On Jan. 10, 2003, the inspector general's office in the Labor Department completed its findings on Spadaro's allegations that the Bush administration was obstructing the accident investigation into the Martin County Coal slurry spill. Salon obtained a copy of the 25-page report by filing a Freedom of Information Act request. It's heavily redacted. Whole pages are blanked out, leaving the public to wonder how the Inspector General was able to exonerate MSHA. The report's final sentence: "No evidence was uncovered to substantiate any allegations relating to MSHA's Martin County Coal accident investigation."

The Courier Journal newspaper in Louisville, Ky., wrote on its editorial page: "The message a Labor Department Inspector General's report has sent, not only to those in charge of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration but to all the friends of business whom George W. Bush has planted in the federal bureaucracy, is clear: Complaints about business-friendly regulation will be given short shrift."

Ellen Smith, an award-winning investigative journalist who publishes Mine Safety and Health News, had this to say about the IG report: "I have been reporting on mining issues since 1987, and I can tell you that in all of these years of reporting on mining issues we have never seen a government report with redactions like this one. They might redact people's names. They might redact dates. But in this case, it was literally half the report, and there are pages and pages of redactions. How they reached their conclusions, we will never know, because they have taken all of that out of the report."

The inspector general's office justified the redactions by citing the need to protect personnel privacy and internal matters. But according to MSHA officials familiar with the IG investigation, what's more likely is that the inspector general had an interest in not revealing details of sensitive discussions and documents that could have implicated Labor Secretary Chao and top MSHA officials in a coverup.

As an example, the report notes that the accident investigation team leader, Tim Thompson, called four of the investigators into his office to sign the final report. When they were handed just the signature page, not the completed report, they objected and refused to sign. The report says, "Thompson made a conference call to Assistant Secretary [for Mine Safety and Health] Dave Lauriski." Several lines are redacted, then the report continues: "Thompson provided a copy [of the report] ... a few typographical errors were identified and corrected. The four members willingly signed the final report without reservation."

What did Lauriski say? And what did he or the inspector general make of the fact that Thompson wanted the investigators to sign a report they hadn't read? The public may never know.

The IG report also addresses the Mark Skiles memo of October 2000 noting that the local office of the MSHA had not followed the recommendations of the report written by the engineer who had analyzed the 1994 spill. But the only information that's imparted is that the memo exists. The entire next page has been redacted.

What follows the redactions is a brief description of a so-called District Response Memo to the Skiles memo, a sort of tit-for-tat dueling memo in the bureaucratic blame game that purports that all the recommendations made by MSHA engineer Larry Wilson after the May 1994 slurry spill had been followed up on. Again, no pertinent information is imparted, and the next two and a half pages are completely blanked out. This is significant because these documents go to the core of culpability and charges of criminal negligence.

According to some members of the accident investigation team, who provided testimony to the inspector general, there are two revealing details that the IG most likely redacted: 1) MSHA investigators had alleged that top management at MSHA put pressure on Mark Skiles to alter his memo in order to water down his conclusion that "after the 1994 failure the [MSHA district office] did not follow [Larry Wilson's] recommendations;" and, 2) MSHA investigators had alleged that the district response memo was fabricated, back-dated and surreptitiously made available to the investigation team after the Skiles memo was leaked to reporters and appeared in regional newspapers. If proven, either one of these allegations would have been grounds for obstruction of justice.

One investigator said he had doubts about the district response memo when it first appeared, late into the investigation. For one thing, it was dated Oct. 31, 2000. The Skiles memo was undated, but it was later said to have been written on the same day, Oct. 31. The Skiles memo, which is a detailed two-and-one-half-page report with more than 20 pages of attachments, had to make its way through at least two offices before the local district office could draft its response, which is four pages in length and disputes, point-by-point, all of the allegations that MSHA and Martin County Coal did not follow through on nine safety recommendations.

What's more, according to members of the investigation team, the district response memo contains "flat-out lies." For example, the initial engineering recommendations in 1994 called upon Martin County Coal to install weirs at its impoundment to monitor for outflow. Skiles noted in his memo that this recommendation had not been followed up on. The district response memo rebuts that "weirs were installed at all outflow locations." But at least two MSHA investigators say they saw no evidence of the weirs when they inspected the site after the October 2000 disaster.

Investigators on the accident investigation team wanted to cite Martin County Coal for eight violations, including at least one for willful negligence. Instead, the number was whittled down to two with a total fine of $110,000. Massey Energy appealed those citations; one was removed. The only federal violation Massey is cited with is for failing to properly notify MSHA about changes in water flow from the impoundment; fine: $55,000.

A fine by the state of Kentucky was much stiffer. Martin County Coal agreed in the summer of 2002 to pay $3.25 million in penalties and damages, the largest mining-related fine in the state's history.

Massey Energy says it has spent over $40 million in cleanup costs. But Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, also announced during a conference call with investment bankers on July 31, 2003, that the company had just won a $21 million insurance settlement for property damage and business interruptions that resulted from the October 2000 slurry spill.

The January 2003 finding by the inspector general that there was no evidence to support Spadaro's allegations that Bush administration officials were obstructing the investigation may have cleared the way for putting Spadaro on administrative leave. But it was never a secret at MSHA that Spadaro was a marked man. He'd acquired a well-deserved reputation as a whistle-blower, a "calls-them-as-he-sees-them" type of government employee, often with the public's interest at heart.

Spadaro has worked with Republican and Democratic administrations over the years. But he never seemed to get on track with the administration of George W. Bush. In addition to the Martin County Coal matter, Spadaro clashed with top officials at MSHA over allegations that lucrative contracts were being handed out to friends and former associates. Earlier this year, Spadaro blew the whistle on Lauriski and MSHA's two deputies, Correll and Caylor, for their connections to not-for-bid contracts that went to longtime friends and associates Gerry Silver and Ben Sheppard. Sheppard obtained a series of contracts worth about $190,000. Silver received more than $100,000 from MSHA.

In October 2003, MSHA charged that the superintendent had abused his authority at the academy, made unauthorized cash advances on a government credit card, and failed to follow supervisory instructions and appropriate accident procedures. The most serious of MSHA's charges against Jack Spadaro revolve around the superintendent's granting of free room and board to two instructors who were disabled. MSHA also says that Spadaro violated government rules by providing free room and board at the academy to participants in a mine rescue competition.

Spadaro's attorney, Jason Huber, says the charges are specious. "There were at least two individuals who required disability accommodations, and Jack provided for them," says Huber. "Everything that Jack did as superintendent was according to either directives that were handed down to him from superiors in accord with policies that existed prior to Jack's arrival, or that were required under the law."

MSHA spokesperson Rodney Brown said that the agency cannot comment on an ongoing personnel matter.

The unauthorized cash advances were a series of transactions in the amount of $200 or less, totalling about $1,800. According to Huber, Spadaro promptly paid his credit card bill each month and that the advances were for MSHA-related activities, including a dinner with Chinese businessmen at a restaurant that didn't accept credit cards, requiring Spadaro to get a cash advance at an ATM. MSHA also cites labor grievances from several years ago: a delayed promotion, reprimanding an employee, and two complaints about relocating employees to different offices in the building.

Spadaro says that given the nature of the charges against him, the June raid on his Beckley office is particularly alarming. "There's no justification for the raid that was done on my office," he says. "Even if I was guilty of all the crimes they accuse me of, there was no justification for attacking me and my office in the way that was done. We can't find any precedent for what they did, and we think it was extreme. That's going to be part of our complaint to the Merit Systems Protection Board [a federal agency that protects civil servants' rights] and later in federal court."

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