Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

N. Korea Missile Hwasong 12 Launch with Video

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Korean Central Television

A test-fire of new ground-to-ground medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket Hwasong-12 was successfully carried out on Sunday by scientists and technicians in the field of rocket research, who are bravely advancing toward a new goal to be proud of in the world, true to the far-sighted idea of Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, for building a nuclear power.
Kim Jong Un guided the test-fire on the spot.
Looking at Hwasong-12, he expressed his satisfaction over the possession of another “Juche weapon”, a perfect weapon system congruous with the military strategic and tactical idea of the WPK and the demand of the present times.
The test-fire was conducted at the highest angle in consideration of the security of neighboring countries. The test-fire aimed at verifying the tactical and technological specifications of the newly-developed ballistic rocket capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead.
According to the order of Kim Jong Un, the new rocket Hwasong-12 was launched at 04:58 on Sunday.
The rocket accurately hit the targeted open waters 787km away after flying to the maximum altitude of 2 111.5km along its planned flight orbit.
The test-fire proved to the full all the technical specifications of the rocket, which was newly designed in a Korean-style by defence scientists and technicians, like guidance and stabilization systems, structural system and pressurization, inspection and launching systems and reconfirmed the reliability of new rocket engine under the practical flight circumstances.
It also verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation and accurate performance of detonation system.
Kim Jong Un hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing. And he had a picture taken with officials, scientists and technicians who took part in the test-fire.
Highly appreciating again their devotion for manufacturing the Korean-style medium long-range strategic ballistic rocket, he gave a special thanks to them on behalf of himself.
He said with confidence that the successful test-fire of Hwasong-12, a demonstration of high-level defence science and technology of the DPRK, is of great and special significance for securing peace and stability in the Korean peninsula and the region and is the greatest victory of the Korean people.
He declared that the DPRK is a nuclear power worthy of the name whether someone recognizes it or not. He stressed the DPRK will keep strict control over those engaging themselves in nuclear blackmail with its nuclear deterrence which has been unimaginably and rapidly developed.
The U.S. massively brought nuclear strategic assets to the vicinity of the Korean peninsula to threaten and blackmail the DPRK, but the coward American-style fanfaronade militarily browbeating only weak countries and nations which have no nukes can never work on the DPRK and is highly ridiculous, he said, stressing that if the U.S. dares opt for a military provocation against the DPRK, we are ready to counter it.
The most perfect weapon systems in the world will never become the eternal exclusive property of the U.S., he said, expressing the belief that the day when the DPRK uses the similar retaliatory means will come. He continued that on this occasion, the U.S. had better see clearly whether the ballistic rockets of the DPRK pose actual threat to it or not.
If the U.S. awkwardly attempts to provoke the DPRK, it will not escape from the biggest disaster in the history, he said, strongly warning the U.S. not to disregard or misjudge the reality that its mainland and Pacific operation region are in the DPRK’s sighting range for strike and that it has all powerful means for retaliatory strike.
He gave the scientists and technicians in the field of rocket research the order to continuously develop more precise and diversified nukes and nuclear striking means, not content with the successes, and make preparations for more tests till the U.S. and its vassal forces make a proper choice with reason.

*** 

ATN: North Korea launched a missile in a test early in the morning of May 14, North Korean time. If the information that has been reported about the test are correct, the missile has considerably longer range than its current missiles.

Reports from Japan say that the missile fell into the Sea of Japan after traveling about 700 km (430 miles), after flying for about 30 minutes.

A missile with a range of 1,000 km (620 miles), such as the extended-range Scud, or Scud-ER, would only have a flight time of about 12 minutes if flown on a slightly lofted trajectory that traveled 700 km.

A 30-minute flight time would instead require a missile that was highly lofted, reaching an apogee of about 2,000 km (1,240 miles) while splashing down at a range of 700 km. If that same missile was flown on a standard trajectory, it would have a maximum range of about 4,500 km (2,800 miles).

New press reports are in fact giving a 2,000 km apogee for the test.

This range is considerably longer than the estimated range of the Musudan missile, which showed a range of about 3,000 km in a test last year. Guam is 3,400 km from North Korea. Reaching the US West Coast would require a missile with a range of more than 8,000 km. Hawaii is roughly 7,000 km from North Korea.

This missile may have been the new mobile missile seen in North Korea’s April 15 parade (Fig. 2). It appears to be a two-stage liquid-fueled missile.

