Idaho agency defunds suspected whistleblower, supports nonprofit accused of Medicaid fraud

BOISE (Investigate West) — After two human trafficking victims filed complaints claiming they were exploited by an Idaho nonprofit, the state’s victim assistance agency kept sending the organization money.

And after InvestigateWest published a series of articles describing how the organization, Community Outreach Behavioral Services, lured human trafficking victims into what experts described as a likely Medicaid fraud scheme, the state kept giving COBS money.

Last week, even after federal investigators launched a probe into the Medicaid fraud allegations at COBS and its affiliated for-profit company, the state decided to award COBS another year of funding: $160,000 in federal grants.

The Idaho Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance did, however, cut funding entirely for a different nonprofit: The Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition, whose director Jennifer Zielinksi was blamed by the council for the revelations about COBS. COBS has denied all allegations of fraud and victim exploitation.

Emails obtained by InvestigateWest provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance, a governor-appointed agency responsible for distributing more than $10 million in grant money for victim service organizations in Idaho. The records show that when news articles exposed allegations of fraud and exploitation at one of those organizations, COBS, the council launched a behind-the-scenes effort to shield it from consequences and punish Zielinksi, the alleged whistleblower.

Council members and the agency’s staff declined interview requests for this article. Instead, Council Chair Wes Somerton, a former prosecutor in Coeur d’Alene, sent a statement to InvestigateWest saying the funding decisions “were not taken lightly,” adding that the council staff met with COBS more than 60 times to “objectively” assess the organization.

“We are also mindful of the disruption to victim services and program collaboration resulting from IATC’s sustained and ongoing enmity displayed toward COBS and those who collaborate with COBS,” Somerton wrote. He and the council’s executive director, Dana Wiemiller, did not respond to follow-up questions.

In response to reporter questions about the records, Gov. Brad Little’s office said it was initiating an “independent review” to look into the council’s funding decisions.

“Director Wiemiller and the Governor’s office are in agreement that an outside, independent review of the council’s funding decisions will provide a greater level of clarity and transparency about the process,” Little’s office said in a statement Thursday.

Ari Yampolsky, a founding partner of Whistleblower Partners, a law firm representing whistleblowers of fraud and misconduct across the country, said he’s seen cases before where public agencies became vindictive with their contractors or grant recipients. But based on a reporter’s description of the state’s emails and statements, he was surprised at how blatant the retaliatory action appeared, calling it “immoral” and “unethical.”

“It’s much more common that public agencies or private businesses go to some lengths to try to cover their tracks. They don’t expressly admit that they are taking retaliatory action,” he said.

Zielinski believes that cutting the coalition’s funding is “100% retaliation.” The council is the administering agency for the federal Victims of Crime Act and Family Violence Prevention and Safety Act. In the previous two grant cycles, it awarded the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition $330,169.

Without it, Zielinski fears the coalition will have to close its doors, possibly within the next month. She said dozens of clients who rely on the coalition for rental assistance may face eviction.

“We don’t make money off of people. We do not make a profit,” Zielinski said. “All of our funding sources go to all of our operations and direct victims services.”

Searching for the whistleblower

On June 25, two members of the Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance, Somerton and Jessica Uhrig, met with the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition’s board. Both prosecutors by trade, the two council members asked how involved Zielinski had been with the upcoming articles from InvestigateWest about COBS.

Days earlier, Wiemiller, the council’s executive director, had emailed the council members a “list of targeted agencies for article.” That list, an attempt to track whom reporters were talking to, was developed directly with COBS founder Paula Barthelmess, emails show.

Somerton asked Zielinski’s board to make Zielinski stop “bad mouthing” the council, according to his later accounting of the meeting. The council believed she was talking to reporters not only about COBS, but about her issues with the council.

The coalition’s board, however, said Zielinski didn’t know the specifics of the InvestigateWest articles.

Wiemiller and her staff didn’t believe it.

“It is clear that Jennifer is withholding information from her board about her role in generating the InvestigateWest article,” council program administration manager Amy Duque wrote in an email. “The IATC board doesn’t seem to have any reservations about her leadership, so that’s where we stand as we consider (funding) applications.”

“I agree with Amy’s assessment of the situation,” Wiemiller responded on July 2. “Jennifer is being disingenuous.”

Wiemiller added that she was frustrated with IATC for “the disparaging comments about COBS” made to partners and law enforcement agencies — and now involving “the press.”

