As head of the independent (and not affiliated with the White House) U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), I take issue with your biased story (“White House Counsel’s Ouster Sought,” June 2) that is replete with inaccuracies, false charges and extraneous name-calling. Although the story said we did not return calls, we immediately responded to an after-hours e-mail and said we would respond in the morning. Unfortunately that was too late for our comments to be included in the initial story.

The real story is the remarkable achievements of my career staff in eliminating our case backlog and increasing the amount of substantiated whistleblower and prohibited personnel cases. Recently a bipartisan group of Congressional staffers audited our backlog efforts, going through hundreds of cases over days, and the congressmen of our oversight committee said all of their concerns were satisfactorily addressed and were impressed with our efforts.

Rumors from pressure groups that we do not enforce our statutes are false. Our statutes do not permit us to enforce the “status” of sexual orientation as a protected class like race, sex, ethnicity or religion – but they do protect discrimination based on off-duty conduct. That is what the whole issue is about. We do not have a human rights ordinance like Lawrence, Kan., and Congress twice rejected special status protection for sexual orientation; therefore I am unable to expand these rights as Log Cabin and other advocacy groups propose. The cases governing our office reject interpretation of our statutes as covering sexual orientation as a protected class. The statements about long-standing interpretation of federal law are quite misleading. What they refer to actually supports our position as does the first 20 years of enforcement history by OSC in following the express language of the statute that requires proof of conduct. We have never failed to protect all federal employees who bring claims to OSC.

The article was a purely one-sided attack of my character and imagined motives and did not deserve coverage in your newspaper.