Fig. 2 (Source: KCNA)

Fig. 1  The black curve is the lofted trajectory flown on the test. The red curve is the same missile flown on a normal (MET) trajectory.

DoJ, AG Sessions, Effectively Immediately

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Read the 2 page memo here.

Sessions ends Obama-era leniency on sentencing, infuriating civil rights groups

FNC: Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that he has told prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible against criminal suspects – a stunning reversal of Obama-era policies, and a move that infuriated civil rights groups.

“We will enforce the laws passed by Congress pure and simple,” he said at an awards ceremony in Washington D.C, adding that prosecutors deserved to be “unhandcuffed and not micro-managed from Washington.”

“This is a key part of President Trump’s promise to keep America safe,” Sessions said. “We’re seeing an increase in violent crime in our cities – in Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, Milwaukee, St. Louis and many others.  The murder rate has surged 10 percent nationwide – the largest increase since 1968.”

In a letter to 94 U.S. attorneys Thursday night, Sessions called it a “core principle” that prosecutors charge and pursue “the most serious and readily provable offense.” Sessions defined the most serious offenses as those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence.

Sessions noted that “there will be circumstances in which good judgment would lead a prosecutor to conclude that a strict application” of the policy is not warranted, but that any exceptions must first be approved by a U.S. attorney, assistant attorney general, or a designated supervisor.

The move, which will send more criminals to jail and for longer terms by triggering mandatory minimum sentences, explicitly reverses policies set in motion by President Obama’s former Attorney General Eric Holder – who implemented the “Smart on Crime” drug sentencing policy that focused on not incarcerating people who committed low level, non-violent crimes. DOJ officials call it a “false narrative” and say unless a gun is involved, most of those cases aren’t charged period.

Officials say Holder’s “Smart on Crime” policy “convoluted the process,” and left prosecutors applying the law unevenly, which they said “is not Justice.”

But civil rights groups blasted the process, with the American Civil Liberties Union describing the move as a move that will “reverse progress” and repeat the War on Drugs, which it called a “failed experiment.”

“With overall crime rates at historic lows, it is clear that this type of one-dimensional criminal justice system that directs prosecutors to give unnecessarily long and unfairly harsh sentences to people whose behavior does not call for it did not work,” Udi Ofer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Campaign for Smart Justice.

The policy was also criticized by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said mandatory minimums have “unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated too many minorities for too long.”

“Attorney General Sessions new policy will accentuate that injustice. Instead we should treat our nation’s drug epidemic as a health crisis and less as a lock ‘em up and throw away the key problem,” he said.

However, the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys backed the move, saying it would make the public safer and give prosecutors to “tools that Congress intended” to lock up drug dealers and dismantle gangs.

 


Wait for it…nah never mind…former DOJ AG, Eric Holder has already responded.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder blasts Sessions memo as ‘dumb on crime’

Former Attorney General Eric Holder blasted a new Justice Department policy on prosecutions and sentencing, calling it “dumb on crime.”

“The policy announced today is not tough on crime. It is dumb on crime. It is an ideologically motivated, cookie-cutter approach that has only been proven to generate unfairly long sentences that are often applied indiscriminately and do little to achieve long-term public safety,” Holder said in a statement Friday shortly after the new department memo.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a memo early Friday directing prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” in all cases going forward.

The Sessions memo reverses one issued by Holder in 2013 that encouraged federal prosecutors to seek the most harsh punishment for only “serious, high-level, or violent drug traffickers” instead of lower-level offenders.

Holder cited department data showing that since the implementation of his memo — the Smart on Crime directive — prosecutors have been able to successfully focus more resources on higher level drug offenders such as kingpins and cartel leaders.

“The data showed that while they brought fewer indictments carrying a mandatory minimum sentence, the prosecutions of high-level drug defendants had risen and that cooperation and plea rates remained effectively the same,” Holder said. “These reversals will be both substantively and financially ruinous, setting the Department back on track to again spending one-third of its budget on incarcerating people, rather than preventing, detecting, or investigating crime.”

2008, the Russians Hacked Obama’s Campaign Too

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Why are we learning this now? It is a dereliction of duty to advise the American electorate, campaign operators and all later political candidates, regardless of the kind of race. Further, should we be blaming Obama on this and did he invite the FBI to investigate? If so, the matters of phishing operations and Russia should have been a clarion call.

Further, why would Obama and Hillary even consider ‘resetting’ relations with Russia? Oh yeah……’cut it out Vladimir’..remember that?

