Liars on Parade
Coast Guard Academy official resigns, says she was directed to lie to Congress as part of ‘cruel’ sexual assault cover-up
By Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken and Audrey Ash, CNN
Tue June 11, 2024
A US Coast Guard Academy official says top leaders directed her to lie to sexual assault victims and Congress, making her an unwitting accomplice in a cover-up of decades of abuse.
As a result, Shannon Norenberg says she’s resigning from her role as the academy’s head of sexual assault prevention and issuing a public apology to survivors, saying she is no longer willing to stay silent.
“The Coast Guard lied to me,” she wrote in a public statement posted online Sunday. “I can no longer in good conscience be part of an organization that would betray me, betray victims of sexual assault, and betray the system I helped set up to hold perpetrators at the academy accountable.”
In an exclusive interview with CNN, Norenberg said she had made it her mission to help sexual assault survivors at the Coast Guard Academy for more than a decade. She said she was devastated when she recently discovered old records showing how leaders had used her as part of the cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor, a secret internal probe into a history of sexual assault cover-ups.
She wrote in her public posting that she was sent on an “apology tour” in 2019 to brief dozens of assault victims about their cases, which had previously been mishandled by academy leadership. The list of talking points she was given at the time shows she was directed to tell victims that Congress was already fully aware of the operation, which she now knows was not the case. She believes this was intended to “dissuade the victims from contacting their Members of Congress.”
The Coast Guard said it was a mistake – not a conspiracy – for the talking point about Congress to be on the list given to Norenberg. The agency added that Coast Guard officials recently interviewed a now-retired Coast Guard officer present during those victim meetings, and she said the talking point was never brought up. Norenberg said she didn’t have a precise recollection of all the meetings, but noted she had one-on-one calls with several victims outside the presence of the now-retired officer. Norenberg also said that if she had been told that Congress was unaware, she would have notified lawmakers immediately.
“Why would anyone trust anything the Coast Guard has to say about Operation Fouled Anchor at this point?” she said.
Norenberg was also instructed to not include the historic assaults being investigated in data that Congress would see, she said, and was prohibited from offering survivors key paperwork that would have helped them access mental health services and veteran’s benefits available to sexual assault victims.
“We weren’t sent out there to help these people, I realized,” she wrote. “The whole thing was a cruel cover-up at the expense of the victims, with the entire purpose being to preserve the image of the Coast Guard and avoid scandal. And the Coast Guard used me as part of their plan.
‘A deep moral rot’: Coast Guard leader grilled by senators at hearing on sexual assault cover-up
By Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken and Audrey Ash, CNN
June 11, 2024
Senators blasted the head of the US Coast Guard at a contentious hearing on Tuesday, saying she has fostered a “culture of concealment,” withheld critical information from congressional investigators and failed to hold leaders and perpetrators accountable for serious misconduct.
“Our investigation has shown a deep moral rot within the Coast Guard now,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, chair of the Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been looking into the Coast Guard’s past mishandling of sexual assault cases. “One that prioritizes cronyism over accountability, silence over survivors.”
Blumenthal and other lawmakers from the subcommittee told Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan that their investigation has found that sexual assault remains a “persistent and unacceptably prevalent” issue across the service, despite her initial assurances that it was a problem of the past.
Nearly 40 whistleblowers have come forward to the subcommittee in recent months, lawmakers said. At the hearing, Fagan was questioned about what specific steps she was taking to ensure those who commit serious misconduct, as well as those who cover up their crimes, are removed from the service.
From: Berkow, Michael SES <Michael.Berkow@uscg.mil>
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2021 11:53 PM
To: All Hands <allhands@uscg.mil>
Cc: Schultz, Karl ADM <Karl.L.Schultz@uscg.mil>
Subject: Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!
Peace, Out.
V/r,
Michael Berkow
Director, CGIS
Admiral Karl Shultz, USCG Academy Class of 1983
Admiral Linda Fagan, USCG Academy Class of 1985
“If They’re Talking, They’re Lying”
We are taking action, the work is not done … we have not waited,” Fagan said, repeatedly pledging to change the culture but saying she needs more time and resources to do so. “I want to stop creating victims, but for the victims that we do have in the organization, I am 100% committed to fully supporting them and their needs.”
Fagan had previously said she only learned of the “totality” of the so-called Fouled Anchor probe when CNN inquired about the issue, though she had heard of it because she had previously taken steps to remove a commanding officer caught up in the investigation.
When pressed by senators Tuesday on how much she had known about the investigation prior to becoming commandant in 2021, she acknowledged that she had “formally” learned about it when the agency’s leadership council was briefed in 2018,and she said that “when we closed it out in 2020, there was conversation around whether to disclose or not.”
Fagan refused to say whether she believed her predecessor, Admiral Karl Schultz, was behind the ultimate decision to keep the findings of Fouled Anchor from Congress after the probe concluded. She said she did not have “any direct evidence of misconduct” surrounding this decision, even though minutes earlier senators had displayed a giant poster of a handwritten list made by Schultz’s second in command with “pros” and “cons” about whether to be transparent with lawmakers and the public about the probe. Schultz previously declined to comment to CNN about Fouled Anchor.
The hearing Tuesday came as Fagan was already facing immense pressure, as new controversies and increased congressional scrutiny have shined a light on how sexual assault is continuing to plague the agency. This includes explosive allegations from the academy’s longtime head of sexual assault prevention, Shannon Norenberg, who recently announced her resignation and said top leaders had directed her to lie to sexual assault victims and Congress, making her an unwitting accomplice in the Fouled Anchor coverup.
