Under mined: when a flood of toxic mining sludge wreaked havoc in Appalachia, how did the White House respond? By letting the coal company off the hook and firing the whistleblower

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Clara Bingham

On Oct. 28, 2002, Smith published an article claiming that Spadaro had been unfairly targeted for his credit-card problems because senior agency officials had tabbed him as a troublemaker since the Martin County fiasco. Smith showed that 50 MSHA employees had charged a total of $51,001 on their government credit cards which they never paid back. One employee even charged $2,000 on his card at Value City Furniture. Spadaro's case was so minor in comparison to the others that, Smith wrote, "it appears as though the alleged 'credit card offenses' might be an attempt to get rid of a whistleblower."

Smith continued to write about several of Spadaro's complaints--the Martin County flood report, the sole-source contracting, and an ignored sexual-harassment case at the academy. After she had published three stories based on Spadaro's information, Lauriski paid Smith a home visit. The assistant secretary for MSHA and one of his deputies traveled all the way from Washington to the little town of Mendon, outside Rochester, NY., for an "off-the-record" discussion about Smith's newsletter. One of the items on Lauriski's agenda was Spadaro. "They brought two letters from people at the academy who had complaints about Jack and crossed out their names," said Smith. "At MSHA there are always complaints. If two is best you can do out of the whole academy, that's pretty weak. They just kept on saying to me there are things [about Jack] that you don't know. We can't tell you because it's a personnel issue. It's a privacy thing. They kept saying, 'you aren't accurate here or there,' and I said 'show me' and they wouldn't so I said, 'then you can't tell me I'm not accurate.'"

Bond, Sam Bond

In the winter of 2003, two reports came just short of vindicating Spadaro. In January, an internal MSHA review admitted that the agency's oversight of the Martin County slurry impoundment had been lax, but did not lay blame for the flood on the agency. Then, on Feb. 19, 2003, the Labor Department's Inspector General released its report on the Martin County investigation. The IG confirmed some of Spadaro's allegations: that MSHA officials had backed off six out of eight citations against Massey Energy, that investigators were denied access to the files, and that several members of the investigative team had initially refused to sign the report because they were prohibited from reading it. The IG even reported that Spadaro "may have" been subjected to retaliation by higher ups, but concluded that the Martin County report was fair and accurate, and that Spadaro had not substantiated his charges that it was a whitewash.

But the IG chose to invoke exceptions in the federal open-records law and censored almost half of the 26page document (a step very rarely taken), leaving more questions than answers. The credibility of the report's conclusion that there had been no cover-up was therefore hindered by its own cover-up. A scathing editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal accused the IG of withholding important information: "Public confidence in MSHA won't be bolstered by a report that's full of black lines where information should be."