U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Linda Fagan testified Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Investigations Subcommittee about the agency’s report, Operation Dirty Anchor, which details historical sexual abuse and misconduct in the United States Coast Guard between 1990 and 2006.
Fagan opened his testimony by reading a statement: “Our failure to share the report with Congress was a mistake that prevented adequate oversight and further eroded trust… I cannot change the past, but as today’s Commander, I reaffirm to our workforce, past and present, that I remain steadfast in my commitment to achieving lasting cultural change.”
But as the hearing progressed, Fagan’s answers to the subcommittee’s questions became repetitive, using the phrase “I remain committed to transparency and accountability” several times.
Fagan’s testimony was preceded by the resignation of Shannon Norenberg, who worked at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London and was responsible for dealing with sexual assault allegations.
Norenberg issued a statement just 24 hours before the hearing.
“The Coast Guard lied to me,” he wrote. “Worse than that, they used me to lie to victims, they used me to silence them, and they used me in a coordinated effort to discourage victims of sexual assault at the Academy from speaking before Congress about their assaults and about the investigation of the cases by the Coast Guard. .”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s senior senator and subcommittee chairman, pressed Fagan on whether he had read Norenberg’s statement. Fagan said he had not yet read the statement, but that he was aware of it from media reports.
Blumenthal said that in his years in the U.S. Senate and in law enforcement he had never seen a statement as “concisely damning” as Norenberg’s.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., ranking member of the subcommittee, pressed Fagan on the documents they have received so far from the Coast Guard, holding up a collection of them and flipping through heavily redacted pages. He noted that some of the pages were completely blacked out.
Johnson questioned Fagan’s comments about transparency and accountability, saying: “It’s all part of a cop-out. It’s all part of making time tick.”
Fagan said the document request was around two million pages and they were working on the request and his team of 10 was literally working 24/7 to fulfill the subcommittee’s requests.
Blumenthal responded by saying that they had received just 24 hours earlier a “document dump” and said that he was using this phrase because the documents they had received were in a format that was almost impossible to follow.
“We continue to vigorously investigate timely reports of criminal misconduct,” Fagan said, adding, “I launched a comprehensive workforce-wide effort to understand how our people live, our core values, and create clarity and alignment. There are more things we are doing and more things we want to do, and I will ask for your support and resources to continue the work and journey we have embarked on. Every expert we consulted cautioned that cultural change is neither easy nor quick, but it is critical that we undertake it and is critical to our success as a service organization. We have started this work. “I’m not going to shy away from this challenge.”
In his testimony, Fagan said that much of the investigation was in the hands of the Inspector General (IG) and that he was complying with all requests from that office.
But Blumenthal noted that the IG’s investigation had not imposed limitations on his office or the Coast Guard, to his knowledge, with respect to denying access or refusing to provide documents to the subcommittee, or to provide assistance to Coast Guard veterans who They had been assaulted and were still being denied access to medical help for follow-up care.
Johnson then asked Fagan if he had seen a draft of the original 11-page report on Operation Dirty Anchor. He seemed astonished when Fagan said no, but that he had read the final version.
Johnson pressed Fagan to have access to the draft report, saying it was important for them to see that version and what it contained, and what was then left out of that draft in the final report.
Blumenthal said that in his years in the U.S. Senate and in law enforcement he had never seen a statement as “concisely damning” as Norenberg’s.
Fagan responded by saying they would allow access to the draft report “behind closed doors,” a legal term in which someone can view the documents privately but cannot make copies, take notes or release them to a wider audience. That response caused the audience members in the chamber behind her to shake their heads in disappointment.
When asked by the subcommittee if he had been aware of the Operation Dirty Anchor report previously, Fagan said he had been informed in the fall of 2018, but it was not until he took over the agency in 2022 as commander, and Freedom As requests for information began to come in from news organizations, the seriousness of the report’s contents became apparent.
Both Blumenthal and Johnson said that although Fagan is not involved in any cover-up of the Operation Dirty Anchor report, she is the leader of the Coast Guard and, as such, should want to know why the cover-up occurred and who carried it out. and hoped that after Tuesday’s hearing there would be more cooperation from Fagan and the Coast Guard as the investigation continues.
