continues to pay her salary) from talking to the press.

The National Park Service's deputy director, Don Murphy, told the Post on Dec. 4 that Chambers' comments broke federal rules against commenting publicly about ongoing budget discussions and against lobbying. (How answering a reporter's questions could be construed as "lobbying" Murphy did not say.) These rules would be a serious impediment to accountable government if they existed, but in all likelihood they do not. The Post's "Federal Diary" columnist, Stephen Barr, asked the Park Service to produce the rules and was refused. Chambers' husband Jeff says that in the legal documents Chambers has received from the Park Service about her pending dismissal, "there were no cites" of any such rules. "They can't find any cites," he told Chatterbox.

Chatterbox thinks Chambers' firing is not only a grave injustice against Chambers, but an attempt to intimidate government officials into maintaining silence about information of public importance. It won't work of course, because government officials can—and often do—speak to reporters on an anonymous basis. But if Chatterbox hears a Bush administration official speak one more time about the cowardice and unreliability of government leakers, he's going to scream. Chambers is being punished for being honest, and that really stinks.

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.