WASHINGTON (AP) — Richard Carmona arrived in Washington a political novice in 2002 and left four years later scarred and frustrated. He didn’t go quietly.
A year after his term as the nation’s 17th surgeon general, the one-time $500 campaign donor to President George W. Bush turned on the administration, telling Congress that mid-level GOP appointees orchestrated his appearances for political gain and muzzled him on hot-button issues like stem cell research and sex education.
As investigators for a Democratic-controlled House committee looked into his allegations back then, one of those appointees returned the criticism, accusing Carmona of taking excessive trips on the taxpayers’ dime to his homes in Arizona and California.
The brouhaha is being refought now that Carmona, running as a Democrat, is given a chance of taking away a Senate seat Republicans have held for almost two decades.
Carmona’s old nemesis, Cristina Beato, then his boss as acting assistant secretary in the Health and Human Services Department, has re-emerged in the form of a 97-page transcript of a 2007 interview she gave investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Carmona’s testimony months earlier had helped the panel’s chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., make his party’s case that the Bush administration was politicizing science. It also burnished Carmona’s credentials with Democrats just two years after Republicans had tried to get him to run for governor of Arizona.
Eventually Democrats, including President Barack Obama, courted Carmona to run on their side. His biography is a rags-to-riches tale: a Hispanic who grew up in New York City, a Vietnam War medic with two Purple Hearts, a deputy sheriff as well as a doctor.
If anyone could pull off an upset in Arizona and give Democrats the seat of retiring GOP Sen. Jon Kyl, it might be Carmona. Until he entered the race last November, both parties looked upon six-term Republican Rep. Jeff Flake as the overwhelming favorite to succeed Kyl. Now Flake has to beat back a challenge from wealthy Mesa businessman Wil Cardon in the state’s Republican primary in September.
Carmona’s Senate campaign highlights his testimony before Waxman’s committee, proclaiming that he returned to Tucson “knowing he stood up and did the right thing.”
His critics have brought in Beato, now chief medical officer for Ernst & Young consultants. In her 2007 interview with the House investigators, Beato rejected Carmona’s allegations. She accused him of lying and said he was “unethical” for billing the government for travel back to Arizona and to San Diego, where he had a second home.
“In the meantime, we had big public health groups that didn’t seem to be getting attention,” she told the investigators. “We had other states that were not getting attention.”
Carmona’s campaign wouldn’t make him available to answer questions raised by Beato.
Andy Barr, a campaign spokesman, said Carmona repaid the government about $3,500 for travel expenses involving various events. In one case, Barr said, Carmona attended an event in Tucson honoring him after political handlers canceled a coinciding appearance at a global AIDS conference at the University of Arizona because of potential controversy. Carmona later reimbursed the government for that trip.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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