A Watchdog’s War on Oversight

One of the most powerful watchdog officials in the federal government has waged a years-long campaign to derail and discredit investigations into allegations of his misconduct, which include claims he retaliated against whistleblowers, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) found after reviewing court filings, documents sent to Congress, records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and other information, and after interviewing federal insiders and experts. 

This campaign, whose scope is previously unreported, has heated up as a significant investigation into allegations of reprisal by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari is nearing completion. In early June, a draft report on the investigation by a little-known federal panel called the Integrity Committee was sent to Cuffari and others accused of wrongdoing for their response — garnering congressional attention and a new round of attacks on the panel and its probe.

“The elephant in the room is the expectation of an upcoming Integrity Committee report on the investigation of the current Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari,” said Representative Pete Sessions (R-TX) during a hearing in July. This August, the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, James Comer (R-KY), requested Cuffari’s comments on the draft report.

The Integrity Committee is the linchpin of the system for investigating claims of wrongdoing against top watchdog officials and has been the focus of reforms in recent years to address long-standing congressional concerns. (POGO has also spotlighted problems and recommended changes.) It is one of several committees that are part of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, a group of more than 70 inspectors general from across the federal government. 

Cuffari helms one of the most critical inspector general posts, keeping tabs on a sprawling department that is responsible for a host of important missions — including hot-button issues that are being vigorously debated this election season — from border security to immigration enforcement to protecting the president to anti-terrorism to responding to natural disasters. He has attracted controversy in recent years by refusing to review the Secret Service’s use of force against Black Lives Matter protestors at Lafayette Square in June 2020, sitting for more than a year on a still-unpublished report on sexual misconduct and harassment in DHS law enforcement agencies, waiting for months to tell Congress about the mass deletion of Secret Service text messages including from January 6, 2021, and other issues.

The Integrity Committee’s reprisal investigation is examining actions he took against employees after they alleged that he was delaying publishing a report finding DHS could not adequately track separated migrant families torn apart by the Trump administration and that he sought to remove a reference to the Trump White House in that report, among a number of other claims. The Integrity Committee is also reviewing Cuffari’s complaints that those employees disparaged him and undermined his leadership.

“Since he was confirmed five years ago, IG Cuffari’s management of his office has been completely unacceptable,” Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told POGO in a statement. Thompson, as well as POGO Executive Director and President Danielle Brian, has called for Cuffari to be removed or to resign. “He has, time and again, stood in the way of any oversight of his office and mistakenly believes he is immune to it,” Thompson said.

The stakes go beyond Cuffari. His attacks on the Integrity Committee could put the flawed yet fragile system for probing allegations of misconduct by top federal inspector general officials at risk, some federal insiders told POGO. 

Glenn Fine, the former top watchdog at the Justice and Defense Departments across four presidential administrations, said that a barrage of criticisms of the Integrity Committee could make it wary of tackling some cases, although thoughtful congressional oversight of it is valuable. While Congress, the press, the Government Accountability Office, the courts, and nonprofit groups play oversight roles, Fine said the “most important” entity watching the watchdogs is the Integrity Committee, voluntarily led mostly by a group of inspectors general. 

“Many organizations don’t like oversight. All organizations need it. That includes IGs,” said Fine, who recently published a new book on inspectors general, called Watchdogs.

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General did not respond to requests for comment, although Cuffari has previously denied doing anything wrong and has said actions he took against employees in his office were justified. The Integrity Committee declined to comment.

The Campaign

The campaign by Cuffari and his close allies to halt investigations by the Integrity Committee has involved two lawsuits. The second of the two lawsuits was filed in late June, after the first was dismissed by a federal judge last year, and weeks after the Integrity Committee shared its draft report on the reprisal allegations with Cuffari and others. 

The lawsuits have argued, among other things, that the Integrity Committee has an unconstitutional structure, that its findings could damage the reputations of Cuffari and two of his top aides, and that the committee is in violation of the law because it fails to follow “procedures designed to promote transparency and public participation in their activities.” Much of the Integrity Committee’s activities revolve around sensitive ongoing investigations and discussing whistleblower complaints.

The Justice Department and the Integrity Committee have warned in court filings, which have received no prior press coverage, that the lawsuits, if successful, “would significantly hinder, if not altogether prevent” the committee from investigating any claims of wrongdoing against inspectors general and “could undermine statutory whistleblower protections.”

One federal official who formerly worked for Cuffari, who asked that their name be withheld because they are not authorized to speak to the press, told POGO that Cuffari’s campaign against the Integrity Committee is an effort to effectively obtain impunity. “What they’re saying is: ‘We are not accountable, except to the president. But the president cannot have the benefit of an investigation that uncovers facts about misconduct,’” the federal official said. 

