Watchdog says Veterans Affairs secretary openly questioned credibility of House aide who reported sexual assault at hospital

WASHINGTON - Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie and his senior leaders openly questioned the credibility of a House aide who reported a sexual assault at the agency’s flagship hospital in the District of Columbia, denigrating her and ascribing political motives to her claim, a report released Thursday found.

The tone Wilkie set with his senior staff and with reporters influenced the investigation into the veteran’s claim - and led to the agency’s failure to improve an inhospitable environment for women at the D.C. Medical Center, Inspector General Michael Missal found.

And instead of turning their attention to the hospital contractor the woman told authorities had “bumped his entire body against mine and told me I looked like I needed a smile and a good time,” investigators found that VA’s senior leaders embarked on a campaign to discredit the woman. The contractor did not have credentials to enter the hospital and had been the subject of a previous sexual harassment complaint from a VA employee.

“Using denigrating remarks and questioning the credibility of a veteran who reported being sexually assaulted, and then failing to fully explore the facts, is . . . contrary to the ongoing missions of improving VA and of serving the veteran community with respect,” James Mitchell, deputy inspector general for special reviews, wrote.

Wilkie, in a scathing response to the report, wrote, “After nearly a year of investigation, interviews with 65 people and analysis of nearly 1.5 million documents, VA’s inspector general cannot substantiate that I sought to investigate or asked others to investigate the Veteran. That’s because these allegations are false. What’s more, the IG could not identify a single instance in which any VA employee violated any rule, regulation or policy.”

Wilkie described conversations about the Goldstein case as “confidential internal deliberations among VA staff” and said they should have not have been a part of Missal’s inquiry. The inspector general “established a strawman in which any discussion or scrutiny of public and highprofile allegations against the department, or a general desire to know the truth are somehow improper,” Wilkie wrote.

Missal’s office answered, “Secretary Wilkie’s comments on this report do not respond substantively to its findings. Instead they mischaracterize key facts and fail to acknowledge the deficiencies in VA’s response to the veteran’s complaint. Notably, his comments do not seek to correct or supplement the findings.”

The 68-page report caps a saga that has embroiled Wilkie, the veteran and Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, in a standoff since the fall of 2019. That’s when Andrea Goldstein, the committee’s senior policy adviser on women veterans, reported that a man slammed his body against her as she waited in line to buy a snack in the hospital’s main lobby.

Wilkie quickly asked Missal’s office to investigate. Goldstein’s complaint highlighted a major struggle for the veterans agency as it tries to serve the health needs of women, the fastest-growing veteran population. Female veterans regularly report sexual harassment and assault at VA clinics and hospitals.

The Washington Post reported Wedneday that the inspector general’s office told federal prosecutors this fall of possible criminal conduct by Wilkie stemming from the investigation. The Justice Department has not pursued a case against Wilkie, a former senior Pentagon official who has served since 2018 as President Trump’s second veterans chief.

The discussions centered around whether Missal’s office was authorized to compel testimony from a senior official who had stopped cooperating in the investigation into Wilkie’s conduct, a personal familiar with the matter said.

Prosecutors told the inspector general’s office they did not think there was enough evidence presented to bring charges, according to two federal officials with direct knowledge of the case.

In January, federal authorities declined to file charges in the sexual assault case. But Wilkie, who had tangled with Takano for months of policy issues and the committee’s oversight of his agency, immediately took a personal interest in the case, investigators found.

Missal’s investigation was hindered, the report says, by the refusal of Wilkie, acting deputy secretary Pamela Powers and his two top press officials James Hutton and Curt Cashour, to cooperate with requests for follow-up interviews.

Within hours of receiving word about Goldstein’s Sept. 20 complaint, “senior VA officials began communicating about whether the veteran had previously complained about verbal abuse from a VA provider at another facility,” the report said. Wilkie speculated in an email that Takano was “laying the grounds for a spectacle.” VA leaders’ suspicions centered on Goldstein’s work on sexual assault issues for the committee and on initial reports of a lack of eyewitnesses.

“This initial skepticism matured into repeated, apparently unsupported assertions or vague conjectures that the veteran did ‘something like this’ before, which similarly contributed to VA personnel actions focusing on the veteran and her credibility,” the report said.

One employee testified, for example, that the deputy assistant secretary for congressional and legislative affairs “walked into the room and he had just come from the 10th floor,” a reference to the executive floor and Secretary’s office. The deputy assistant secretary commented that the veteran was raising the sexual assault allegations “‘to push some legislation, because she had some legislation in her purse that was going [to] mandate that all VA had to go through some kind ofsexual assault prevention training,’” the report said.

The inspector general did not substantiate that Wilkie formally investigated Goldstein’s past or improperly accessed her electronic health and military records or asked others to do so. In interviews, Wilkie denied investigating her, questioning her credibility or knowing whether she had made prior assault complaints in the military.

But investigators found that Wilkie told his staff that Goldstein had made similar complaints of sexual assault in the Navy.

Eight senior agency officials described discussions in Wilkie’s presence “that involved the veteran’s purported history of filing complaints, whether specific to prior sexual assault allegations or similar issues during her military service,” the report found. Six of the witnesses in sworn testimony attributed the remarks to Secretary Wilkie himself.”The inference was that the complaints were unfounded,” the report said.

One of the secretary’s top public affairs officials, Curt Cashour, pitched a story to a journalist that would impugn Goldstein’s character, telling the reporter, “[Y]ou may want to look into-see-if she’s done this sort of thing in the past,” according to the report.

The report describes “an unusual level of engagement by VA senior officials in an ongoing criminal investigation,” as VA police who met with Wilkie and his team told investigators. This “created pressure on VA police and focused their attention on the veteran herself.”

VA senior officials traveled to the medical center to view any available video footage of the incident, although the surveillance cameras in the area were not working. A VA police officer recalled that a visiting VA official suggested that Goldstein may have “made a complaint similar to this before.”

The police ran a background check on her and circulated the results-which multiple VA police officers considered unusual. This occurred two days before a background check was run on the contractor accused of sexual assault by the veteran.

Less than a week after Goldstein reported being sexually assaulted, Wilkie made a surprise visit to the D.C. medical center himself, the report said. He and Powers met with the medical director. They discussed the case in detail. Wilkie read the written statement provided to VA police by Goldstein, detailing her account of the incident. The medical center director told investigators that after Wilkie finished reading the statement, “he commented that the veteran’s statement was ‘similar to other complaints she’s made other places,’ or words to that effect.”

The agency has not followed through on promises to take steps to ensure that women veterans feel safe and welcome at the D.C. hospital, which Powers described to investigators had long been a place women veterans described as a gantlet of unwelcome interactions, including “cat calls.”