The Department of Justice’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, stepped down on Friday after a decade of pushing to clean up and depoliticize a hyperpoliticized department. He will be missed.
Mr. Fine’s best-known efforts came in 2008 when he documented the George W. Bush administration’s politically driven firings of four United States attorneys and its politically driven hirings (breaking the civil service law) of scores of civil servants at the Civil Rights Division. Last year, he continued to detail the F.B.I.’s widespread misuse since 2001 of “exigent letters” to get phone records and the “failure” by “the most senior” F.B.I. officials to resolve the problem.
The inspector general reports to Congress and the attorney general and can be fired only by the president. But the job’s purview of detecting and deterring waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct is oddly limited. It doesn’t include power to investigate alleged misconduct by the department’s lawyers in their legal work.
That is left to the Office of Professional Responsibility, which has no independence and can be far too easily overridden as it was in its investigation of the Bush administration’s appalling memos authorizing the drowning technique known as waterboarding and other torture of detainees. While the office urged that the lawyers who wrote the memos should be penalized for professional misconduct, a lawyer working for the deputy attorney general rejected that counsel.
If the inspector general had done the investigation and made the same recommendation, a midlevel official could not have rejected it. And the attorney general would have had to take it far more seriously.
Congress should expand the power of the inspector general to investigate lawyers and give him or her the power to compel testimony from former Justice Department employees and not just current employees, to enable more comprehensive accounts. President Obama should appoint a vigilant successor to Mr. Fine, one who will continue to expose the department’s shortcomings and their costs.
Civil servants such as this one, with such personal courage, are pretty rare, one suspects.