Ultimately, only the president, not the Integrity Committee, can discipline Cuffari, including removing him. But Integrity Committee findings and recommendations can inform White House decision-making.

The second prong of Cuffari and his aides’ campaign involves leveraging allies on Capitol Hill. Records show Cuffari and his inner circle of aides have shared their grievances against the Integrity Committee with a coterie of lawmakers. Some of these lawmakers have in turn issued pointed criticisms of the Integrity Committee and peppered it with aggressive questions about its ongoing probe of the alleged retaliatory acts by Cuffari.

Congress has an oversight interest in inspectors general and the system for holding them accountable, and that includes examining individual cases. Yet congressional requests for information from specific, ongoing investigations have long raised concerns by the executive branch. “Such inquiries inescapably create the risk that the public and the courts will perceive undue political and Congressional influence over law enforcement and litigation decisions,” as a 2000 Justice Department letter puts it. For its part, the Integrity Committee has written that “congressional oversight is a welcome and expected part of the IC oversight process,” but its leadership has said it cannot provide substantive details on ongoing investigations due to “investigative integrity principles.” They have offered to brief Congress and answer questions on the Integrity Committee’s report on Cuffari once it is publicly released. Nonetheless, even if the Integrity Committee remains tight-lipped until then, the executive branch cannot bar lawmakers from seeking details and opining on the pending probe of Cuffari.

One such instance is an August letter from Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rick Scott (R-FL) citing unnamed whistleblowers accusing the Integrity Committee of a “politically motivated” investigation of Cuffari, who is a Trump appointee. (The probe is being conducted by an office led by another Trump-appointed inspector general.) “The whistleblowers allege that the true purpose of the Integrity Committee’s investigations is to hinder, delay, or stop Dr. Cuffari’s efforts to expose the Biden administration’s policy failures, most notably the open border catastrophe,” their letter states. The senators list reports by Cuffari’s office examining border and immigration issues during the Biden administration, yet the Integrity Committee investigation began more than a year before any of the reports they cited were issued. 

A top attorney working in Cuffari’s office — James M. Read — has emailed complaints about the Integrity Committee to staff working for Scott, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), and other congressional offices, according to records POGO obtained from the DHS Office of Inspector General through the Freedom of Information Act. Read is not an uninterested, neutral party in the matter. According to a lawsuit he filed against the Integrity Committee this June, Read has also been “scrutinized” by the Integrity Committee during probes of the reprisal allegations against Cuffari and other claims. Read did not respond to a POGO query asking whether he was one of the unnamed whistleblowers behind Scott and Johnson’s recent letter.

That letter isn’t the first round of congressional questions regarding the Integrity Committee’s work involving Cuffari. Months after Cuffari hyperbolically claimed in May 2021 that the Integrity Committee retaliation investigation “will destroy DHS OIG,” Hawley fired off a long list of questions seeking insight into the committee’s work examining allegations against Cuffari and related matters. In January 2022, a Hawley staffer sent the Integrity Committee’s responses to Cuffari’s chief of staff, as well as a letter signed by Hawley himself critical of the committee asking Cuffari to send records showing “partisan conduct by deep state actors in the inspector general community.” 

Hawley would issue yet another letter in March 2022 to the then-head of the Integrity Committee and the Transportation Department Inspector General, whose office is conducting the Integrity Committee’s investigation of Cuffari, asking if he or anyone else in their organizations leaked an email to POGO. That email was sent by Cuffari’s deputy to “all employees” within the 700-plus person DHS watchdog office and, along with earlier correspondence Cuffari sent to Congress, was a basis for POGO to first report that Cuffari was under investigation by the Integrity Committee.

At the center of that investigation are complex allegations accusing Cuffari of retaliating against a former high-level employee who blew the whistle on Cuffari’s actions early during his tenure as inspector general. Cuffari’s office settled a separate reprisal complaint filed by that former employee for $1.17 million last year.

The situation is particularly fraught due to the Integrity Committee’s initial decisions in late 2019 not to investigate certain claims — some made against Cuffari, and some made by him against that former high-level employee and two others. The committee has drawn fire partly because it later reversed itself and decided to examine the claims. Its initial decisions continue to haunt that investigative panel and have been used to attack it years later. 

“This failure is a dereliction of the Committee’s statutory duty to ensure accountability among the community of Inspectors General,” nine House Republicans wrote this May of the Integrity Committee’s initial decisions not to investigate claims Cuffari made against the high-level employee and two others. (The former high-level employee, Jennifer Costello, told POGO she wishes the Integrity Committee had investigated in late 2019, but she supports its ongoing probe.) 