For the investigation of COBS, InvestigateWest granted anonymity to several whistleblowers and victims who feared retaliation for speaking out. To report the initial series of stories, reporters spoke to more than three dozen sources, including former employees and clients of the organization, law enforcement agencies, service providers, state officials, attorneys specializing in Medicaid fraud and lawmakers. The reporting was also backed by court records, public records and an in-depth analysis of Medicaid reimbursements also reviewed by multiple experts. Since the initial stories, nearly a dozen more former COBS clients or former employees have contacted InvestigateWest with similar experiences as those detailed in the original series.

To Wiemiller, however, Zielinski was clearly the most likely culprit to go to the press about COBS.

Barthelmess and Zielinski had been feuding for years. Barthelmess used to work as a contract clinical supervisor with the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition, but her contract was terminated in 2020. She then began operating safe houses through COBS, which she had already founded, and its connected for-profit, Advanced Clinical Trauma Services, owned by her son. In separating from the coalition, however, Zielinski said Barthelmess stole clients and blocked the coalition from accessing its own electronic health records, though Barthelmess has said that is false.

Zielinski has since refused to work with COBS. But she says it’s because of much more than any dispute over how Barthelmess left. Zielinski said they’ve received “dozens and dozens” of complaints from human trafficking victims who have said they were exploited by COBS. In the last year, she said, they’ve served 17 former COBS clients who had “all brought forward legitimate complaints.” The coalition found them housing and provided necessary transportation and assistance, Zielinski said.

Zielinski’s been vocal about this. She’s taken her concerns to the attorney general, civil rights lawyers, lawmakers, the governor and anyone who’d listen. She criticized COBS for not being vetted or licensed, for violating victim privacy and consent, for a conflict of interest with ACTS, and for COBS not filing their annual tax reports. But her complaints had been dismissed, with agencies not wanting to get in the middle of a dispute between two nonprofits.

Zielinski’s grown weary of that characterization.

“Victim rights have been violated time and time again while working with COBS,” Zielinski said. “This is one organization that is blatantly harming people. And it’s another organization that is trying to bring justice.”

To the victims assistance council, however, all of that, topped off by Wiemiller’s suspicion that Zielinski had also involved reporters, was “disparaging of the other agency” and “unprofessional,” as Wiemiller said in a recent meeting.

“It’s been ongoing, and it’s been going for five years. It’s really escalated over the last year, and in particular over the last several months, with the introduction of reporters,” Wiemiller said.

Wiemiller then said that the council has full discretion to defund any program they want.

“There’s no reason why we can’t tell an agency that this disruption is causing harm to victim services, to community collaboration. And those would be foundations for saying, ‘You know, this relationship really can’t continue,’” she said.

In the Sept. 25 letter notifying the anti-trafficking coalition it was losing its funding, Wiemiller pointed to its “refusal to collaborate with a variety of community partners,” which resulted in “disruption to victim services.”

Idaho has a law against public employers retaliating against whistleblowers. But John Rumel, a law professor at University of Idaho, said the Idaho Supreme Court has interpreted it as applying only to employer-employee relationships, not to a state agency and a grantee.

Still, he said the council pulling funding for the coalition based on Zielinski’s alleged whistleblowing may be a First Amendment violation. To win such a case, Rumel said the coalition would have to prove that its funding was cut because Zielinski was speaking out on a matter of public concern and that it was an issue important enough to outweigh any disruption to the agency caused by saying something.

Avoiding punishment

The state’s treatment of the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition stands in stark contrast to its treatment of COBS.

The council staff had a close relationship with COBS, regularly meeting in person whenever new information about the articles or the federal investigation would come up, records show. “We’d like to discuss an upcoming investigative article that may contain slanderous content,” one COBS employee wrote to the council in May, four days after InvestigateWest interviewed Barthelmess.

After they met, a later email shows the state came away realizing the nonprofit’s policies and procedures were still “not in sync with federal funding requirements,” asking for tax documents and for the COBS Venmo page to protect victim identities.

On July 2, the same day Wiemiller called Zieilinski “disingenuous” for her denial of tipping off reporters, Wiemiller and her staff were covering up another violation of funding standards at COBS.

A state staffer discovered that COBS was using the federal grant money to drug test clients for sobriety — a condition to be in one of the safe houses operated by COBS. Federal standards prohibit requiring sobriety of victims.

Wiemiller decided that the council didn’t need to go back and recover costs, but that going forward, they should only “reimburse for tests taken voluntarily.” The staff decided those tests would include a memo saying they are voluntary in order to satisfy auditors.

Most residents of COBS safe houses are there on probation and have to follow COBS house rules that include sobriety.

State staffers, in presentations to their council, repeatedly praised COBS for its collaboration with other agencies. And they said COBS has “never really struck back in any way” at IATC.

