DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the Role after Trump’s Mass Firings скачать в хорошем качестве

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the Role after Trump’s Mass Firings

Apolitical, independent mission of rooting out fraud, waste, corruption remains, Horowitz says. Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz, one of the few who wasn't fired by Trump, emphasizes the importance of apolitical independence. by Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation Despite the purge of top government watchdogs from 17 agencies during the first days of the new Trump administration, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the work to expose waste, fraud and abuse remains “driven by our independence.” Horowitz, among a corps of federal inspectors general still on the job, told the National Press Foundation’s Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship that the non-partisan mission has not changed. “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 … because ultimately that’s who we’re there to report to is the public and give the information that they need,” Horowitz said. “We’re all about transparency and accountability, and we are driven by our independence.” That independence is enshrined in the post-Watergate law that outlines the mission, including the apolitical standards for the presidential appointments of inspectors general. “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 … being a lawyer, being an investigator, being an auditor, whatever the background is of the nominee,” he said. Pursuing Accountability Amid Political Pressure In nearly 13 years at Justice, Horowitz’s work has been among the most scrutinized in government. His investigators have issued especially pointed critiques of the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, the Bureau of Prisons and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Among the most anticipated of those reviews was delivered in 2019 in a scathing assessment of the FBI’s surveillance of a former campaign aide while investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Trump has long referenced the report as evidence of a Justice Department weaponized against him. Yet the same report also concluded that the Russia inquiry was legally justified and that there was no evidence of political bias. A Shared Mission: Investigators and Journalists “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,” Horowitz said. “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 … 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. “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,” he said. How Government Whistleblowers Drive Accountability Key to the work, Horowitz said, are often government employees with first-hand knowledge of abuse within their own departments. “We have people who’ve been 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 … who can report to us when they see misconduct, when they see fraud, and when they see waste,” the inspector general said. Speaker: Michael Horowitz, Inspector General, Department of Justice Summary and transcript: https://nationalpress.org/topic/doj-i... This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios. NPF is solely responsible for the content.