EPA climate change expert, John Beale, gets prison time for lies and being a fake spy
The EPA’s leading expert on climate change and highest-paid employee, is going to prison for what federal prosecutors describe as a ‘fraud of massive proportion.’
John C. Beale pretended to be a spy, being abroad with the CIA, taking a massive salary of $206,000 a year while being at home the entire time, reports NBC news.
His lawyers noted his therapist’s opinion on Beale obsession to lie.
“With the help of his therapist, Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.” Beale’s attorney also said that his client was driven “to manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives … that are fueled by his insecurities.”
Beale was lying to his bosses that he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, while staying at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod.
Patrick Sullivan, assistant inspector general for investigations, said he doubted Beale’s fraud could occur at any federal agency other than the EPA.
“There’s a certain culture here at the EPA where the mission is the most important thing,” he said. “They don’t think like criminal investigators. They tend to be very trusting and accepting.”
Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000. Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court filing.
To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials — including McCarthy — that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.
[…] The Global Dispatch […]
[…] Beale was just sent to jail for fraud. He was in charge of the EPA. His wife Nancy Ketes wrote the Clear Air Act based on this […]