For more than a decade, the Justice Department’s inspector general has been thrust into the center of some of the most contentious disputes in government.
The DOJ watchdog has issued scathing assessments of the FBI, including mishandling requests for surveillance authority and detailing the bureau’s devastating failure to address sexual abuse allegations against disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nasser.
The inspector general’s review of a botched gun-running inquiry by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives prompted a wholesale shakeup of the agency. And a recent review of hundreds of inmate deaths is still reverberating throughout the federal Bureau of Prisons.
No agency within the sprawling Justice Department, it seems, has been spared the scrutiny of an investigative unit that values its independence more than elevating its public profile.
“I’m not looking to make headlines,” Inspector General Michael Horowtiz told the National Press Foundation’s Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship class. “The reports will either do that or not do that… But it’s very important for us for the public to see all the facts so that they can make an assessment based on the facts.
“The truth, in our view, still matters,” he said.
The power of the investigative work, Horowitz said, is based on a rigid, non-partisan approach and independence from the influence of the traditional Justice leadership structure.
“We have several key principles that we abide by, all of us,” Horowitz said, of the 535-person division formed to detect waste, fraud and misconduct across a department of more than 110,000 employees. “We are statutorily independent, which means while I report to both Congress and the Attorney General, as I said, the Attorney General doesn’t review me or rate me.”
“We do not want to be seen as partisan in any shape, way shape or form,” Horowitz said.
Indeed, the work of inspectors general has exposed wrongdoing across Democrat and Republican administrations.
Similar to news organizations, Horowtiz described whistleblowers—those who call attention to wrongdoing—as “critical to who we are, what we do.”
“We take their complaints seriously, we take retaliation against them particularly seriously,” he said.
Access the full transcript here.