Okay read on….the anger mounts.

Exclusive: Russian Hackers Attacked the 2008 Obama Campaign

Jeff Stein: Russian hackers targeted the 2008 Barack Obama campaign and U.S. government officials as far back as 2007 and have continued to attack them since they left their government jobs, according to a new report scheduled for release Friday.

The targets included several of the 2008 Obama campaign field managers, as well as the president’s closest White House aides and senior officials in the Defense, State and Energy Departments, the report says.

It names several officials by title, but not by name, including “several officials involved in Russian policy, including a U.S. ambassador to Russia,” according to a draft version of the report, authored by Area 1 Security, a Redwood City, California, company founded by former National Security Agency veterans.

“They’re still getting fresh attacks,” the company says.

The attacks on their email accounts have continued as the officials migrated to think tanks, universities and private industry, the company says. The favored weapon of the Russians and other hackers is the so-called “phishing” email, in which the recipient is invited to click on a innocent-looking link, which opens a door to the attackers.

Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014, tells Newsweek that he gets “frequent” warnings of phishing attacks by an unnamed “foreign government” from both his Google email service and Stanford University, where he is now a professor of political science. He says his “colleagues, assistants and people like that” at Stanford also get attacked “on a fairly regular basis.”

“I have not been successfully penetrated, to the best of my knowledge,” McFaul says, speaking Thursday in a brief telephone interview. So far as he knows, “I have not been compromised.” There were three other U.S. ambassadors to Russia during Obama’s eight years in office who could not immediately be reached for comment.

The role of Russia in attacks on the 2008 campaigns of Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has not been previously reported.  On the eve of a U.S.-China summit meeting in 2013, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that Beijing alone was responsible for a 2008 cyberattack on the Obama and McCain campaigns.

China can’t be excluded as a perpetrator in those attacks, Area 1 Security’s report says, but its new data “show that Russia tried to hack several members of the Obama campaign and could have done so at the same time as someone that achieved massive data exfiltration.”

Blake Darché, a former NSA technical analyst who co-founded Area 1 Security, tells Newsweek that “state-sponsored Russian hackers have been targeting United States officials and politicians since at least 2007 through phishing attacks.” Russian hackers reportedly breached the Joint Chiefs of Staff email system in 2015.

The company says one of the Russian targets was a “deputy campaign manager” in the 2008 Obama campaign, but was otherwise unidentified in its report. There were a number of them over a period of time. One was Steve Hildebrand. Reached in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he now runs a specialty bakery and coffee shop, Hildebrand says he was “not aware” that he might have been a Russian target and didn’t remember being warned about cyberattacks of any kind during the campaign. Another senior 2008 campaign aide (and later White House National Security Council spokesman), Tommy Vietor, tells Newsweek he had “no knowledge” of Russian hacking at the time.

Besides top officials in the Energy, Defense and State departments, the Area 1 Security report cites a half-dozen positions in the Obama White House that were targeted from 2008 through 2016, including the president’s deputy assistant, special assistant, the special assistant to the political director, advance team leaders for first lady Michelle Obama, and the White House deputy counsel. None of them could immediately be reached for comment.

Among the State Department targets named by Area 1 Security were three top offices dealing with Russia and Europe. Evelyn Farkas, who served as the Obama administration’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia from 2012 to 2015, says she could not discuss matters that remain classified, but says “the biggest impact” she remembered offhand was the Russian hack of the Joint Chiefs.

Among the three top, unnamed targets at the Energy Department was the director of the Office of Nuclear Threat Science, which is responsible for overseeing the U.S. Nuclear Counterterrorism Program.

The Area 1 Security report names the “Dukes,” also known as “Cozy Bear” and APT-29, for the Obama attacks, the same Russian actors named in the 2015 and 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the State Department.

In an interview, Darché calls the Dukes a front for Russia’s “premier intelligence-gathering arm,” which would be the SVR, or External Intelligence Service, the Kremlin equivalent to the CIA, although he declined to specifically name it. As opposed to the DNC hacks launched to steal and publicize information damaging to the campaign of Hillary Clinton, he says, the Russian offensives that Area 1 Security uncovered were clandestine “intelligence gathering operations” designed to secretly penetrate a wide variety of institutions and industry.

Clinton had harshly criticized the Kremlin’s suppression of human rights and seizure of the Crimea, while her rival Donald Trump had repeatedly said he wanted to be “friends” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Oren Falkowitz, a former analyst at the National Security Agency who co-founded Area 1 Security, says he launched the company to stop phishing attacks, which until then was thought to be impossible because so many employees continue to click on risky links in emails. The key to the company’s success was persuading clients to let it monitor its servers, he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.

