The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is investigating the State Department to probe the impact of political influence on this year’s annual human trafficking report.
Senior Republican and Democratic members of the committee made plans for the inquiry publicly at a hearing on Thursday. They called the department’s 2015 Trafficking in Persons report into disrepute, and stressed concerns that Malaysia benefited from a questionably favorable grade specifically to smooth the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Citing a Reuters article published Monday which chronicled unprecedented amounts of meddling by administration appointees during the compiling of this year’s paper, committee chair Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and ranking member Ben Cardin (D-Md.) pressed the State official in charge of overseeing the influential document to layout the thinking behind its conclusions.
Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights Sarah Sewall responded claiming that there was no undue backroom initiative that impacted the outcome. She noted that Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier in the morning that the TPP did not come up with respect to country’s upgrade to Tier 2. But she stated repeatedly that she could not get into substantive details about the deliberative process.
Stonewalled on their efforts to gain insight into department thinking, the legislators’ collective frustration boiled over during the start of Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-N.J.) question-and-answer period.
“I would urge the committee to seek all of the documentation that was created in the context of devising this year’s report,” the former ranking member and committee chair told Corker, “because the answers to you and the ranking member, I am certainly not satisfied.”
“If that is not forthcoming immediately, my sense is the committee would take the very unusual step of subpoenaing that information,” Corker replied. “This is possibly the most heartless, lacking of substance presentation I have ever seen about a serious topic,” he added.
Corker, who had driven efforts earlier this year to pass anti-human trafficking legislation that ended up being unanimously approved by the Senate, appeared dejected throughout the hearing.
“I don’t see how anyone could believe there was integrity in this process,” he said, expressing sympathy for Sewall, given her role that day as recipient for their indignation.
Later in the hearing, however, Corker warned Sewall that he was “putting you on notice.”
“Any destruction of emails phone records or letters from 11:19 a.m. on could have significant consequences,” he stated.
When Congress granted President Obama trade promotion authority in June, it forbade his trade negotiators from engaging in “fast-tracked” negotiations with countries that have a Tier 3 ranking on the State Department’s regular human trafficking report.
Malaysia, a party to TPP negotiations for years, was this year upgraded to Tier 2 by State officials despite significant questions about its government’s actions–or lack thereof–cracking down on human trafficking.
Other countries placed in higher tiers in the so-called TIP report at the insistence of senior officials, according to Reuters, included Cuba, Mexico, India, Uzbekistan, and, the largest exporter of commodities to the US, China.
When the report was first published late last month, Sewall described it as a document that “works to connect trafficking concerns with broader foreign policy goals.”
While Kerry did emphatically state Thursday morning that he “had zero conversation with anybody in the Administration about the Trans-Pacific Partnership relative to this decision,” he also noted that the rating was partially “based on the recommendation of my team.”
