From October 24, 2022 post.
Today, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote to the DoD and the DoD OIG seeking an explanation for its failure to identify relevant information during their conflicts review for Sally Donnelly, a former aide to Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
“The American people must have confidence that their government isn’t plagued by conflicts of interest and that the decisions made by government officials are done for the people and their best interests, not the financial interests of government officials,” Grassley wrote.
Before beginning her tenure as an aide to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Sally Donnelly sold the interest in her business, SBD Advisors LLC, to VMAP Investor LLC. SBD Advisors was a consulting firm where Sally Donnelly previously worked for various clients including Amazon. During its conflicts review, DOD OIG only reviewed a version of that sale agreement with the buyer’s information redacted as part of that office’s conflicts of interest review. DOD OIG later wrote that it “found no evidence that [Ms. Donnelly] had an ongoing or undisclosed financial relationship with C5 [Capital] or Amazon and its affiliates.” However, based on information collected during this investigation, it was discovered that VMAP Investor LLC was connected to C5, its affiliates, and other investors related to that business while Donnelly was at DoD and received payments from the sale. This information is relevant to DoD and DoD OIG’s conflicts review and could have affected the types of procedures required to wall-off Sally Donnelly from potential and actual conflicts of interest while working at the DoD.
Grassley, having obtained information about the purchasers of Donnelly’s firm, is pressing the DOD OIG and current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for information about how this new information affects the previous conflicts of interest analysis. He asks whether the DOD OIG will reopen its review, and how inspectors general and secretary’s offices will improve their internal processes to obtain relevant information before performing these reviews in the future.
Related:
January 2022: Watchdog Failures In Review Of Pentagon Cloud Computing Contract Raise More Questions About Conflicts Of Interest, Bureaucratic Whitewashing
June 2021: Grassley to Defense Dept.: Cloud Computing Contract Questions Remain Unanswered, Other Approaches Show More Promise
April 2021: Grassley Pushes New SECDEF for Answers on Old JEDI Questions
October 2020: Grassley Continues to Press Defense Department on Massive Cloud Computing Procurement Program, Conflicts of Interest and OIG Recommendations
April 2019: Grassley Presses Defense Department on Potential Conflicts in Massive Cloud Computing Procurement
Original source can be found here
