Department of Justice officials are defying Congress in withholding from their agency’s internal watchdog access to documents that Inspector General Michael Horowitz says he must have to do his oversight job properly.
Horowitz revealed Monday that he has reported to the House Appropriations Committee twice in less than three weeks on the FBI’s failure to give his office email records it has been seeking for months on multiple cases involving the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI whistleblowers.
Congress quietly included a provision directing Horowitz to file the reports in the “CRomnibus” spending bill legislators passed in December. Section 218 of the bill instructed Justice Department officials not to use any appropriated funds to stymie Horowitz and directed him to report any violations to the appropriations panel.
In a letter sent Feb. 19 but only made public Monday, Horowitz described the FBI’s failure to meet a series of deadlines he set for officials there to submit records necessary to the watchdog’s probe of Drug Enforcement Agency subpoena usage.
Horowitz said the FBI has continued to stall the release of the emails because officials have expressed a desire to review them for information they say the inspector general “is not legally entitled to access,” such as wiretap records.
“It has been the FBI’s position in other cases that, for any such information it identified, it would need the authorization of the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General in order to produce the information,” the letter said.
But Horowitz argued the Inspector General Act, which established his office in 1978 and grants all inspectors general unfettered access to any and all government documents, imposes no such limitations on what information the watchdog should receive.
Even if Justice Department officials eventually approved wiretap records and other sensitive information for release to the inspector general, the very process of forcing a watchdog to seek permission from agency leadership violates both the IG Act and Section 218, Horowitz said.
The inspector general sent another letter to the Appropriations Committee Feb. 3 that raised identical concerns about FBI intransigence during another investigation, this one into a pair of agency whistleblower cases.
President Obama’s budget proposal sought to circumvent Section 218 by claiming the White House was “unaware of any specific materials” that the Justice inspector general “believed to be necessary to its reviews, but to which the Office of Inspector General has not been granted access.”
Horowitz raised concerns about the FBI’s practice in a hearing before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 3 that examined a number of obstacles inspectors general face when conducting oversight of their respective agencies.
The two letters mark the first attempts by Horowitz to use Section 218 as a tool to strengthen his office’s oversight resources. The provision requires the inspector general to file a report with the appropriations committee within five days of the agency’s failure to hand over any requested records not protected by “an express limitation” in the inspector general act.
The provision doesn’t specify penalties for violations of its requirement.
