A year and a half after resigning in disgrace as the Vice President for Public Affairs for the US Postal Service, Azeezaly Jaffer is hanging out his shingle as a PR expert. Jaffer’s performance as a USPS spokesman moved the Federal Times to write:

“[Postmaster General] Potter and the leadership of the Postal Service have a choice to make now. The IG report documents a strong case, depicting a public official who ran amok with his official credit card, sexually harassed fellow employees and abused his trusted position. If Potter doesn’t think that merits criminal or other punitive action, perhaps it is time for a new leadership team to take charge of the U.S. Postal Service.

Details of the Jaffer scandal are available in the OIG report that prompted his sudden resignation. In September 2006, the Washington Post summarized the findings:

The June IG report accuses Jaffer, who managed a staff of 160 and a $20 million budget, of, among other things: drinking at a work function until he passed out; running up $8,000 in extra hotel room charges so he could qualify for a suite with a bathtub for two; and following a female colleague into her hotel room, propositioning her, then passing out.

Jaffer was not held responsible for over forty six thousand dollars in alcohol, expensive hotel suites and dinners for friends and families, and it turned out that even months after he “resigned”, he was still on the USPS payroll. As the Post put it:

All summer, federal-dom has been abuzz over a steamy U.S. Postal Service Inspector General’s report accusing the agency’s former public affairs chief of heavy drinking, expense account chicanery and sexual harassment. But who knew that the subject of the report, Azeezaly S. Jaffer, has spent the season on vacation, courtesy of the Postal Service? Jaffer’s taxpayers’ holiday bears witness, a Postal Service spokesman said, “to how hardworking he is.”

So what does Jaffer want to do for you and your company? Well, according to his LinkedIn page, he has experience and expertise in such things as “crisis communications”, “talent relations”, “executive coaching”, etc. He also claims to be the person who “Aggressively increased annual revenues 400 percent” for the USPS by “conducting innovative promotion and publicity campaigns”.

The LinkedIn page says Jaffer started his PR company, “globalPRpros LLC” in August 2007. (The page doesn’t account for the year that had elapsed since his postal resignation/sabbatical.) The company is described as “A full service communications company specializing in media relations”. Although Jaffer registered the company’s domain name in August of last year, four months later, its web site still consists of a generic “parked domain” page currently offering custom searches on “Umbilical Stem Cells, Equipment, Cheap Advertising, Global Overpopulation, and Tee Times”. Surprisingly, for someone supposedly skilled in corporate relations, is Jaffer’s email address: globalprpros@yahoo.com. Free anonymous email accounts aren’t generally seen as “professional”, especially when they’re used as the main point of contact for a firm. For a “full service” firm, Jaffer’s seems quite small- it’s listed on LinkedIn as having “1-10″ employees, and so may actually consist of Jaffer himself.

The rabidly right wing, anti-government, anti-postal service group that calls itself “Citizens Against Government Waste” may be a bit slow on the uptake, but they’ve finally gotten around to the scandal surrounding ex-USPS spokesman Azeezaly Jaffer:

“As the USPS’ voluble spokesperson, Mr. Jaffer was notorious for his tartly-worded rebuttals, called “Setting the Record Straight,” aimed at critics who questioned the USPS’s spending and management choices (all of which seem to have been scrubbed from the USPS website). He liked to boldly claim that all the USPS’s costs were “accounted for and fall into two basic categories: the actual costs of moving each piece of mail and the contribution each piece of mail makes to support [the USPS’s] coast-to-coast network. That’s not special postal accounting, that’s the law.”

“Mr. Jaffer’s reckless spending and “lack of candor” should be viewed as part of the operational culture of the USPS. Azzezaly Jaffer was just living large because he had swallowed the prevailing party line. Maybe the USPS does operate like a Fortune 100 business. Just like Enron, Fannie Mae, or Tyco.”

Ouch!

Citizens Against Government Waste: USPS Chief Living Large

While Azeez Jaffer escaped responsibility for $46,256.68 in “questionable expenses”, the USPS fired a rural carrier for winning $1,000 at an instant lottery machine while he was on his lunch break.

TouchPlay win gets postman fired

I missed this story when it first came out a week ago, but a reader emailed it to me, suggesting it offered an interesting contrast with the handling of the Jaffer affair. George Bush last month granted a presidential pardon to a 54 year old Rhode Island woman who had been convicted in 1984 of falsifying her postal service timecard. In addition to paying back $1,200 in wages, and serving two years probation, she was tagged as a convicted felon.

Twelve hundred dollars. Keep that in mind when you read the OIG report on Azeez Jaffer.

Her presidential pardon proves bittersweet

Setting the Record Straight clears the slate?

A postalnews.com reader posted the following in response to the Federal Times editorial calling for the PMG to take action against Azeez Jaffer:

The Federal Times obviously does not have a crack legal staff or they would have seen that Jaffer was given a Kalkines warning which means he was forced to talk. Forced to talk with the IG because prosectuion was declined by the prosecutor. Which means the IG at least did try to present the case for prosection but got the thumbs down sign. Once that was done and the Kalkines was given the waters are too murky now for any prosecution to be revisited.
actionjackson

What’s a Kalkines warning? When some investigative functions were shifted between the IG’s office and the Inspection Service last year, the APWU Magazine published a discussion of employee rights, which included this on Kalkines:

In Kalkines v. United States (1973), the U.S. Court of Claims elaborated on the Supreme Court’s holdings, finding that an employee can be asked to “answer pertinent questions about the performance of an employee’s duties … when that employee is duly advised of his options to answer under the immunity granted or remain silent and face dismissal.” In other words, if an employee is given immunity, but nonetheless decides not to answer questions, the government may discipline the employee for not answering the questions…

The Kalkines ruling is an attempt to balance the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination with the Supreme Court’s holding that the government has the right to have its employees answer questions about the performance of their official duties. In getting this information from employees, according to Kalkines, the Fifth Amendment is not violated so long as the government also grants the employee immunity from prosecution based upon that information.

Kalkines immunity (correct me if I’m wrong on this, readers!) is what’s known as ‘use immunity’, meaning that the individual’s testimony can’t be entered as evidence against him, rather than a blanket grant of immunity from any prosecution. It does, as actionjackson points out, muddy the waters. It’s worth noting that the “disposition” in the IG’s report says “Referred to the Postal Service for administrative action.”

In a sternly worded editorial, the Federal Times last week called on Postmaster General Jack Potter to take action against disgraced former executive Azeezaly Jaffer, or make way for “a new leadership team”. The paper points out that “Jaffer’s alleged improprieties were known and apparently tacitly accepted for years before he finally resigned in June”.

The editorial, published in the August 21 print edition of the paper, asserts that “What has been sorely absent here is basic leadership from Postmaster General John Potter”, that both the PMG and the Office of Inspector General “failed to take allegations against Jaffer seriously when they first surfaced, and he failed to ensure that the proper controls were in place to prevent the kind of wasteful spending exemplified in the IG report”.

The piece concludes: “Potter and the leadership of the Postal Service have a choice to make now. The IG report documents a strong case, depicting a public official who ran amok with his official credit card, sexually harassed fellow employees and abused his trusted position. If Potter doesn’t think that merits criminal or other punitive action, perhaps it is time for a new leadership team to take charge of the U.S. Postal Service.”