Government service is like no other job. Most of the time, you’re a tiny cog in a huge machine. But on a handful of occasions, you do something important, something you will feel proud of, and the payoff is not the bottom line of some company but the well-being of our nation.
Glenn Fine is clearly proud of what he did in government—and justifiably so. From 2000 to 2020, he was inspector general in the Justice and Defense Departments, and was not just present but had investigative authority in the big events of the young millennium: 9/11; an FBI scandal; the Karl Rove–orchestrated mass firing of U.S. attorneys; the hecatomb of taxpayer waste in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the Trump administration’s criminally incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic.
It was in that last role, as the incoming chairman of the new
Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, and with a reputation for
fierce oversight, that Donald Trump fired him. Now, Fine has written Watchdogs—an
engaging memoir about his career that brings readers inside the world
of inspectors general. For students of government, the book provides
important lessons about the value and the limitations of this system of
independent bureaucratic oversight—and its vulnerability to attack from
an administration that is determined to bury its mistakes.
What is an inspector general? It is a position created in 1978 by an
act of Congress. The law established an inspector general (IG) for most
cabinet departments and several major agencies, with the responsibility
to investigate waste and fraud, to give policy advice, to handle certain
complaints by employees, and to report to their agency heads and
Congress on their activities every six months.
According to the act, an IG “shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, without regard to political affiliation and solely on the basis of integrity and demonstrated ability in accounting, auditing, financial analysis, law, management analysis, public administration, or investigations.” The position is also independent of the agency head and may open investigations and audits on its own authority.
After an early career as a government attorney, Glenn Fine was hired in 1995 to work on investigations for the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, and in late 2000 was confirmed as the Justice IG. The department only implemented an IG position in 1989, and Justice attorneys and the FBI continued to assert that their own internal controls obviated the need for independent oversight. This claim turned out to be false, as shown by badly flawed practices in the FBI laboratory that were uncovered in the 1990s. And shortly after Fine took the helm as IG, the FBI lurched into the worst spy scandal in its history.
Off and on for 20 years, the FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for the Soviet GRU and KGB and their successor agencies in the Russian Federation. Not only did he pass on a treasure trove of intelligence information, he also routinely obtained information from the FBI that he had no need to know (which should have alerted his superiors), and even hacked into the Bureau’s computers. On more than one occasion he was detected, and each time, his superiors believed his excuse that he was just testing the system. Incredibly, through all this time, he was never properly reinvestigated or even polygraphed.
Trump’s unprecedented firing of six IGs was a clear signal that for all their limitations, inspectors general are seen as a threat by the corrupt and the venal. The firings are also a dire warning of what a second Trump administration would entail: a systematic purge of competent employees and a dismantling of safeguards and anti-fraud procedures.
Finally, in February 2001, he was arrested at a dead drop in Virginia. Fine’s investigative report was properly scathing, demonstrating that the FBI’s fearsome reputation—cultivated by J. Edgar Hoover over the course of decades—was a facade covering up a complacent organization. Incredibly, the Bureau resisted the report’s recommendation that it create a permanent separate unit whose sole task was to determine whether the FBI had been compromised; they only conceded under subsequent congressional pressure.
The Hanssen case has fascinated me, not least because I played a
Hitchcockian cameo role in it. During the year before his arrest, I was a
congressional staff member, and at a foreign policy conference
downtown, I was “befriended” by the press officer of the Russian
embassy, who gave me his business card. As soon as possible, I placed
the card, and the circumstances of my possession of it, into the hands
of the FBI. They suggested I keep a sharp eye out for the Russian man
and report any further attempts at contact, which I happily did. Only
later, after Hanssen’s arrest, did I learn that my would-be friend was
the foreign intelligence service resident at the embassy—and Hanssen’s
handler.
No sooner had Fine autopsied the spy affair than he was thrust into the maelstrom of the post-9/11 blame game. In Watchdogs, he examines the numerous bureaucratic failures and poor communication between agencies that have almost universally been impugned as the cause of the intelligence failure that led to the tragedy of September 11. Here I must part company with the author, who mentions his good working relationship with then Attorney General John Ashcroft, who never tried to undercut the Justice IG’s investigative authority. This he favorably contrasts with Bill Barr, who as attorney general in 1992 attempted to defang the IG office—hardly surprising given Barr’s subsequent career as a Trump fixer.
Yet Ashcroft’s own role in the government nonfeasance leading up to 9/11 deserves more critical scrutiny. In congressional testimony, he tried to deflect criticism onto the Clinton administration for lack of antiterrorism funding and legal authorities, proclaiming that he was “handcuffed.” But the administration somehow stopped the millennium bomb plot scheduled around New Year’s Day of 2000, a thwarted attack that had the potential to be as catastrophic as 9/11.