In Friday’s report, Area 1 Security says it uses a “vast active sensor network” to detect and trace phishing attacks. It says it could imagine the Dukes “operating a giant spreadsheet where new targets are added, but never leave.” It “moves quickly, compromising a server or service to send out phishing emails from it, and then leaves, never returning to check for  bounced email messages to cull from its list.”

Most ex-officials don’t realize they are carrying “the blemish of being a Russian target into their new workplace,” the Area 1 Security report says.  As a result, “they give the Dukes beachheads in companies and organizations they never even planned on or imagined hacking,” such as Washington think tanks, defense contractors, lobbyist offices,  financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies stocked with high ranking former political, military and intelligence  officials.

Russia is “notoriously persistent in pursuing targets,” the report says. “It’s a lesson on why every organization needs great security.”

***

FireEye CEO: Russians are at Work in Election Hacking

FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said Thursday that strengthening U.S. cybersecurity defenses begins with protecting the country’s own systems first, and he is hopeful the Trump administration will implement a strategy to defend from cyber threats, during an interview on FOX Business’ “Countdown to the Closing Bell.”

“You gotta protect critical infrastructure and under times of duress, you have to be able to have shields up as a nation, and I think this order is going to move toward that,” he said, referring to the executive order President Trump signed Thursday, aimed at strengthening the America’s infrastructure to help prevent cyberattacks.

Cyber hacking has been in the forefront of an FBI investigation over Russia’s alleged involvement in the 2016 presidential election. Mandia said he believes acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe will continue the investigation into these claims.

“When you awake the sleeping giant, they get the job done and I think the FBI, whenever they apply the resources at their disposal and their capability, they can get the job done as they see fit,” he said.

Mandia believes the Russians are at work in election hacking and thinks it will continue to happen.

“The tool in every emerging nation’s tool box now [is] a cyber component,” he said.

The FireEye CEO added that the risks from cyberattacks can’t be eliminated because persistent hackers are exploiting human trust and not exploiting systems.

DHS Project New Dawn 1,378 Arrests

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WASHINGTON (ABC7) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officials are revealing details of a massive anti-gang operation that’s resulted in 1,378 arrests nationwide.

The six week long operation, which began March 26th, targeted violent criminal street gangs in the DC metro area, San Antonio, San Diego, and Newark.

“The primary purpose of the operation was to identify, arrest, and prosecute gang members and associates who threaten our communities,” Thomas Homan, ICE’s Acting Director told reporters.

The operation, called “Project New Dawn” was led by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations section, known as HCI.

In the DC area alone, agents arrested 52 people, including 29 members of the El Salvador-controlled MS-13 gang.

“Nearly 1100 were arrested on federal or state criminal charges, including murder, assault and other crimes of violence,” says DHS Deputy Executive Associate Director Derek Benner.

Authorities arrested 21 people on murder related charges, and seven for rape and sexual assault charges.

Others face drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human smuggling, sex trafficking, and racketeering charges.

Police say more than 1000 of those arrested had gang affiliations: connections to MS-13, and the Crips, Bloods, and the Surenos street gangs.

“Let me be clear that these violent criminal street gangs are the biggest threat facing our communities,” Homan says.

DC-based HSI agents arrested eleven MS-13 gang members in April at a home in Falls Church, police say.

Ten of those actions were ‘administrative arrests’, for immigation violations, the eleventh was a criminal arrest.

Investigators say federal agents and Fairfax County Police were keeping the home under surveillance because of reports about alleged sex trafficking.

“Our goal at the end of the day is to arrest, prosecute, imprison, deport and remove trans-national gang members as well as to supress violence, and prosecute crimial enterprises,” Benner says.

ICE says during the operation, officers seized 238 guns and $492,000 in cash.

But the agency also revealed a troubling trend.

Investigators in the San Diego area found street gangs are bucking the idea of turf or territory, and instead, are acting in concert, with different groups using each other’s expertise to maximize illegal profits.

“One gang, they specialize in narcotics smuggling, one may specialize in weapons trafficking,” Benner explains. “They’re using each other in this particular case, to further their own enterprises.”

Authorities say of those arrested, 933 are U.S. citizens, and 445 are foreign nationals from Central America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean.

