to be applied to salary and years of service might be increased for those who had retirement ages of less than 60 years. It was sometime late in January or early February, 1986 that I had a clear understanding of what the changes were likely going to be in the retirement system rules. It was during the same period of time that I asked the Retirement Branch to give me information on what my retirement benefits would be under some alternative cases such as; how long I would have to work to be eligible to retire; what my benefits would be if I resigned with an effective date after the proposed rules were in effect; and, etc. That information was supplied to me and was used in my decision process about my future career. The changes in the retirement system rules were approved by the TVA Board in mid-February, 1986 with an effective date of April 1, 1986. 1 On March 13, 1986, I submitted my resignation letter to Mr. Willis. That letter offered my resignation with an effective date of April 4, 1986. In his letter to me dated March 18, 1986, Mr. Willis accepted my resignation as tendered. Subscribed in my presence and sworn to before me this 22 day of August. OCTOBER 7, 1986 SUPPLEMENT TO THE SEPTEMBER 4, 1986 STATEMENT OF HERBERT S. SANGER, JR., ON EVENTS LEADING TO HIS FORCED RESIGNATION The TVA Board's initial refusal of my offer to resign and its subsequent request and actions forcing me to resign are connected by many facts to its employment of Joseph C. Swidler (Swidler) at the instance of Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation and Steven Ap White (White). Swidler failed in his early attempt to get an agreement from the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) that a Federal criminal conflict of interest statute should be ignored because of the enormity of the total shutdown status of TVA's nuclear plants. He thus failed to extricate the TVA Board from its even-then long-existing defiance of OGE's condemnation of the Board's involvement in the continuing violation of the Federal criminal conflict of interest statute or as the press attributes to Senators Sasser and Gore, "for acting indecisively in handling the conflict-of-interest issue surrounding the hiring of outside consultants". ville News-Sentinel, October 5, 1986, p. 1. The Knox Indeed, Swidler exacerbated the TVA Board's defiance to such an extent that OGE issued a letter concluding that Swidler's advice was "adverse to that of the TVA Board" and had thereby deprived the TVA Board of access to me and members of my staff for legal. advice. The second and third reasons are contrivances on their faces. A highly respected Washington, D. C. law firm, McCarthy, Sweeney & Harkaway, P.C., has advised the Retirement Board that it has a "duty" to reject Zigrossi's assertion of authority over the Retirement System. Ex. 3. Swidler's contrary opinion, Ex. 4, is fully expected since it serves to support his August 18 spurof-the-moment opinion that prior positions can always be "distinquished" which he gave when confronted with his inconsistent prior opinion; it also follows through on his previous bad judgment in advising the TVA Board that I could be placed on leave because I exercised my discretion as a Retirement System Board member in a way that did not meet the wishes of the TVA Board. The law is clear that regardless of who appoints a director of a retirement board, the director is not subject to the will of the one who made the appointment. Swidler was just wrong in advising the Board otherwise. He was right 38 years ago when, as a director of the Retirement System and TVA's General Counsel, he advised TVA and took the position with the General Accounting Office (GAO), that is the opposite of that which he states in his September 24, 1986 opinion. That opinion incidentally was a replacement of his earlier opinion issued the same day which he and TVA leaked to the press and which was reported nationally. (Their distribution of the earlier opinion constituted one of their violations of the Federal Privacy Act in the effort to castigate me for Retirement System matters to cover up their reaction to the criminal conflict of interest advice I gave them in acting as TVA's General Counsel and Designated Agency Ethics Official.) 1. The Swidler memorandum, corrected to eliminate a further Privacy Act violation, is remarkable for--among other things--its failure to discuss or even quote the two documents most relevant to the nature of the TVA/Retirement System relationship--i.e., TVA Board Chairman Clapp's December 7, 1948 letter to the Comptroller General and Swidler's August 5, 1949 letter to the same officer. As pointed out in the McCarthy, Sweeney & Harkaway, P. C., memorandum, these two letters represent contemporaneous constructions of the Retirement System Rules and Regulations by those involved in their original promulgation and as such are to all intents and purposes dispositive on the points they cover. Swidler's careful avoidance of them is especially remarkable since both of them are Swidler's own products. The Clapp letter was prepared for him in what was then TVA's Division of Law headed by Swidler as General Counsel, and Swidler himself approved it; it is thus as much his letter as Clapp's. The August 5, 1949 letter Swidler of course signed as Chairman of the Retirement System Board. 2. Those two letters are incompatible with Swidler's present Some examples of such incompatibility follow: memorandum. a. The Swidler memorandum tries to distinquish the attempt by GAO to audit the Retirement System in 1948 on the basis that it "involved the extension of authority by an outside agency, not the rights, duties and responsibilities of TVA itself." In fact, the December 7, 1948 letter expressly equated GAO's and TVA's own authority as regards the System, saying: If TVA should now say that the Retirement funds consti- b. The Swidler memorandum attempts a further "distinction" by saying that the GAO was attempting "not merely to investigate the Retirement System, but to assert control over its day-today transactions", while "TVA is not asserting the right to exer |