“They haven’t been poisoning the well in the community with any community partner,” Duque said. “So there could be other reasons that we decide not to fund COBS, and I’m not speaking about that right now, but for the collaboration piece, I wouldn’t punish them for that.”

‘He said, she said’

It wasn’t just that the state council thought Zielinski triggered a story that would look bad for COBS. The staff also theorized that Zielinski was out to make the council itself look bad, using reporters to do so.

On July 31, InvestigateWest published an article with the news that federal investigators were probing the alleged Medicaid fraud at COBS. The reaction from the council was one of exhaustion: “I’m so tired of all this,” Wiemiller wrote.

But it was a series of claims about supposed InvestigateWest phone calls that made the council irate at reporters and, by extension, Zielinski. Cynthania Clark, the executive director of the Elmore County Domestic Violence Council, said that she got a call from someone named “Audrey” with “InvestigativeWest Department” regarding potential concerns with the state agency.

“It appears the reporters are still attempting to smear our agency which is unfortunate and concerning,” Wiemiller wrote to board members.

It was one of several times Wiemiller told the board that reporters had called the Elmore council asking for dirt on the agency, records show. The implication was that Zielinksi was behind the calls.

But InvestigateWest had not called Clark or anyone else from Elmore County DV Council. InvestigateWest asked Idaho-based ProPublica reporter Audrey Dutton if she had, in case Clark mixed up which news organization Dutton worked for. Dutton said she hadn’t called Clark.

When InvestigateWest discovered the claims regarding phone calls through the email records, a reporter called Clark, who was adamant someone claiming to be from the news organization had called her before. When told that IATC lost their funding from the state, Clark said she was “flabbergasted” and said she now regrets notifying Wiemiller about the calls at all.

“COBS should have been defunded, not IATC,” Clark said. “I didn’t want to get involved, but this isn’t right. Where is the freedom of speech?” It’s unclear whether Wiemiller or anyone from her agency made any attempt to verify the calls.

Yet in September, when deciding the fate of COBS and IATC in public meetings, the state agency portrayed COBS and the council as victims of a “misinformation” campaign.

They dismissively referenced the “allegations” containing “no proof” of wrongdoing in the articles about COBS. Wiemiller described it as a “he said, she said thing.” And Wiemiller and the council doubted that COBS was under federal investigation at all.

“We’ve just got allegations. We don’t know if an investigation is going on,” Somerton said on Sept. 25.

Three sources, including a former resident at a COBS safe house and a former employee, told InvestigateWest that they’ve spoken to special agents with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General within recent weeks. Wiemiller herself was also asked to share information about COBS with the investigators, though Wiemiller said during recent public meetings that those investigators would not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation to her.

Somerton, the former prosecutor, did express satisfaction with the state council’s own investigation of COBS, however. Wiemiller said they’d visited COBS and spoken to current residents who were victims of trafficking, and that those residents all had good things to say.

But Wiemiller acknowledged “we didn’t ask any questions” and instead simply sat and listened to the residents.

Former residents have told InvestigateWest that Barthelmess retaliated against women who said anything negative about her and COBS.

Ultimately, Somerton and the council said that if the allegations are proven, they wanted the ability to terminate the funding to COBS with 30-day notice. Somerton wanted to “at least” be “cautious,” fearing a scenario where funding COBS comes back to “bite us in the rear, that it was right there looking at you in the face, like, ‘How did you not just catch that?’”

But pulling a program’s funding is a major decision, he stressed.

“Regardless of what the agency is,” Somerton said, “if someone from the community provides allegations and we react by stopping all funding — is that reasonable on our part?”

Collaboration

On Oct. 4, after the decision to pull the funding for the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition, a reporter asked Wiemiller and Somerton whether a complaint had ever been filed against the nonprofit.

They didn’t answer the question.

But four days later, Zielinski got an email.

The council had suddenly received two complaints about the coalition. One was filed by Nampa Family Justice Center, an agency that also awards COBS federal grant funding.

The other was filed by COBS.

The allegations mirror the language the state used to pull IATC’s funding: the “refusal to collaborate” and the negative things said about COBS.

“Jennifer Zielinski and IATC’s ongoing campaign of slander and defamation, now coordinated with assistance from InvestigateWest,” Barthelmess wrote, “has caused significant disruption to Idaho COBS.”

Wiemiller said the state agency would investigate.

Correction: This story has been updated to remove a quote in which a state staffer wrote “slimy” in response to a purported InvestigateWest call on July 31. In fact, that email occurred days earlier in response to a separate inquiry from a reporter.

InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reach news and investigations editor Wilson Criscione at wilson@invw.org.