Last year, Cuffari wrote to Congress claiming to be a victim of “torment” by the Integrity Committee’s parent organization and offering his theory of why the Integrity Committee is investigating him: He says it is because, after the Integrity Committee initially declined to investigate, a law firm hired by Cuffari’s office confirmed misconduct by the employees. Cuffari wrote that the law firm’s findings “displeased” the Integrity Committee’s parent organization.

The Integrity Committee’s then-chairman, Amtrak Inspector General Kevin Winters, has tried to explain to Congress what may have happened when asked why claims that were closed in 2019 later became the focus of an Integrity Committee investigation. 

“In general, when the IC votes to close a matter without referral for investigation, it does not necessarily mean the complaint is without merit,” he wrote to Senator Hawley. The Integrity Committee can later decide to investigate after learning more if new complaints provide new information, he wrote.

A second Integrity Committee probe launched in 2022 reviewed Cuffari’s months-long delay in notifying Congress about deleted Secret Service texts, including those on January 6, 2021, and the circumstances behind a still-unpublished report on sexual misconduct in DHS law enforcement agencies. 

This second investigation appears to have wound down earlier this year, although the Integrity Committee has not yet publicly released any information on it. When asked why this case did not appear in a recent public report detailing the status of its open investigations, an Integrity Committee spokesperson would only tell POGO that “a matter may have been combined with other similar matters, referred to other appropriate agencies for review, or closed.” 

A Flawed System Under Fire

Lawmakers who keep close tabs on inspectors general say they need to be held to particularly high standards of integrity given their watchdog mission. “IGs, who hold others to account, must be pure as the driven snow,” Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) has written.

Yet inspectors general pose an accountability challenge because they have a wide degree of independence through law and governing norms. This independence protects them so they can bring to light information that could anger agency leaders. 

Enter the Integrity Committee, whose “investigations and recommendations have the potential to help all parties manage the tension between IG independence and accountability,” according to the Congressional Research Service. Integrity Committee investigations have preceded some watchdog departures.

Yet, the Integrity Committee is far from an ideal system. When the committee undertakes investigations — and only a tiny handful of complaints lead to such probes — they tend to take a very long time to finish. One reason is they don’t have sufficient in-house staffing to conduct investigations themselves. Instead, they have to rely on voluntary assistance from another Office of Inspector General to undertake the investigation. Finding such a watchdog office to help “can take weeks or months,” the Integrity Committee has written.

“We need an effective, professional, robust Integrity Committee to handle these complaints in a timely, effective, consistent, and nonpartisan way,” said Fine, now a nonresident scholar at the Brookings Institution. His new book contains recommendations for improving the Integrity Committee, such as giving it more staff to conduct investigations. 

But there are more troubling reasons the Integrity Committee’s probes are prolonged, including “resistance from subjects or their parent OIG when the IC attempts to review, evaluate, or investigate allegations of wrongdoing,” according to the committee. Last year, for instance, the Integrity Committee wrote that it encountered problems getting answers from an official accused of misconduct “because they were not authorized to do so by their OIG” in a probe involving Cuffari. Cuffari admitted during a June 2023 deposition that the Integrity Committee has raised concerns about its access to information and witnesses in an investigation where he has been accused of wrongdoing.

Such roadblocks have provoked anger from Congress in the recent past. Senators Johnson and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) were up in arms about a watchdog official who obstructed the Integrity Committee, writing in 2021 that those acts show that the official “lacks the attributes reasonably expected of an IG.” That same year, the Integrity Committee adopted a new rule allowing it to render additional findings of wrongdoing when accused watchdogs obstruct its probes. Read, the top DHS watchdog attorney, has vigorously argued against this new rule, according to records obtained by POGO.

Lawsuits — such as those filed by Cuffari and Read — also tend to drive further delays in the Integrity Committee’s work, the group has stated. Its reprisal investigation of Cuffari has been ongoing for over three years.

The legal challenges and congressional critiques are stress testing the Integrity Committee on top of the built-in ways the panel’s investigations give the accused chances to be heard. While an email that appears to be written by Read claims the Integrity Committee is “out of control,” the Integrity Committee gives accused watchdog officials many chances to have all the facts and their views presented (Read did not respond to a question from POGO about this email). Indeed, records obtained in discovery show that the committee closed most of the complaints against Cuffari after the committee asked for a response from him — hardly any have led to full-blown investigations.

The few that it has launched into Cuffari have led to an aggressive level of attacks that could weaken the panel’s stomach for investigating serious allegations against watchdogs who seem willing to use Cuffari’s playbook to stop its work.

“That’s the challenge of being an IG. You have to have a thick skin, you have to do what’s right, regardless of the pressure. Yes, you’re challenged. Yes, you’re tested,” Fine said of inspectors general, including those serving on the Integrity Committee. 

“But I would hope and expect that IGs would stand up to any such pressure and do the right thing. That’s the nature of the role. And that’s what we ask of them.”