ICE’s Acting Director says the notion of sanctuary cities, where local authorities don’t cooperate with, or take part in ICE operations, is making these investigations more difficult.

“One officer can make (an) arrest inside the jail, turn him over to us, we can remove that person from the country,” Homan says. “When they get released without our attention, they’re back on the streets.”

He says after an initial arrest, 30 to 40 percent of gang-related suspects are repeat offenders.

Some of those in custody face federal re-entry charges, for returning to the U.S. after they were kicked out of the country for immigration or criminal violations.

ICE officials say this is not over, that there will be more operations like this in the future.

“We are not done,” Homan says. “We have a laser focus on these groups, and we will continue to actively pursue them, wherever they are in the United States.”

*** In 2016, ICE had a similar success. Image result for homeland security investigations

WASHINGTON — A five-week operation, dubbed Project Shadowfire, netted 1,133 arrests, including more than 900 transnational criminal gang members and others associated with transnational criminal activity, like drug trafficking, human smuggling and sex trafficking, murder and racketeering. The operation was led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and concluded March 21.

“This operation is the latest example of ICE’s ongoing efforts, begun more than a decade ago under Operation Community Shield, to target violent gang members and their associates, to eradicate the violence they inflict upon our communities and to stop the cash flow to transnational organized crime groups operating overseas,” said ICE Director Sarah R. Saldaña.

Since the inception of Operation Community Shield in February 2005, HSI special agents, working in conjunction with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, have made more than 40,000 gang-related arrests and seized more than 8,000 firearms.

Project Shadowfire was a surge operation conducted under Operation Community Shield, and led by the HSI National Gang Unit. Between Feb. 15 and March 21, HSI special agents worked with numerous state, local and federal law enforcement partners, including ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), to apprehend individuals from various gangs.

Most of the individuals arrested during Project Shadowfire were U.S. citizens, but 239 foreign nationals from 13 countries in Central America, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean were also arrested. Of the 1,133 arrests, 915 were gang members and associates, 1,001 were charged with criminal offenses and 132 were arrested administratively for immigration violations.

The majority of arrestees were affiliated with gangs like MS-13, Sureños, Norteños, Bloods and several prison-based gangs. Enforcement actions occurred around the country, with the greatest activity taking place in the Los Angeles, San Juan, Atlanta, San Francisco, Houston, and El Paso areas.

The National Gang Unit oversees HSI’s expansive transnational gang portfolio and enables special agents to bring the fight to these criminal enterprises through the development of uniform enforcement and intelligence-sharing strategies.

Recent National Gang Unit-led operations include: Southern Tempest in 2011, targeting gangs affiliated with drug trafficking; Project Nefarious in 2012, targeting gangs involved in human smuggling and trafficking; Project Southbound in 2014, targeting the Sureños, the fasting growing transnational gang in the U.S., and Project Wildfire in 2015, the largest gang surge conducted by HSI to date.

Additionally, for the past three years, ICE has held an anti-gang conference with the U.S. Department of State in Mexico City to provide training and capacity building for international law enforcement officers to combat and prevent gang activities.

Who Can be Fired at the VA for Cause? No One

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Bipartisan Senate Group Unveils New Bill to Speed Up VA Firing, Bonus Recoupment

The new bill comes just days after a federal appeals court ruled Congress’ previous attempt at hastening VA’s disciplinary process — through the 2014 Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — was unconstitutional. The measure stripped Senior Executive Service employees of their right to a second-level appeal before the Merit Systems Protection Board’s presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed panel. VA had already stopped using the new authority after its constitutionality was questioned in court and the Obama administration declined to defend it.

The senators have been working on their new bill for weeks, but they said the court ruling reinforced the need for reform. “This legislation would improve on the law we enacted in 2014,” Rubio said.

The bill would allow the department’s secretary to fire, suspend or demote an employee with only 15 days notice. Affected workers would then have seven days to issue a response before a final decision is made. Any employee facing removal, suspension of at least 14 days or a demotion would have 10 days to appeal the action to the Merit Systems Protection Board. MSPB would then have 180 days to issue a decision, a much longer period than the 45-day timeline set up in the House bill. Employees would maintain the right to appeal an MSPB decision to federal court.

Employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement would also maintain the right to appeal a negative personnel action through the grievance process, though it would have to be resolved within 21 days. Read more here.

