CV NEWS FEED // An internal investigation uncovered that the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) office had a predatory work environment rife with sexual harassment.
The Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak wrote Monday that the 125-page internal report deemed the VA’s DEI office a “hostile, toxic work environment with a permissive culture of rampant gossiping and innuendo.”
Rosiak noted that per the report, “multiple layers of top officials” in the office “participated in and covered up sexual harassment.”
“At one point, a senior manager fired a mid-level manager because both men wanted to sexually harass the same employee,” Rosiak reported. “When a complaint was filed, a political appointee sat on it, apparently partly for racial reasons.”
The internal probe also revealed that the office’s “[e]mployees engaged in ‘self-aggrandizing,’ petty turf wars, and planned wasteful events, including one junket in which nine people traveled to dispense ‘diversity’ training that was supposed to have been done by one person,” according to Rosiak.
Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Rosiak described that the “VA has done the most insane DEI stunts” of all branches of the federal government.
He specifically cited their recent near-banning of the famous 1945 photograph of a U.S. Navy sailor kissing a nurse in New York City after news broke that Allied forces defeated Japan in World War II.
Per the Associated Press (AP), the VA’s rationale behind the (later reversed) ban was that the picture “‘depicts a non-consensual act’ and is inconsistent with the department’s sexual harassment policy.”
Rosiak also mentioned the VA’s push to deny “benefits to suicidal whites in the name of racial equity.”
“But the report said that its DEI officials were themselves racist, sexist,” the journalist emphasized.
Rosiak reported:
Deputy Assistant Secretary Harvey Johnson, the leader of the Office of Resolution Management, Diversity & Inclusion (ORMDI), retired when confronted with evidence of his department’s behavior, as well as allegations that he had swept misconduct “under the rug.”
Archie Davis, the ORMDI Chief of Staff, has been moved to a different office pending discipline after the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection (OAWP) concluded that he “engaged in misconduct of a sexual nature with a subordinate employee, including while he was in her direct chain of command,” “sexted’ with a different subordinate employee,” covered up allegations against colleague, and a slew of other infractions.
The reporter later wrote that the victim eventually “reached out directly to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, who did not respond.”
“With Harvey and Archie being in a position of power… I felt like it wasn’t going to go nowhere,” the victim stated.
Again from Rosiak:
The VA diversity office was so chaotic that investigators from another agency, the US Postal Service, were called in to address their many complaints against each other. While some complaints showed severe misconduct, others evidenced bizarre, adolescent dysfunction or were petty, high-school style gossip.
McDonough testified in front of the House Veterans Affairs Committee last month, when lawmakers pressed him about the scandal.
Rosiak noted: “[A]lthough a whistleblower contacted [McDonough] about the issue, he didn’t remember it, and it didn’t get his attention when [Committee Chairman Mike] Bost [R-IL] wrote to him about it.”
The secretary then stated that he had “just ignored” letters members of Congress had sent him.
“The person who failed here is me,” McDonough said during his testimony.
“The 125-page report is almost comical in how the DEI office did nothing that remotely touched upon improving the lives of veterans,” Rosiak concluded on X. “Instead, the DEI officials spent much of their time filing discrimination complaints against each other, and fighting petty turf battles for ego.”
McDonough is a self-professed Catholic. Back in 2013 when the official was serving in the Obama administration, NBC News reported that he “holds his Catholic faith in high importance.”
A Newsweek article from earlier that year stated that “as close as he is to [Obama], McDonough is even closer to his faith.”
“In fact, he can sometimes be found in the basement of the West Wing, sharing an early morning breakfast and conversation with a bishop or priest,” the piece went on:
Denis’s faith was so deeply entrenched that he went on to study under the Benedictine monks at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, a liberal arts school with a strong Catholic identity. Two of his brothers took their Catholic study a few steps further: his brother Bill is a former priest, and brother Kevin is currently a priest and pastor of the Church of St. Peter Claver in St. Paul.
