Veterans Administration Secretary Robert McDonald misled the public during his interview on Meet the Press last Sunday.
McDonald was hired to fix the bureaucratic nightmare in the Veterans Administration that led to tragic deaths of military veterans.
The deaths were attributed to employees that altered medical appointments for sick veterans, and the subsequent delays resulted in a number of deaths.
In a comment that seemed too good to be true, McDonald said, “We’ve got 60 people that we fired who have manipulated wait times.”
The Washington Post examined McDonald’s claim and awarded him Four Pinocchios — the maximum number — for his gross exaggeration of the truth.
The newspaper’s Fact Checker looked into the accuracy of McDonald’s comment and found that only eight employees were fired. The truth is that the department recommended “disciplinary action to more than 60 employees nationwide.”
The Fact Checker concluded:
Recommending people to receive a letter about their wrongdoing is not the same thing as being fired. Recommending people to be fired is not the same thing as being fired. Employees are not fired unless they have been removed from their jobs – and as of two days before McDonald went on air, there were eight employees who were removed for manipulating patient wait-time data. So McDonald’s statement is incorrect.
Cross-posted at DeneenBorelli.com