Image result for Veterans admin

Meanwhile, there is that blasted union problem at the VA:

An estimated 346 employees in the Department of Veterans Affairs do no actual work for taxpayers. Instead, they spend all of their time doing work on behalf of their union while drawing a federal salary, a practice known as “official time.”

That’s according to a report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. But exactly what those VA workers are doing and why so many are doing it is not clear. The VA doesn’t track that, and the GAO report offers no clue.

Rep. Jody Arrington, R-Texas, a member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, thinks the number on 100 percent official time may be much higher. He also notes that the 346 workers don’t include those who spend most, not all, of their time doing union work.

“The lack of accountability at the VA when it comes to monitoring official time suggests it might be worse,” said Arrington, who has introduced legislation that would require the department to track the use of official time, among other reforms.

Pointing to the waiting list scandals at the department, Arrington said the official time situation is reflective of the “broken culture at the heart of the VA” and adds, “I haven’t heard one good, acceptable reason why the practice has continued.”

The VA was not eager to discuss the matter with the Washington Examiner. After several days of inquiries, it responded with the following statement: “VA believes that the appropriate use of official time can be beneficial and in the public interest as stated in the Federal Service Labor-Relations Statute, which governs how executive branch agencies treat official time. VA takes the position that labor and management have a shared responsibility to ensure that official time is authorized and used appropriately. VA practices are in compliance with the Federal Service Labor-Relations Statute.”

Official time is allowed under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. The idea behind it is to ensure that a federal employee who is also a union official won’t be penalized for being away from work if he or she is negotiating a contract or addressing a worker grievance, for example. It is essentially a trade-off for the limitations put on federal unions, such as prohibitions on striking.

At least 700 federal workers do nothing but work on official time, according to the GAO and data obtained from various Freedom of Information Act requests. The VA uses official time far more than any other agency.

“Employees spent approximately 1,057,00 hours on official time for union representation activities … In addition, the data show that 346 employees spent 100 percent of their time on official time,” the GAO found in a January report.

It is possible that even those figures are conservative. The GAO said the said the VA’s poor monitoring meant the data was “inconsistent and not reliable.”

The GAO didn’t know what the employees are doing with all of that time. “We just didn’t get into that in that particular study,” said Cindy Barnes, the GAO’s director of education, workforce and income security issues and author of the report.

Part of the explanation is that the VA is one of the largest federal agencies with 373,000 workers, making it second only to the Pentagon in the sheer size of its workforce. About 250,000 VA workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, according to the GAO, citing 2012 data. Arrington puts the covered figure at 285,000.

By comparison, the Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 workers and the Department of Commerce has just under 44,000 workers. But those departments get by with proportionately far fewer people working exclusively on official time. DHS has 39, while Commerce has just four.

Another factor is that the VA’s workforce is represented by no less than five unions: The American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, National Nurses United, the National Federation of Federal Employees and the Service Employees International Union.

National Nurses United representative Irma Westmoreland was the only union official willing to talk about the practice with the Washington Examiner. She is one of five nurses union members who work exclusively on union time at the VA. The union has another nine who spent 80 percent of their time at the VA on official time, she said.

Westmoreland said her work was necessary because nurses can’t simply stop taking care of a patient to do something like address a worker grievance. People such as her do the union work and make it possible for the other nurses to focus on providing care.

“I have to travel across the country working with 23 VA facilities in four time zones,” she said. “The management teams want somebody at 100 percent official time so they don’t have to pull somebody out of care.”

But not everyone at the VA is involved in care. So what are the other 341 exclusive official time workers doing? Westmoreland had no insight.

“I don’t know how the other people do it,” she said.

American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox told Arrington’s subcommittee in February that official time involved activities such as “designing and delivering joint training of employees on work-related subjects and introduction of new programs and work methods that are initiated by the agency or by the union.”

He added that “in no way did the [February GAO] report suggest that the use of official time presents problems for the department.” The report sought only to quantify the amount of time used.

Arrington argues that the practice has to change if the VA is ever to be truly reformed. He has sponsored the Veterans, Employees and Taxpayer Protection Act, which would require the VA to track the use of official time. It also would prohibit employees involved with direct patient care from spending more than a quarter of their work hours on union activities and bar any VA employee from spending more than half of their time on official time.

The legislation would effectively put VA employees under right-to-work protection. The VA would be prohibited from agreeing to union contracts that force workers to join or otherwise support a union as a condition of employment.

Westmoreland said she has no trouble with better tracking the use of official time but warns against putting any limitations on its use.

“It makes it very difficult if you cannot have set official time,” she said.