WASHINGTON — The resignation of White House environmental adviser Van Jones has revealed a lapse in the administration’s vetting procedures that, nearly eight months into his tenure, delivered President Barack Obama with an unwelcome distraction as he begins an important week on behalf of his health care reform initiative.
Jones’ resignation late Saturday came as calls for his ouster increased from Republican leaders, who have been critical of past statements and associations that have also surprised the White House. His departure as a top adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality leaves Obama’s push to create so-called green jobs, which he has called an essential element of the more stable economy he is trying to build, without a leader.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Sunday explained the resignation on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” saying Jones “decided that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual.”
The president does not endorse Jones’ past statements and actions, Gibbs said, “but he thanks him for his service.”
Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, had issued two public apologies in recent days. One was for signing a petition in 2004 from the group that questioned whether officials in former President George W. Bush’s administration “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war,” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.
His previous involvement with the now-defunct Bay Area radical group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, which had Marxist roots, also emerged as an issue. And on Saturday his advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of fatally shooting a Philadelphia police officer in 1981, threatened to further deepen the controversy.
A White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter, said Sunday that Jones’ past was not studied as intensively as that of other advisers because of his relatively low rank.
While some conservatives tried to portray Jones as one of Obama’s many issue czars, he was not. Nancy Sutley, head of the White House environmental council, hired him as her “special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation” in mid-March, and he reported to her rather than Obama. Because Jones’ position did not require Senate confirmation, he avoided the kind of vetting Cabinet officials were subjected to.
