CGI, which was fired for incompetence in the Obamacare website rollout fiasco has a strong connection to Michelle Obama. Toni Townes-Whitley, is a former classmate of Michelle Obama as well as both being former members of Organization of Black Unity and the Third World Center. Townes-Whitley was coincidentally hired as a top executive at CGI in 2010, just as CGI, a Canadian company, was bidding on the contract to build the Obamacare website. Records show that Townes-Whitley visited the White House four times for between 2010 and 2013.
She met with Vivek Kundra, former White House chief information officer, in 2010; Danny Werfel, former controller of the Office of Management and Budget, in 2011 and 2013; and Jonathan McBride, assistant to the president and director of presidential personnel, in 2013. She also made at least one visit to the Obamas in their living quarters.
Above is a picture of Townes-Whitley and her husband with the Obamas for a Christmas visit.
The Obama administration says that her connections with Michelle Obama had no bearing on CGI getting the contract. If that is true, then why after their epic failure on the Obamacare site did they continue to get federal contracts? FreedomWorks was able to acquire a memo through the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.” It reads:
Mr. Nelson presented that the State received a $1.7 billion allocation in CDBG Disaster Recovery aid from HUD to aid impacted businesses and residences. He stated that the State’s Action Plan was approved on April 26, 2013 and HTFC is currently in a phase of implementing the program. He stated that in this phase, the corporation needs to stand-up its recovery programs as soon as possible to deliver critical resources, and in order to do so, the corporation requires immediate access to consultant services to assist in policy and procedure development, training, surge capacity, and call center assistance, and stated that CGI Federal Inc. could provide such services.
CGI was selected for the contract on May 9th, 2013. They were given the job of implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they were given the task of setting up the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, which was funded at 1.7 billion. This money was to be distributed to victims of Sandy. But nearly a year after the disaster most of the 24,000 people who applied for help hadn’t received any aid.
Now, the IRS has awarded CGI another federal contract. The IRS has awarded a 4.5 million dollar contract to CGI. The House Oversight Committee, now led by Republican firebrand Jason Chaffetz is looking into how a company with a history of failure, and was fired from the Obamacare website, could possibly ever get another federal contract.
Chaffetz has ordered his staff to investigate how and why CGI was awarded the contract. The administration has claimed that all of these contracts were made in a competitive bidding process. However, they did not accept all bids and some of the contracts they’ve awarded to CGI and other companies are based on “best value” — a concept that is extremely vulnerable to favoritism.
The question Chaffetz needs to ask is, would CGI have gotten the Hurricane Sandy contract or the IRS contract if not for the Michelle Obama/Toni Townes-Whitley connection?
Failure should not be rewarded with additional rewards. I wish the voters had realized that in 2012.
Courtesy of Red Statements.
