In 2018, U.S. Coast Guard officials who withheld a report on the Coast Guard Academy’s mishandling of sexual assaults at the academy were worried about the fallout if the report became public, documents released Friday show.

They also were concerned the rates of reporting of sexual assaults had changed little during the course of the investigation that led to the report, “calling into question” the impact of the Coast Guard’s attempts to improve conditions on the academy’s New London campus.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said the revelations were contained in the documents the subcommittee received after it requested more information following a December public hearing.

The hearing featured damning testimony by four women who described being sexually assaulted as Coast Guard Academy cadets.

Blumenthal, who appeared at a news conference at city hall in New Haven, said the subcommittee was dissatisfied with the material it received.

In a letter this week to Adm. Linda Fagan, the Coast Guard commandant, Blumenthal and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the subcommittee’s ranking member, expressed their dissatisfaction and asked that Coast Guard officials address redactions in the documents they sent and provide additional records and information by Feb. 29.

“These documents are troubling and raise new questions about the reasons for the Coast Guard’s fall of 2018 decision not to brief Congress about Operation Fouled Anchor,” the letter states, referring to the sexual-assault investigation by its title. “According to the enclosed documents, the Coast Guard was concerned that, should Operation Fouled Anchor be made public, it would ‘risk the initiation of comprehensive Congressional investigations, hearings, and media interest’ and that ‘[t]he rates of sexual assault reporting have not appreciably changed, calling into question impact of Coast Guard actions taken over the past decade to change CGA climate/etc.’”

The letter singles out handwritten notes on one document in which then-Vice Commandant Adm. Charles Ray wrote, “Problem is one of the past ...”

Ray, now retired from the Coast Guard, resigned last August from the academy’s Loy Institute for Leadership over his connection to the cover-up of the Operation Fouled Anchor report.

CNN, the cable television news network, first revealed the report’s existence last June.

The Senate subcommittee, which launched its probe of the cover-up in September, asked in December that the Coast Guard produce records without redactions, which the Coast Guard failed to do.

“... (T)he Coast Guard continues to redact information, which prevents the Subcommittee from understanding the full scope of the Coast Guard’s decisions,” Blumenthal and Johnson wrote in their letter.

They also asked that the Coast Guard provide “missing email attachments,” including one they said appears to be an earlier draft of the Operation Fouled Anchor report shared among Coast Guard officials in March 2019 ― “nearly ten months before the report was finalized.”

The subcommittee members also asked that all Coast Guard personnel “involved in preparing, drafting or reviewing” the documents obtained by the subcommittee “as well as all personnel who were briefed on or otherwise made aware of the existence of the enclosed documents in or around October 2018” make themselves available for interviews the week of March 4-8.

At the December hearing at which the women testified about being sexually assaulted as cadets, Blumenthal promised the subcommittee would seek accountability for those involved in the decision to cover-up the Operation Fouled Anchor report, among others.

Retired Adm. Karl Schultz was the Coast Guard commandant when the decision was made to withhold the report.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com