Further, there is evidence that Ashcroft brushed off FBI Acting
Director Tom Pickard when the latter tried to alert him to indications
of a looming terrorist operation. There is also support for the belief
that terrorism did not rank as highly as other law enforcement
priorities for Ashcroft, and he formally rejected a $50 million FBI
request to hire additional counterterrorism agents and intelligence
specialists on September 10, 2001—the day before the attacks.
That there was complacency and lack of focus in the bureaucracy is incontestable. But simply put, disasters like 9/11 are beyond the remit of an IG to investigate and correct. If there was complacency and lack of focus in the lower ranks, the responsibility lay with the captain of the ship—George W. Bush—and his executive officers, meaning the vice president and Senate-confirmed senior administration officials.
September 11 was not an intelligence agency failure; it was a cognitive intelligence failure of the Bush cabinet. In early August 2001, while Ashcroft was staging a major press conference on the menace of internet porn, Bush was dismissing the CIA presenters of the August 6 President’s Daily Brief that stated, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US”—saying, “You covered your ass,” before going back to golfing and brush-cutting during his four-week vacation. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld was fulminating about a “Soviet” Defense Department bureaucracy and dreaming of ballistic missile defense rather than attending to current threats. At the Old Executive Office Building, Dick Cheney was fantasizing about a “unitary executive,” with himself in the role of Cardinal Richelieu advising Bush’s Louis XIII.
For all the utility of inspectors general in preventing fraud and mismanagement in agencies, they cannot address the massive policy failures that come from the people we elect (or, in Bush’s case, those whom a Supreme Court majority arbitrarily selects). Fine went on to become IG at the Department of Defense, where he encountered significant waste in Iraq and Afghanistan. But war is inherently wasteful, the most improvident of all human endeavors, and waste had been baked into the policy decisions to invade Iraq and remain indefinitely in Afghanistan.
These events point to the structural weaknesses
that characterize watchdog organizations like the Office of the
Inspector General, regardless of the fact that we are better off with
them than without. Like all organizations that settle into a
bureaucratic routine, they tend to focus overmuch on procedures,
processes, and what they call “best practices” rather than on human
culpability. Every full report must undergo a numbing quantity of edits,
and the signoff required of multiple personnel who want to play it safe
and not make mistakes frequently softens sharp criticism into pabulum.
This particularly applies to the reconciliation process between the
IG Office and the agency it oversees. This can turn into a game of
bureaucratic ping-pong, with the agency attempting in many cases to
defang the report. As Fine himself notes, it often takes a strong and
contentious IG to stand up to an agency. The sometimes protracted
back-and-forth also doesn’t help the timeliness of the report.
The general public, and particularly reporters, should bear these limitations in mind when trying to interpret an IG work product. The press practically leapt to declare that a Department of the Interior IG paper had “exonerated” the Trump administration for its handling of the Lafayette Square protest in June 2020 in which protesters were tear-gassed.
The report was, in fact, a “special review,” a document for which there are no established standards, no verification by an independent reviewer, and no check for bias. The IG Office only interviewed Interior Department employees, and, incredibly, didn’t interview protesters, Attorney General Barr, White House personnel, Federal Bureau of Prisons officers, Washington Metropolitan Police personnel, or Secret Service personnel. As a chronicle of events, the special review was close to worthless, but most journalists seem not to have read the qualifying footnotes.
It is many decades overdue that Americans learn how their government actually functions, and that there are good people in government service who try hard to do their jobs. It is also a grave warning that a constitutional government of checks and balances, by honest public servants, is all that separates us from dictatorship.
By the time of the Lafayette Square incident, Fine was already history. A few months earlier, he had been chosen to chair a panel of IGs of several major agencies who would assess the effectiveness of the hundreds of billions of dollars of COVID-19 relief that were going out the door. Trump got it into his head that Fine was a Democratic partisan (although he had served 20 years in both Republican and Democratic administrations without anyone complaining) and fired him—along with five other IGs.
This unprecedented mass firing was a clear signal that for all their limitations, inspectors general are seen as a threat by the corrupt and the venal. The firings are also a dire warning of what a second Trump administration would entail: a systematic purge of competent employees; a dismantling of safeguards and anti-fraud procedures; and a general trashing of the concept of good government. As Hannah Arendt observed 75 years ago,
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Fine ends his book with a series of policy recommendations.
Unquestionably the most important, and timely, is one that would create
an independent inspector general to oversee the Supreme Court.
(Congressional Democrats seeking court reform might do well to call Fine
as a hearing witness to publicly air his proposal.) He says separation
of powers issues can be avoided by having the chief justice name the IG.
I would go further: Chief Justice John Roberts may appoint the IG, but
the nominee should not take office until the Senate confirms them. This
is the same procedure followed for major executive branch IGs, so why
not have an official process to publicly vet the competence and honesty
of the nominee?
Perusing the reflections of an inspector general is hardly summer beach reading, but it’s many decades overdue that Americans learn how their government actually functions, and that there are good people in government service who try hard to do their jobs. It is also a grave warning that a constitutional government of checks and balances, staffed by honest public servants, is all that separates us from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and dictatorships across the world.