Former watchdog Walpin loses suit over firing

A federal agency inspector general fired last year by President Barack Obama amid claims of bizarre and incompetent behavior, Gerald Walpin, has lost the first round in his legal bid to win back his job.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Roberts threw out a lawsuit Walpin brought in an attempt to be restored to his position at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs Americorps and other programs. Walpin has claimed that his firing was political retaliation for his opposition to wasteful spending by the agency and for his aggressive investigation of a friend of Obama, Sacramento Mayor and former NBA player Kevin Johnson. The White House stridently denied any such motivation.

Roberts said a federal law passed in 2008 with Obama's support, the Inspector General Reform Act, did not allow Walpin the right to sue over what he contends was an improper removal. The judge also said that the requirement in the statute that Obama give Congress his reasons for any such firing was too vague for the courts to assess whether Obama's claim that he'd lost confidence in Walpin was sufficient.

"Walpin has not identified any text in the IGRA which explicitly creates a cause of action for an aggrieved Inspector General, nor has he presented any authority demonstrating that Congress drafted the IGRA with the intent to give individual Inspectors General an enforceable right to continued employment," Roberts wrote in a 15-page opinion dismissing the suit. "While Walpin complains that the President’s rationale was insufficient, Walpin fails to show how the IGRA provides any sort of criteria that would allow a court to make that determination."

Walpin said in an e-mail to POLITICO Friday he disagrees with the ruling and is considering what to do next. "We are disappointed in the decision, believe it is erroneous, and are reviewing it and our options," he said.

The 78-year-old Walpin has suggested that White House and Americorps officials improperly invoked his age in an effort to buttress their claims that he exhibited bizarre behavior on the job and was disoriented at a meeting with the CNCS board. In one of the affair's most entertaining episodes, Fox News host Glenn Beck subjected Walpin to an on-air senility test. He appeared to pass without difficulty.

In a letter sent to Congress after some senators from both parties expressed concern about the vagueness of Obama's initial explanation for Walpin's removal, White House attorney Norman Eisen made reference to a May 2009 meeting where Walpin was "confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions and exhibited other behavior that led the Board to question his capacity to serve.”
Eisen also asserted Walpin "had engaged in other troubling and inappropriate conduct."

Walpin said he may have been ill at that meeting, but that would be an insufficient basis to dismiss him. He said other alleged incidents of odd behavior were trumped up or easily explained.

The legal ruling comes nearly a month after Walpin filed an unusual petition with a federal appeals court in Washington, trying to force Roberts to issue a decision.

Roberts was appointed to the bench in 1998 by President Bill Clinton. Walpin, a prominent Republican attorney in New York, was named to the I.G. post by President George W. Bush in 2007.

UPDATE: This post has been updated with Walpin's reaction.

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