Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz will tell Congress Tuesday that FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration officials repeatedly “raised baseless allegations” to “impede” his staff’s investigation of sexual misconduct.
“These delays created an unnecessary waste of time and resources, both on the part of the OIG personnel and the component personnel,” Horowitz will tell the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“The delays experienced in this review impeded our work, delayed our ability to discover the significant issues we ultimately identified, wasted department and OIG resources during the pendency of the dispute, and affected our confidence in the completeness of our review,” Horowitz will testify.
Horowitz will also tell the committee, which is headed by Rep. Jason Chafetz, R-Utah, that he and his investigators cannot be “completely confident that the FBI and the DEA provided us with all information” they should have gotten.
After long delays in getting uncensored documents from either agency, Horowitz said his staff found “it still was incomplete. For example, we determined that the FBI removed a substantial number of cases from the result of their search and provided additional cases to the OIG only after we identified some discrepancies.”
He said DEA officials first delayed responses, then provided censored documents and continued withholding documents the inspector general staff should have been given.
“Rather than delay our report further, we decided to proceed with releasing it given the significance of our findings,” Horowitz will testify.
The investigations he will be referring to concerned revelations that Secret Service agents had patronized prostitutes and violated security regulations while in Cartagena, Columbia, and how the FBI and DEA handled allegations of sexual misconduct by their employees. The reports were made public in January 2015 and March 2015.
But those two reports were not “an isolated incident,” Horowitz will say. “Rather, we have faced repeated instances over the past several years in which our timely access to records has been impeded, and we have highlighted these issues in our reports on very significant matters such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, the department’s use of the Material Witness Statute, the FBI’s use of National Security Letters, and ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious.”
Congress approved an appropriations rider — Section 218 — in the Justice Department funding bill that barred any part of the law enforcement agencies like the FBI and DEA from resisting the inspector general’s requests for documents or other lawful investigative activities.
But the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder continued its obstruction, according to Horowitz.
“Despite the Congress’s clear statement of intent, the department and the FBI continue to proceed exactly as they did before Section 218 was adopted — spending appropriated funds to review records to determine if they should be withheld from the OIG. The effect is as if Section 218 was never adopted,” Horowitz will tell the committee.
Go here for Horowitz’s prepared testimony, which was made public late Monday.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
