Bill Donohue comments on news reports that the U.S. State Department is involved in a cover-up of pedophilia:
At a Senate Finance Committee today, it was reported that the State Department found in 2010 that the majority of domestic victims enslaved in the sex industry are runaway and homeless youth. It did not say whether the child that was allegedly raped by the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium was homeless. Perhaps that is because the investigation into what Howard Gutman did was spiked by Patrick Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management.
The State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to have been infinitely more concerned about punishing whistleblowers than pedophiles. Aurelia Fedenisn, a former senior inspector general investigator at the State Department, said Gutman “routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.” Evidently, lots of people knew about it and did nothing. Gutman raised a half-million dollars for Obama in 2008 and helped finance his inaugural.
Worse, the Inspector General’s (IG) office compromised its independence by lying about the events: Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security, Eric Boswell, ordered reference to the pedophilia deleted, and the IG acceded to the request. As for Fedensin, she was threatened with criminal charges, but nothing was done about the child rapist.
Yesterday, a State Department official said that investigations sometimes result in disciplinary actions that aren’t made public. If the State Department wants to punish its johns internally, that is of no interest to the Catholic League. But when priests are being removed from ministry for “boundary violations,” and bishops are being pressured to step down because they didn’t sufficiently supervise a former groping priest, it is unconscionable—if these stories are true—that State Department higher-ups not be punished for refusing to contact the authorities about a suspected child rapist, and then engaging in a cover-up.
