Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz spoke to National Press Foundation Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellows on March 7, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation:
Well, I think it’s only appropriate that we begin a deep dive into issues related to the Justice Department with our first speaker today, Michael Horowitz. It may seem like ancient history now, but the purge of federal staffers began when more than a dozen inspectors general were dismissed at the end of the first week of this new administration. Among those spared is Michael Horowitz, and I think it’s fair to say that no government watchdog has been swept into more controversial assignments during his 13 and –
Michael Horowitz, Department of Justice:
In another month it’ll be 13 –
Johnson:
– at DOJ than Michael Horowitz. Starting with a searing report of the ATF’s role in a gun running program in Mexico, scathing reviews of the FBI’s surveillance program and deadly failures at the Bureau of Prisons. The Inspector General, as you can imagine, is not the most popular guy at the Justice Department. Ironically, it was the 2019 review of the FBI surveillance program that which notably found no evidence of political bias, was the one mentioned by the current president when he made decisions to keep Michael Horowitz on the job. But his work and that of his remaining colleagues should be must reads for all of us as we attempt to bring accountability to the institutions on our beat at such a uncertain time. We’re extremely fortunate to have the IG with us today, and as I mentioned the ground rules that we discussed. We will start, Michael will have a few remarks and at first and then we’ll move to Q&A after that. But welcome Michael Horowitz and as you welcome him, I also want to introduce a couple of staffers who are with him today. John Levinsky is the senior counsel at the IG’s office and Stephanie Logan is the chief spokesperson at the IG’s office and this is her last day today.
Horowitz:
Yeah, I was going to say for 12 more hours after that. Welcome. Don’t take anything he says. Thank you. Great to be here with all of you. Going to start with just some background about inspectors general, our office, what we do, put together a slide, give you a sense of who we are because what I’ve found over the years is most people don’t really know what our authorities are and what we do and what we don’t do, and understanding the landscape of what the IG Act provides for. So let me just run through that with you. So everything about what we do is governed by the IG Act, which was passed in 1978. It was one of the post-Watergate reforms at the time it was passed, there were 12 inspectors general created by the new statute. There have been multiple amendments to the IG ACT over the years.
It was very controversial when it was created, questions about constitutionality, the appropriateness of having an employee embedded in agencies that reported both to the agency head and to Congress. And that I think it’s fair to say that issue, that question has been ameliorated in a large part by what we’ve done as IGs over the years and how we’ve rooted out waste, fraud and abuse and misconduct. And so currently there are actually 74 IGs. That number has grown over the years. In the last five, six years. It’s fluctuated a little bit because there have been special IG positions created to deal with particular programs. So the number has gone up and then as those special IGs have went down, it’s wound down, it has gone down. So for example, there was a special IG for Afghanistan, reconstruction for Iraq, reconstruction for the TARP program after the great recession. Two of those offices are no longer in existence. I think the Afghan reconstruction one may be winding down right now. I know it’s winding down. I’m not sure if it’s officially wound down yet or not, but that’s why in the last few years you might see people saying 73, 74, 75, but it’s been in roughly that space. But to the extent there are any questions about what we do and what our legal authorities are, it’s governed by the IG Act and fundamentally what we’re about is finding waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in the agencies we oversee.
There are of the 74 half, mostly all the cabinet agencies and most of the larger agencies are nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate. The other 37 are agency appointed igs. So for example, the independent agencies like the SEC and others like that have igs appointed by their commissions or commissioners and are not Senate confirmed. So you’ll sometimes hear the acronym for IGs being PAS, which are presidentially nominated Senate confirmed, and then DFE, which are designated federal entities. Those are the agency appointed ones, but we’re all governed by the IG Act. There’s a video embedded in here. I’m not going to run it because it’s about 10 minutes from our 40th anniversary event, but it’s worth watching. It’s great video and the whole event is online. Very interesting discussions including for example, one with Attorney General Barr who was the attorney general when the IG Act came into being for the Justice Department.
We were not part of the first 12, we were added in 1988 and his speaking about how when we were first created, he had questions about our constitutionality. But fast forward to the event we had in 2018. He talked about how integral we are and how important a role we are. We play in overseeing agencies like the Justice Department, so you can watch all of that if you are interested. So what do we do as IGs and we provide independent oversight of the agencies. We start from the proposition that everything we do should be transparent and public. And so unlike I think what a lot of agencies look at and think about, perhaps not necessarily putting everything out publicly, that’s something we are committed to. And in the IG Act, it makes clear that’s what we need to do is be transparent about what we do.
