At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned US Coast Guard Academy whistleblowers.
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00:00 Thanks, Senator Butler. Senator Hawley.
00:02 Thank You, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to you and the ranking member for holding this hearing today. Thank you for each of you.
00:09 Thank you for being here. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your service to our country, first of all.
00:13 And thank you for serving your country today by being here today to shine light and expose
00:19 what has happened. And I just want to say I can't believe we are sitting here today. I can't, first of all,
00:27 words fail me and
00:29 saying what has happened to each of you and offering condolences. That doesn't begin to cut it. But I also just cannot believe
00:35 that
00:38 the extent of the cover-up for years and years and years and years.
00:44 And I also can't believe, Mr. Chairman, that the Coast Guard has had this report since 31 January 2020.
00:51 And they sit on it for three plus years and deliberately conceal it for us. I mean deliberately conceal it. Ms. Morrow,
00:57 I wanted to ask you about something you said in your written testimony.
01:00 I cannot imagine what this was like for you. You said you found out from CNN that your case
01:07 was included in Operation Fouled Anchor. I just want to read what you said here. "Not from an Academy representative,
01:13 not from CGIS, not from Congress.
01:16 The news was broken to me by the press over the phone while I was wiping my child's runny nose."
01:24 Tell us what it is like to, frankly, be betrayed in that way. Since you've got a member of the press,
01:31 you know, which thank goodness they got it. Thank goodness whomever it was, the whistleblower, whomever leaked it to them.
01:36 Because otherwise we probably still wouldn't know about it.
01:38 But just tell us what that was like to get a call and to say, "Hey, by the way,
01:42 there's this report that you've never heard of and your case is in it." And do you have a comment?
01:46 Yes, I have several.
01:50 I would like to start by saying that I wish I could put that whistleblower on my Christmas card list for the rest of my life.
01:57 Because without that whistleblower,
02:00 something that I had thought that I had put to bed
02:03 decades ago
02:06 was just
02:08 resurrected.
02:10 I
02:12 have been minding my own business the last several decades. I left the Academy,
02:19 haven't had careers like the other ladies up here. I am living a blissfully
02:25 average life with my husband and my children in Tennessee.
02:30 And
02:33 in a mom bun and like dirty leggings,
02:38 my very good friend sent me a link in my text messages saying, "Look at this CNN article.
02:48 Weren't you at the Academy during this time period?"
02:50 And again, my heart hit my feet and I read the report and I immediately
02:57 contacted the CNN reporter.
03:01 She immediately contacted me back and said, "I've been looking for you.
03:07 Your name is in this report. I've been looking for you."
03:16 And it was clear to me that even though I had been in therapy all those years, that I had not healed.
03:23 And
03:26 like I mentioned in my testimony, I was wiping my son's runny nose
03:30 with my phone up to my ear like this, listening to her tell me this.
03:34 And
03:37 I still don't have words. I've been suffering
03:42 since June, since I heard.
03:46 Went back into therapy and
03:48 finally found a great counselor who diagnosed me with complex PTSD.
03:53 And
03:56 that was very freeing.
03:57 So this is in many ways been a blessing for me because I finally
04:02 have a diagnosis for the things that I thought were just personality quirks these last 20 years was actually in fact PTSD.
04:10 I don't know if that answered your question fully.
04:15 No, you bet it does.
04:18 Can I ask you about something that you said a few minutes ago?
04:21 Talking about back when you were at the Academy,
04:24 talking about carrying people on your back in the pool, pushing them up over the walls in the obstacle course, and then none of them
04:30 would come forward and support you. And you said something that really struck me. You said they're so fearful.
04:36 They were so fearful. Tell us about that dynamic. What were they fearful of and why?
04:44 Frankly, they were fearful of the stripes
04:47 on leaders shoulders. The bigger the stripes, the bigger the threat. We all know this.
04:55 So what would, walk us through that. I mean just help us. What was the threat? If they supported you and they said, "Yeah,
05:04 she's telling the truth," what would happen?
05:06 You would be, you know, blacklisted in a way. I don't know how else to
05:10 better explain that.
05:14 Every person that has gotten into a service academy
05:18 knows how difficult it is and how driven and how hard-working you have to be to get there.
05:25 I mean, it's not like the normal, you know,
05:28 acceptance routine that most kids have to go through to get into colleges. They are very, very
05:35 special people. They're talented. They're hard-working and they're smart.
05:41 To get there, you had to work your tail off.
05:45 To be,
05:50 to stay there, you have to work equally as hard.
05:54 It was a lot to lose.
05:57 To be kicked out, thrown on the streets
06:00 without any, you know, VA help, you know, for depression or suicidal thoughts.
06:05 It's crushing. I mean, I had to start over from square one.
06:10 I, like I said in my written testimony, I had several NCAA
06:14 Division I rowing scholarships.
06:17 I chose to go to the Coast Guard Academy to serve my country. I even turned down the Naval Academy to go there, too.
06:25 And then,
06:27 after one semester,
06:29 I'm out on the streets, so to speak.
06:31 It was a lot to lose. Oh my god. Yes, it is.
06:36 Help, just help me understand. Help us understand the culture.
06:41 Leadership doesn't want to,
06:43 they don't want to hear it, right? There's retaliation, there are repercussions. If somebody supports you,
06:49 they're gonna get blacklisted because
06:51 the leadership doesn't want to deal with the problem or they don't want to do it. Explain that piece of it to us.
