Calmatters.org columnist Dan Walters notes Thursday that University of California President Janet Napolitano, who served as Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, was given no real punishment for behavior that would have seen a CEO in the private sector fired for mismanagement and possibly prosecuted for obstruction.
As Breitbart News’ Chriss Street has noted, a state audit revealed that Napolitano’s office hid $175 million even as it raised tuition for students in the UC system. The audit found that Napolitano’s office “used misleading budgeting practices, provided its employees with generous salaries and atypical benefits, and failed to satisfactorily justify its spending on systemwide initiatives.” In addition, the auditor testified before the state legislature that Napolitano and her office had attempted to interfere with, and to smear publicly, the investigation into its financial mismanagement.
Walters notes:
Let’s say you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that’s under scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting irregularities.
And let’s say that when the SEC’s investigators sought information from other executives at your company, you insisted that their responses be funneled through your office and altered to reflect more favorably on your leadership.
Finally, let’s say that your manipulations were exposed. You probably would be fired by your board of directors for exposing the company to legal penalties and quite possibly prosecuted for interfering in an official investigation.
Instead of facing punishment, Walters notes, Napolitano was merely “scolded” and “issued a quasi-apology this month for exhibiting ‘poor judgment’.”
Read Walters’s full column here.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.