So we are all obligated to have websites. We’re all obligated to post information to those websites. And so what we do is when we get our reports, we look and see are there any limitations on what we can put out publicly. As you might guess at the Justice Department, we sometimes have to deal with those issues and be particularly careful in what we put out because we deal with classified information, we deal with sensitive law enforcement information, information about informants, information about programs and operations that are highly sensitive. So the process for that is we make sure before we post anything publicly, we always give the department and its component an opportunity to review the report and tell us not only did we get anything, is there any information in there that perhaps is inaccurate from their standpoint. We’ll then assess what they say. We have the final word on that because we want to make sure we get it right for obvious reasons, but we also ask them to tell us if there’s anything in there that needs to be marked for redaction so that it’s not posted publicly.
We will on our own, either as a result of the markings or beforehand, have a pretty good idea of what may be an issue because we will have seen the underlying documents. We have access to all records of the agency. It’s critical that we have that access. So we’ll see what documents and how they’re marked. Are they marked as classified? Are they marked as sensitive? And so sometimes we will be able to knowing that information, what we call right around the issue, so that we don’t have to directly speak to what is classified, but we can provide the public with the information they need to know without disclosing or including, not disclosing, but including information in the report that might need to be redacted for classified purposes. So we’re thinking about that as we’re doing the reports. Sometimes it’s not possible, but that’s something we try and do.
And so you can go to our website and you can see all our public reports. Investigative reports are the one exception to this rule. Obviously if it’s criminal and the case moves forward, it’s public because there’ll be a charge, a public charge. But we also do administrative misconduct reports and those we look at and treat from the standpoint of the Privacy Act. We look at carefully and assess what we can make public and what we can’t. And we are obligated under the law, under the IG Act to make public a summary of all of our reports. So you will see for GS fifteens and above, that’s what the law requires us to post reports, post summaries of reports, not the report itself. And they are anonymized for privacy act purposes for reports involving presidential appointees. Those will often be public reports in full. And so you’ll go to our website and you’ll find reports about US attorneys, FBI directors, those sorts of things are public talk.
Just briefly on financial management, probably not the most exciting area for you to be looking at as journalists, but one of the things every IG is responsible for is doing the financial statement auditing of the agencies they oversee. And that, as I said, generally is pretty routine. Probably not something people are likely to follow, but if you’re covering for example, the Defense Department, that’s a significant issue for the Defense Department. It’s been a significant challenge for the Defense Department in getting what is a clean audit and being able to do a full audit of the agency. We also do reports by statute of the information security systems at our agencies. They’re called FSMA reports, the Federal Information Security Management Act. And those often are overlooked, I think by journalists and the importance of them, and they come into play once there’s a breach, then you see a lot of reporting about what did the FSMA reports say previously, but it is something I think is worth your thinking about, particularly if you’re focused in that space.
Keep in mind those reports are there. Those reports are being done by IGs annually and it can be a very important source of information. oversight.gov I want to mention is a website we put together that allows the IG community to post in one place all of its public reports, both prior to that, if you wanted to follow igs, you had to go to each IG office and look at their own website. You don’t have to do that anymore. If you go to oversight.gov every day we release a report and the other IGs release report, it automatically gets posted as well to oversight.gov. So it’s both on our website and that website. And we also launched a, at the time it was Twitter account X account. And so if you want to follow the website but not go there every day, you can sign up on our account at the Council of Inspectors General.
And if you go to oversight.gov, you’ll see it the link there and you’ll get an alert every time a report’s posted to oversight.gov. And all it will be is we don’t tweet out or send out sort of snappy information about it. What you’ll get is simply the title of the report and who issued it, which IG issued it, and then you can decide if you want to go to oversight.gov and see the report. It’s something I’d strongly recommend you look at in our reports, we make recommendations. That’s really the lifeblood of what we do in our audit work and other oversight work is making recommendations to address programs. Keep in mind is made expressly clear in the IG Act. We do not make policy for agencies. We are not management. That’s one of the things very clear for all of us. My responsibility is to put forward recommendations to address issues we see in programs and in operations and to address waste, fraud abuse.
But I ultimately am not responsible for deciding whether to implement the recommendations, how to implement them, and what steps are taken from a management standpoint that is up to the Department of Justice and their employees. And we’ve got to be very careful not to be suggesting what policy should be or shouldn’t be. One of the examples I often give, we’ve done several reports on the department’s use of compassionate release, which is a statutory provision that allows the Federal Bureau of Prisons to release inmates who have terminal illnesses, things like that. We’ve done reports about it and one of the things I’ve made clear is we’re not saying they need to have a good policy, have a compassionate release policy policy under the law or that they shouldn’t, but if they’re going to have a policy, which they do, then we’re going to assess whether it’s working effectively, whether they’ve managed it the right way.