06:57 Why not just say, why wasn't leadership in your case saying, "This is unbelievable. This is terrible. It's probably a crime."
07:06 For many of you, it is a crime, which you described. Sexual assault's a crime. Rape's a crime. So it's not just bad behavior.
07:13 It's criminal behavior.
07:15 Help us understand that the culture that says, "Oh, we're just gonna, you know, see no evil, hear no evil,
07:22 look the other way. We don't want to deal with it." Such that if you press the issue and you say, "No, actually, I was
07:26 assaulted. Actually, I was raped." They say,
07:29 "We've got to silence you. I mean, we just, we've got to shut this down. We can't deal with this."
07:33 Why is that? I mean, help us get into the mindset, their mind, to the best you can, their mindset.
07:37 Keep in mind, I was only there for one semester.
07:39 So my experience is going to be a little bit more limited than the other ladies up here.
07:44 But like others have touched on, there,
07:49 there's a sphere of retaliation and then, you know, the Academy itself is an incredibly,
07:56 especially your freshman year, is an incredibly strong
08:00 pressure cooker type environment.
08:03 When I was there, there were no self, you were not allowed to have cell phones.
08:07 You were not allowed to have
08:09 iPods when they were back a thing. It was so, there's no music. There's no, there's no connection to the outside world and
08:17 you have to
08:19 eat on squares. I don't know if you guys know what that is. You're, you're, you're turning, you know,
08:25 you're braced up. You have to have your eyes in the boat. It's a, it's, there's no
08:29 relief from this pressure and
08:33 it's, I
08:35 forget exactly where I was going with that, excuse me, but so this pressure type cooker type environment just creates
08:46 this difficulty
08:51 in trying to, you're just taking care of yourself. You're, you're in like survival mode,
08:56 so to speak.
08:59 And so it's, it's hard to
09:02 see someone suffer and then to
09:06 speak out about it because it also might spotlight you as well. And so if you are
09:13 guilty of consuming alcohol underage or guilty of doing something that would merit a demerit,
09:22 you just keep your mouth shut. I, you know, I can't handle
09:28 demerits on my record. I have bad grades or I just don't want to spotlight myself. So I think that's
09:33 in a roundabout way and I hope that answers your question. It does and I don't want to monopolize the time, Mr. Chairman.
09:39 I'd be interested actually in the response to that question from, from everybody. Is that, is it okay, Mr.
09:45 Go, yeah, please go ahead. Lieutenant McCaffrey. Yeah, Senator Hawley,
09:48 I will try to make this as macro level as possible given my 12 years of experience
09:53 at literally every single level within the organization from my fourth class year as a cadet to the front office of Commonaut Advisory Group.
10:01 I served on the front, the front office staff on the Commonaut Advisory Group for Admiral Zunko
10:06 from 2016 until I ultimately was medically retired in 2019 for sustained
10:10 PTSD. And what I observed directly in headquarters at that office where I am surrounded by the cream of the crop of
10:19 leaders, senior leaders, is that they implement safeguards within each other, for each other. And
10:26 I call these people the gatekeepers.
10:28 Time and time again, I would go to these gatekeepers, my immediate boss, who was an O5, a commander, and an O6, a
10:37 captain. I would come to them with legitimate problems backed by reams and reams of data.
10:43 Example, 2016. We had a retention problem then and it's only gotten worse.
10:48 I tried to bring this to the awareness of Admiral Zunko and was told outright not to do it.
10:54 Those gatekeepers prohibited access to him so they did not have to give him bad news.
11:01 And the reason they did this is because they were up for promotion. I hate to say it.
11:06 I honestly hate to be the one to call this out.
11:09 But this is the reality. This is it. This is the reason. They just want to promote.
11:14 They want to make the next rank. They want to become a captain. The captains want to become an admiral and they want to join
11:21 that so-called esteemed and privileged club. That is exactly what it is. And they don't care about the carnage
11:27 left in their wake. They do not care about their loyalty to the oath.
11:32 They don't care. They just want to make the next rank.
11:37 And I have seen it in the fleet, at the Academy, at the senior most levels.
11:42 And I have seen it time and time and time and again.
11:47 And while I really do applaud my colleagues' optimism and that it's better,
11:52 I have seen the reality and I have not been out that long.
11:55 I've retired in 2019 at the pinnacle of my career, having saved with my teams nearly
12:03 17,000 people. And yet this organization, these senior leaders who are still here,
12:11 refuse to do something they could easily do tonight.
12:14 Should Admiral Fagan be genuine in her ability and her action to do something,
12:20 she could recall every single one of those senior leaders tonight.
12:25 She could charge them under her authority given to her via the UCMJ and she could hold them accountable.
12:32 But the unspoken and the unwritten rule that I have learned from my own experiences,
12:38 and again, I need to caveat this, that not everyone in the flag corps, not all captains are bad.
12:45 Many, many are good.
12:47 But the ones in power, the ones who make the decisions, the one who overrule convictions,
12:53 criminal convictions, are the ones who often stay the longest and rise the ranks to the highest point.
13:03 And then when you add in the complexity of a gatekeeper, an 06, a one-star, or a commander,
13:09 they are just simply not getting the information that they need.
13:13 And that's just the fundamental, that is the reality of the situation.
13:17 It comes down to individual ego and ambition and their need and desire to promote for power.