Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan testifies during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee hearing on June 11, 2024, in Washington. (Mariam Zuhaib/AP)

Senators on Tuesday berated the Coast Guard’s top admiral for her handling of the service’s sex-assault scandal, chiding her for not punishing anyone for the cover-up and stalling their request for more documents about the mishandling of the crisis at the service’s academy.

“[The Coast Guard] is refusing to provide us with documents deemed ‘sensitive,’ which is another word for embarrassing,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “This situation demands unsparing truth telling, following the evidence where it leads and being willing to face that truth, even though it may be embarrassing to friends, colleagues, predecessors and current leadership.”

Blumenthal is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ subpanel on investigations, which is examining the cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor — a 2020 report based on a five-year inquiry into the handling of sexual assault and harassment at the Coast Guard Academy prior to 2006.

The Coast Guard only notified Congress about the existence of Fouled Anchor after CNN reporters began digging into it in 2023 — three years after the service decided not to disclose the investigative report.

Adm. Linda Fagan, the Coast Guard commandant, sat before the subpanel Tuesday and faced heated questions and statements from senators about transparency, accountability and the Coast Guard’s ongoing efforts to quiet the voices of sexual misconduct survivors.

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the subpanel, fanned pages of Coast Guard documents covered in black-ink redactions.

“This is not full transparency,” he said. “The sooner that the Coast Guard comes clean, becomes fully transparent, holds people accountable … the finest among us can feel safe at the academy and in service to this country.”

But Fagan said she has been compliant, providing roughly 18,000 documents to the subpanel — and she will hold people accountable as investigations conclude and require it.

The service’s inspector general has an open review into Fouled Anchor’s cover up, and the admiral said Congress provided $1.5 million for a third-party to investigate. A contract is nearly complete for that to begin, she said.

“This is not a cover-up,” Fagan said. “I am committed to providing documents in good faith. This is an incredible organization and I am committed to bringing the organization forward and making the culture change necessary.”

The hearing room was packed with people and required an overflow seating area. The crowd included Coast Guard veterans who have previously testified to the subpanel about Operation Fouled Anchor. They were joined by Shannon Norenberg, who recently resigned as the sexual assault response coordinator at the academy after she said she discovered she was used in 2018 to mislead victims.

Some in the crowd applauded when Blumenthal told Fagan the investigation “cannot be used as a shield for inaction.”

The U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. (Jack Sauer/AP)

Yet the admiral continued to deflect pointed questions on several occasions, stating she is complying with the inspector general’s investigation.

Johnson said he wanted Fagan to provide the original 11-page report written to summarize the Fouled Anchor investigation. The subpanel has only received a six-page version.

Fagan said she has not read the early draft of the report to which he was referring, but Johnson could review the requested document “in camera,” which means he is not allowed to take notes or retain a copy for himself.

Senators also pressed Fagan for information on allegations that surfaced over the weekend from Norenberg that while she worked at the Coast Guard Academy, she was used by leaders to lie to Fouled Anchor victims and discourage them from speaking to Congress about their assaults.

In 2018, which was Norenberg’s fifth year at the academy, she said she was called to the Pentagon to participate in an “apology tour” with victims identified through Fouled Anchor. On those visits, which were often in people’s homes, she said she was told not to provide any of them with a document that would enable the veteran to get treatment for their assault from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I had to resign because I could no longer be part of an organization that knowingly lied to me, to the team I was with, and to the victims of OFA. The leadership of the Coast Guard did all of this with forethought, with malice towards the victims, and they used me personally as a part of their cover-up,” Norenberg wrote in a letter posted to her attorney’s website and provided to the subpanel.

Fouled Anchor reviewed the mishandling of sexual assault reports at the academy from the early 1990s to 2006, though Blumenthal said Norenberg is among 40 whistleblowers to contact the subpanel in last few months.

“This problem is not one of the past,” he said. “It is real and present. It is persistent and unacceptably prevalent. The evidence is not my voice, it’s the voices and faces of the whistleblowers.”

In the last two months, the Coast Guard has weathered two instances of survivors taking their stories online after they felt the service let them down.

In May, an anonymous letter spread online through the Coast Guard community detailing the mishandling of a sexual assault investigation and subsequent retaliation. The letter was sent to Coast Guard email accounts within District 8 and its sector in Mobile, Ala., and then deleted from the computer server because it was “spam,” Blumenthal said. It later surfaced on social media.

Catherine Herbert, a Coast Guard veteran who is the victim of the case detailed in the anonymous letter, said her case was closed without any disciplinary action. However, Fagan said Tuesday that the case remains open after prosecutors sent it back for further investigation.

The letter revealed there is a problem and got Congress to recognize it, Herbert said.

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., called on Fagan to explain an April decision not to publish videos recorded of sexual-assault survivors sharing their stories as part of an internal storytelling series with the Coast Guard’s sexual assault prevention office. Service leaders decided the prevention office could not share the videos because they “could continue to exacerbate the narrative being advanced by some that the Coast Guard is in a sexual-assault crisis” and because congressional committees “are going to reach out to the Coast Guard and demand accountability,” Hassan said, quoting an internal memo leaked online.

“This memo reflects continued problems with the Coast Guard’s commitment to accountability and transparency. It also shows an unwillingness to fully confront ongoing allegations of sexual assault and harassment,” she said. “Adm. Fagan, when did you become aware of this storyteller program? Were you consulted in the decision on whether to share these videos? And are you concerned that some agency leadership apparently feared accountability?”

“I was not consulted,” Fagan responded. “I am not afraid of victims’ stories being shared and being shared publicly.”

Meghan Klement was one of four survivors who recorded a video and chose to share her story publicly after the Coast Guard did not. The service has since shared all the videos.

Klement watched Tuesday’s hearing and said she has been contacted by active-duty personnel in ongoing situations and veterans who said they never saw justice.

“This sexual assault problem is a Coast Guard-wide problem, not just an academy problem. It’s a systemic problem. It’s a cultural problem, and our enlisted members, they need to be seen and they need to be heard,” she said.