And that’s something we’re particularly careful in what we do. Another thing that’s worth looking at all IGs annually are required to issue top management and performance challenges. Reports that report every year in our case it goes out in November, lays out what we think are the most significant issues facing the Department of Justice. Again, it’s posted online publicly, and we include in their links to reports that we are referencing and citing and relying on as we assess how the department has done and what the challenges are. So that’s something that is worth doing. Again, if you got oversight.gov and you look, can just see all of the top management reports sitting there for you across all IGs, we also have a semi-annual report that we send to Congress. It’s due March 31, not due March. It’s due 30 days after March, 31, 30 days after September 30th, which summarize all of our work and all of our reports.
Again, it’s publicly. Last thing I mentioned there, whistleblower protection. That’s again in the IG Act. It’s the lifeblood of what we do is having individuals report to us. Sometimes they meet the definition of whistleblower under the loss, sometimes they don’t. But nonetheless, very important for them to come forward, report to us what they see as a potential problem. I like to do. We have 550 employees in my office at DOJ OIG. They’re comprised of auditors, evaluators, inspectors, federal law enforcement agents, lawyers, IT professionals, back office operations, those sorts of things. And we know a lot about the Justice Department, about how it operates. We have people who’ve been there in my organization a long time with deep experience and understanding, but we’re never going to know as much as the people who are actually working in the prisons, the people who are actually working in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration, et cetera, who can report to us when they see misconduct, when they see fraud, and when they see waste.
So very important for us to be able to get that information and under the law, under the IG Act, we have an obligation, maintain the confidentiality of that information except where the law would require us to otherwise disclose information. The most obvious exception there being if a criminal case goes forward and we have disclosure obligations or the prosecutors have disclosure obligations as part of the criminal process. But otherwise, we are very careful to protect the confidentiality of information that comes to us from whistleblowers, from department employees who want to report misconduct, waste, fraud, and abuse. We also have jurisdiction, primary jurisdiction over retaliation against whistleblowers at the FBI. Most other federal employees, including everybody at the Justice Department except FBI employees for retaliation issues. The primary jurisdiction goes to the Office of Special Counsel, not special counsels appointed by the Justice Department, but the Office of the Special Counsel, the one exception being FBI and the FBI has been excluded because of their national security intelligence responsibility. So we have primary jurisdiction over FBI retaliation cases and we get a fair amount of them, and that’s something we spend a lot of time on. These are just in the PowerPoints. You get some headings of things. We’ve done very famous journalists. I think that a lot of these stories and Kevin used to follow us very carefully and very closely. A lot of good headlines there.
Johnson:
Well, not to interrupt, but the reason why this office is such a rich resource is that I don’t think any other job in government is more similar to what you all do, and they have the power to compel people to talk when we don’t. And if you dig deep down into the reports sometimes in the footnotes, that’s where you find the good stuff. So anyway, sorry to interrupt.
Horowitz:
No, and just picking up on that and one of the things, I think that’s right, there’s a lot of similarities between the kind of work you do and what you’re looking for and what we’re looking for. One of the big differences is we do have access to all the information that we need to get from the department, but that also means while you all are reporting essentially in real time sometimes about what’s happening and what’s occurring and what sources are saying to you, we are not doing that right. We are spending sometimes multi years looking through everything to write a thorough footnoted report that provides in some instances, really the first historical record of an event. For example, the Fast and Furious report that Kevin mentioned, the Pfizer report that we did, the report about how the FBI handled Larry Nasser’s investigation and the USA gymnasts issues, the Jeffrey Epstein death, suicide and death in prison.
So are many times, and it can frustrate people, it can frustrate me. We take a fair amount of time to do these reports. It’s because we are sometimes literally looking through a million or more records interviewing 50 to a hundred people, sometimes multiple times, including the attorney general on occasion. And so we will write lengthy reports providing as much as we can to the public about what happened. It’s a little bit of a cross of what between what you all do and what say judges would do and quasi-judicial function in some respects. And that’s why judges write lengthy reports, lengthy opinions, explaining and laying out the justifications for what they found. One of the things that I very much tried to do over the years is address issues that are in the public space on these matters, on the Nassar matter, on the Fast and Furious, on the FS issue.
We’re not writing to what we want to hear and what we think alone is important. We’re taking into account what we think is important based on the evidence we see, but we also want to address what the public needs to hear or wants to hear about issues or is concerned about because ultimately that’s who we’re there to report to is the public and give the information that they need. So that’s what we’re trying to do. So these just some bedrock principles for us. We’re all about transparency and accountability and we are driven by our independence. We are, in fact, the IG Act makes clear that that’s how IGs need to be appointed. They need to be appointed, not based on political affiliation, but rather expertise in one of the disciplines that are central to what we do, whether my case being a lawyer, being an investigator, being an auditor, whatever the background is of the nominee.