Several lawmakers seized on Norenberg’s allegations, specifically that she had been barred from providing survivors with key paperwork that would help them access veteran’s benefits available to sexual assault survivors. Fagan said she couldn’t speak about specifics of that allegation, as well as other issues raised by the senators, because of an open Inspector General investigation. That prompted Blumenthal to criticize her for using the investigation as a shield, eliciting applause from the audience.
“You’re the leader, these decisions are yours,” said Blumenthal.
Fagan said she hadn’t actually read Norenberg’s full statement, just the CNN article about it.
Senators also focused on an email alleging a recent assault coverup that went viral after being deleted from Coast Guard servers and a leaked internal memo showing that Coast Guard officials recently worried that publishing testimonials from assault survivors “could continue to exacerbate the narrative … that the Coast Guard is in a sexual assault crisis now.” Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire, argued that the “reluctance” to release the videos “indicates a real failure of leadership” and lack of understanding of the agency’s current sexual assault problem.
Throughout the hearing, lawmakers pressed Fagan on what they described as a lack of transparency and cooperation with their investigation.
“The only way you can change the culture, the only way this can be fixed … is with truth, transparency and accountability,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin and Ranking Member of the subcommittee, adding that he thinks subpoenas will be necessary. Johnson flipped through page after page of records produced by the Coast Guard that were almost entirely redacted.
A group of bipartisan lawmakers from the House Oversight committee, who were not part of the hearing but have their own investigation underway into the agency’s handling of a variety of misconduct, including sexual assault, racism and hazing, joined the voices of criticism. They sent a letter to Fagan on Tuesday saying that the Coast Guard has provided fewer than 1% of records identified as potentially responsive to the requests to date.
They also said they have heard from whistleblowers who “revealed additional cultural deficiencies and alleged incompetence and misconduct by current and former leaders,” who whistleblowers say may have “willfully concealed evidence relevant to criminal investigations” and “misrepresented material facts to Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) investigators to conceal the depth of the culture of misconduct and the identities of other potential suspects.”
At Tuesday’s hearing, Fagan said the Coast Guard has been fully cooperating with the subcommittee’s investigation. But senators said it appeared that the records it deemed “sensitive” and refused to provide were more likely withheld because of fear of further public embarrassment.
“What’s required of the Coast Guard at this moment is an unsparing commitment to truth-telling, following the facts and the evidence wherever they lead, even if they are embarrassing to former members of the Coast Guard or present members,” said Blumenthal.
Admiral Shultz was prepared to lie through his teeth if it served his purposes. We know that because he had done it already. He proved he would invent ugly fictions and promote illegal schemes to overturn the results of any policy decision that didn’t go his way. That was his record. He placed his vanity, his every want and whim above the integrity of the Coast Guard.
Admiral Fagan was an honest attempt by the President to install an empathetic cure to the epidemic of sexual assault raging within the Coast Guard. Yet even she couldn’t bring herself to accept the Coast Guard’s long lack of ethical leadership. With her many deflections, Admiral Fagan laundered and sanctioned Schultz’s depravity, telling us not merely that she stands with Shultz and the Coast Guard Academy classes of the 1980s but that she sinks every bit as low as Shultz.
Commandant Shultz’s and derivatively Commandant Fagan’s duplicative brand of storytelling has been adopted by both senior Coast Guard officers and their subordinates. In the past five years, Coast Guard Flag Officers have been sharing fictional acquisition, operational and administrative declarations, and have refused to disavow their deceit even when it’s proven false. When misleading the President, DHS, the Congress, and the American people is the self-validating end-goal, the Coast Guard’s publicly disseminated declarations have become untethered from all other concerns, including verifiable reality.
“If Adm Schultz’s blatant cover-up and direct lying to Congress as to the Coast Guard’s long history of sexual assault and harassment (and alcoholism; and cooperative academic cheating; and blatant racism, etc.) had taken place within the Department of Defense vice the country’s stray agencies catch-all “Department of Homeland Security (DHS)”, Adm Shultz would have been demoted by at least by two-stars and drummed out of the “civilians in uniform” that define the Coast Guard.
Instead, he was allowed to retire as a 4-Star and now has the gall to show his face at Coast Guard events and reunions, as if he isn’t a national embarrassment, and not just another USCG leadership example of “what not to do”. I can’t say from experience how you’re supposed to know when you’ve officially become part of an organized crime family, but if you feel it necessary for your professional advancement to show up at a function where Adm Shultz is an attendee, just to pay respect to the misogynist responsible for ignoring the Coast Guard’s 40 year- long history of the rape of junior officers and enlisted personnel (women AND men), chances are you check all the boxes.
It is worth noting that a host of senior Coast Guard officers and civilian leadership shortly preceded or followed Adm Shultz out the door, including the highly unusual late night farewell of CGIS Director Michael Berkow, the disgraced Director of the U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS). He abruptly and unexpectedly publically left his job just before midnight on December 31, 2021. Right before he was locked out of his Coast Guard Email account, Berkow sent the following short and frankly juvenile Email:
“Peace, Out.” CGIS Director Michael Berkow resigns in the face of controversy… again.
Question: Who is the overwhelmed and overworked Secretary of DHS’ advisor on all things Coast Guard?
Answer: A brand-new (2024) USCG O-7 “Cutterman” whose career is directly dependent on the Commandant… NOT on DHS Secretary Mayorkas or anyone else at DHS.
*** Bonus Question: How useful is this Rear Admiral’s “counsel” to Secretary Mayorkas?
Answer: Worthless… unless Secretary Mayorkas needs someone to distinguish bow from stern. Otherwise, this newly- made RDML is just the Commandant’s “talking dog”’; he justs recites the Commandant’s deceitful script to Secretary Mayorkas.
