WASHINGTON – The investigators who are responsible for watching the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Peace Corps have testified that the Obama administration actively obstructs their efforts to get documents that are key to their work.
In a hearing before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, the inspectors general overseeing the agencies said the administration also impedes their ability to conduct effective investigations.
“I should not have to go to the people I am investigating to ask for permission to obtain relevant documents,” Michael E. Horowitz, the DOJ inspector general, explained.
Kathy Buller, the Peace Corp inspector general, said she had to go to the office of general counsel to get documents out of the Obama administration that her office was accustomed to getting voluntarily from previous administrations.
“What I see is stonewalling and parsing out of information,” Arthur A. Elkins Jr., the EPA inspector general, testified.
“You ask for 10 pieces of information and what you get is three pieces of information and arguing about the other seven. It’s an expensive process for the taxpayer when we don’t get immediately the documents we are requesting,” Elkins said.
He explained that having to negotiate with EPA to get access to witnesses and documents allows an element of “wiggle room” into the discussion. The Obama administration achieves the goal of changing an investigative demand for relevant evidence into a negotiation for the information.
“We are told all the information we have requested has been given us, even though fulfilling the requests took many months,” Horowitz testified regarding DOJ.
He suggested he had no way of knowing for certain there remained relevant documents or access to witnesses that had been withheld secretly.
“Despite our objections, over the past two years the Peace Corps has developed and implemented policies and procedures denying us access to restricted reports,” Buller said in her prepared testimony.
“The agency claims it is necessary to withhold information from the Office of Inspector General to protect victims’ information even though OIG has always had access to PII [personal identifying information] and medical records of volunteers, and there are no cited incidents of this information being breached while in OIG’s custody. The agency claims its policies and procedures are ‘victim-centric,’ but our view is that nothing could be more ‘victim-centric’ than providing independent oversight of victims’ care.”
In his prepared testimony, Horowitz testified that even routine requests for information made to Attorney General Eric Holder have become a challenge.
“In two on-going audits, we have even had trouble getting Department of Justice organizational charts in a timely manner,” Horowitz said.
In his statement, Elkins noted that he joined with 46 other federal inspectors general in writing a letter to Congress on Aug. 5 discussing “the troubling push-back many of us have been seeing from our respective agencies denying us mandated access to agency employee[s] and records.”
Elkins continued: “Besides claiming some highly tenuous rationale to trump the clear mandate of the Inspector General Act, an agency will sometimes impose burdensome administrative conditions on access. Further, we noted that even when IGs were ultimately able to resolve these issues with agency management, the negotiation utilizes a considerable amount of the OIG’s [Office of Inspector General] resources and diverts the OIG from substantive oversight activities.”
The hearing was held as the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., broke the news that a member of Holder’s Justice Department staff called the committee majority office, instead of calling a Democratic office, to ask Democrats to release publicly several documents regarding former IRS official Andrew Strelka in the on-going investigation of IRS bias against tea party groups applying for tax-favored determinations.
TheHill.com reported Tuesday that “Issa said it’s clear that the Justice official meant to call Democratic staff. Issa said the mix-up is proof that President Obama’s administration and Cummings have been collaborating to “prejudice the committee’s work through under-the-table coordination.”