It’s for their expertise in the area and not for their political affiliation. We have independence from the agencies built into the statute. We are, it’s important. Always point this out, we are not untethered from the agency. We’re not untethered from, in my case, the executive branch. There are IGs in the legislative branch where we are part of the Justice Department, and IGs in the past have gotten themselves in trouble for essentially believing they are free agent actors in the system. We’re not that. It’s very important for us to follow what the IG X says, comply with the IG Act and stay true to that mission and that obligation. Having said that, we have independence from the agency built into the statute IGs by pursuant to the statute. We have our own hiring authority. I have my own HR operation. We do our hiring separately from the department in all cases. In my case with the attorney General.
The Attorney general doesn’t have any personnel authority over me, like other employees. The only removal power is for the president, and that’s the only discipline available for an IG who’s a presidentially appointed IG. If you’re appointed by the agency head in the category of the D figs, that would be then the agency leadership’s decision. I appoint my own general counsel by statute. I have a general counsel who reports to me as opposed to the agency’s general counsel who provides advice to the agency. So there are all these provisions built in to provide that independence. I mentioned transparency. We’re also accountable to Congress. Obviously we have reporting obligations to Congress and there is substantial amount of oversight performed by Congress of IGs themselves and how they’re performing. Again, I mentioned we have access to all agency records, limitations. I mentioned this already. We make recommendations, but we don’t implement them.
The department ultimately can say we’re not going to do it, and they are then answerable to the public and Congress and to all of you in making that decision. But we don’t have the power or the responsibility to implement recommendations. I think Kevin mentioned this. We can compel testimony from current agency employees. We don’t have the ability to compel testimony of DOJ and police who’ve left the department. That has proven to be a challenge for us in several matters, including high profile matters. But frankly, most often in day-to-day work, whistleblower retaliation cases, a lot of times the individual alleged to have retaliated has retired and isn’t going to talk to us. In all sorts of cases, we come across that challenge. It’s something we have looked to get authority to be able to compel former employees to do. We have not been successful in that regard.
There are two IGs that do have that authority. Congress has given that authority to the Defense Department IG into the Veterans Administration IG, and they’ve used it rarely in large part because former employees are then willing to voluntarily cooperate with their office. We have a very significant limitation on our jurisdiction, which is, and this is a historical legacy of when we were created, so we were not in the first IG Act. As I mentioned in 1978. We were added during the 1988 amendments. One of the reasons we weren’t in the 1978 legislation is the department had created something called the Office of Professional Responsibility within Maine Justice, and yet had oversight over the lawyers at the Justice Department, the FBI and all the other parts of the department had their own internal affairs offices. The department argued successfully that it didn’t need an IG, that it already had these processes in place.
Fast forward to 1988, Congress decided to add an IG of justice. They carved out from our oversight. At the time, the Justice Department lawyers, because of OPR, they carved out FBI and DEA as well because of their internal affairs structure. So when we come into existent 1988, the Immigration and naturalization service is actually at the Justice Department at the time. That’s a big part of the work at DOJ IG and other areas of oversight, but not FBI, DEA or federal prosecutors or department lawyers. Fast forward 2001, there are two major spy scandals at the FBI that happened, Aldridge ames and Robert Hansen. That causes an expansion of our jurisdiction to cover both FBI and DEA. But the department prosecutor slash lawyer limitation continues to exist over the years. We’ve come very close to having that removed. It hasn’t happened, and so one of the things we often think about with our jurisdiction is when lawyers are involved, do we have jurisdiction over the matter?
If the issue involving lawyers is criminal, we have jurisdiction. If the issue involving lawyers occurs outside their office, outside the office is unrelated to their legal duties at the Justice Department, we have jurisdiction. If it concerns what happened in a courtroom with, if it’s not a perjury matter, that would be criminal. But if it’s discovery violations that are alleged, failure to turn over records, prosecutorial decisions, do I indict, do I not indict? Things like that would go, if there’s an allegation of misconduct, would go to the Office of Professional Responsibility. There are places where our jurisdictions touch, as you might imagine. It’s not a pure clean break between the two and where those circles touch, we will talk to OPR and see how we each assess it and make a judgment as to where jurisdiction lies. This is our mission statement values. I’m going to jump over that. You have a chart there of the org charts mentioned. We have, it says five 30. We’re about five 50 now. Those are all the various professions we have, and then there are some resources. I’ll stop there and switch over to questions.
###
