A new story posted today on ABCNews.com– that I wrote and reported with Anna Schecter– about a grant awarded to a former White House official in part thanks to the role some of her former colleagues in the Bush administration played in pressing her case.
A former top official in the White House’s faith-based office was awarded a lucrative Department of Justice grant under pressure from two senior Bush administration appointees, according to current and former DOJ staff members and a review of internal DOJ documents and emails.
The $1.2 million grant was jointly awarded to a consulting firm run by Lisa Trevino Cummins who previously headed Hispanic outreach efforts for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and a California evangelical group, Victory Outreach.
The grant was awarded over the strong objections of career DOJ staff who did not believe that Victory Outreach was qualified for the grant and that too great an amount of the funds was going to Cummins’ consulting company instead of being spent on services for children.
Cummins’ company, Urban Strategies LLC, was slated to get one third of the money for helping the self-described “evangelizing” Victory Outreach use the rest of the funds.
On its website, Victory Outreach describes itself as a “church-oriented Christian ministry called to the task of evangelizing and disciplining the hurting people of the world, with the message of hope and plan of Jesus Christ.”
The grant is now central to a Justice Department probe into alleged irregular contracting practices within its own ranks, according to a federal law enforcement official close to the investigation.
The money was awarded by J. Robert Flores, the Administrator of the DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) who is under investigation by the DOJ’s Inspector General after current and former employees said he awarded grants to programs with the right political and ideological connections. OJJDP grants are intended to address juvenile delinquency prevention and/or the juvenile justice system.
Questions about Flores’ awarding of grants were raised earlier this month by ABC News on Nightline.
Cummins’ application for the grant should have immediately “raised red flags,” according to a senior Justice Department official. The official said that most of the grant money should be going to services, but that “in this case, you have a third of the money up front going to a consulting company,” the official said.
Furthermore, Cummins’ said in the application that she planned to have one of her senior employees oversee Victory Outreach’s use of the federal funds, even though that employee, Kelly Cowles, had mismanaged funds according to Ohio state investigators.
You can read the story in its entirety here.
Update: Just as our story was being posted, the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a report saying that former senior Justice Department officials illegally used “political and ideological” criteria in deciding which young lawyers would be accepted into DOJ’s elite intern program.
The report asserts that “many qualified candidates” were rejected solely because of their political beliefs. Such practices, the report concluded,“constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”
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