The Justice Department Inspector General on Monday detailed new and old dilemmas facing the DOJ, calling on department leaders to improve their work on some of the department’s top initiatives.
The Inspector General identified 10 areas in which the DOJ could improve, including counterterrorism, Southwest border law enforcement and restoring confidence in itself.
“Many of the items on our list are long-standing management challenges that are not easily resolved,” Inspector General Glenn Fine said in a statement. “While our list recognizes the progress the Department has made in some challenges, we believe the Department should continue to focus attention on these difficult issues.”
A DOJ spokeswoman declined comment.
The top 10 challenges include:
- Counterterrorism
- Restoring Confidence in the Department of Justice
- Southwest Border Security Issues
- Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
- Information Technology Systems Planning, Implementation, and Security
- Violent and Organized Crime
- Financial Crimes and Cyber Crimes
- Detention and Incarceration
- Grant Management and Recovery Act Funding and Oversight
- Financial Management
Read more on the report here.
This story has been updated.
The White House announced Tuesday that former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich will lead a planned reorganization of the Minerals Management Service.
Michael Bromwich (photo by Ryan J. Reilly/Main Justice)
The federal agency is part of the Department of the Interior and oversees oil and gas development. The Minerals Management Service has been accused of lax oversight and conflicts of interest in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The White House said that Bromwich would have a mandate to implement far-reaching changes and the resources to do it. He will be in charge of developing new oversight requirements and environmental and safety regulations.
Bromwich has been a litigation partner resident at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP since 1999. He served as Inspector General for the Department of Justice from 1994 until 1999.
In the mid-1990s, as the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Bromwich established a reputation as a meticulous enforcer of ethical standards who did not flinch from criticizing senior officials or entrenched bureaucracies. In one scathing report, he found the FBI’s crime lab was sloppy, mired in dysfunction and that analysts had faked evidence in important cases like the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. His review led to a top-to-bottom overhaul of the lab and its forensic procedures.
The former head of the Minerals Management Service, Elizabeth Birnbaum, stepped down last month.
The White House’s biography of Bromwich is reprinted below.
Michael R. Bromwich is a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C., and New York offices of Fried Frank where he heads the firm’s Internal Investigations, Compliance and Monitoring practice group. Mr. Bromwich concentrates his practice on conducting internal investigations for private companies and other organizations; providing monitoring and oversight services in connection with public and private litigation and government enforcement actions; and representing institutions and individuals in white-collar criminal and regulatory matters.
In 2002, Mr. Bromwich was selected by the Department of Justice and the District of Columbia to serve as the Independent Monitor for the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), focusing on use of force, civil rights integrity, internal misconduct, and training issues. He served in that position until 2008 when MPD was determined to have achieved substantial compliance. In 2007, Mr. Bromwich was selected by the City of Houston to undertake a comprehensive investigation of the Houston Police Department Crime Lab; the investigation was widely praised for identifying serious problems in some of the Crime Lab’s operations and providing recommendations for the Lab’s improvement.
Prior to joining the law firm, Bromwich served as Inspector General for the Department of Justice from 1994 – 1999. As Inspector General, he headed the law enforcement agency principally responsible for conducting criminal and administrative investigations into allegations of corruption and misconduct involving the 120,000 employees of the Department of Justice. He was best known for conducting special investigations into allegations of misconduct, defective procedures and incompetence in the FBI Laboratory; the FBI’s conduct and activities regarding the Aldrich Ames matter; the handling of classified information by the FBI and the Department of Justice in the campaign finance investigation; the alleged deception of a Congressional delegation by high-ranking officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; and the Justice Department’s role in the CIA crack cocaine controversy.
Before his appointment as Inspector General, Mr. Bromwich served as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and as Associate Counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel for Iran-Contra. Bromwich was one of three courtroom lawyers for the government in the case of United States v. Oliver L. North. Bromwich’s other responsibilities in that office included supervising a team of prosecutors and law enforcement agents that investigated allegations of criminal misconduct against government officials and private citizens in connection with provision of aid to the Contras in Nicaragua and serving as overall coordinator of the Iran-Contra grand jury.
Bromwich received his law degree from the Harvard Law School in 1980 and a master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government the same year. He received his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976.
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine told members of Congress Wednesday that the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were not coordinating efforts with the agencies’ explosives investigators racing to the scene of an incident in the hopes of calling dibs on a case. As some agents acknowledged to Fine, they believed “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
Inspector General Glenn Fine, Margaret Gulotta of the FBI and Jennifer Shasky Calvery of the DAG's Office at a hearing on Wednesday (photo by Ryan J. Reilly).
The Inspector General audit report issued in October found that the FBI and the ATF management of their coordinated efforts was ineffective.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, Fine reported that conflicts over which agency should lead investigations continue to occur even though the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was transferred from the Treasury Department in 2003.
According to the report, 33 percent of ATF specialists and 40 percent of FBI bomb technicians who responded to the Inspector General’s survey reported having disputes with their counterparts at explosives incidents in fiscal years 2007 and 2008.
Jennifer Shasky Calvery, senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, told the committee that the Justice Department had already implemented several of Fine’s recommendations and had formed working groups to resolve the issues raised in the report.
Fine and other DOJ officials also testified on a separate Inspector General report, also issued in October, on the FBI’s foreign language translation program.
Jennifer Shasky Calvery, senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, testifies before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on Wednesday (photo by Ryan J. Reilly).
That report found that the FBI lacks a consolidated, accurate collection and statistical reporting evaluation system for the foreign language material it collects. It also found that the FBI continues to have significant amounts of unreviewed audio and electronic files it collected for its counterterrorism, counterintelligence and criminal investigations between fiscal year 2006 and 2008.
Margaret Gulotta , section chief of the Language Services Section of the FBI, said that the FBI continues to struggle to find qualified staff for the section.
The audit found that the number of linguists performing translations for the FBI has decreased from 1,388 in March 2005 to 1,298 in Sept. 2008, and that the FBI had not reached its hiring goals.
The audit found that it took the FBI approximately 19 months to hire a contract linguist, an increase from the 16 month period it took in 2005. Fine said that one of the reasons that it was so difficult for the FBI to add staff was because it is currently taking 14 months to complete a background investigation.
“You don’t think terrorists would be willing to wait fourteen months if they know we’ve got this problem?” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), ranking member of the subcommittee. “They don’t wait fourteen months, they take advantage of our weaknesses.”
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said the panel would discuss the Inspector General report regarding the FBI’s use of informal requests for phone records at an upcoming hearing.
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