The Justice Department’s internal watchdog lost a crucial account from a whistle-blower detailing wrongdoing by political appointees for more than two months, prompting criticism that the agency’s inspector general has been inactive and silent during a time of deep turmoil.
The complaint, submitted in early May, accused top Justice Department officials like Emil Bove III of overseeing an effort to mislead judges and skirt or ignore court orders, according to people familiar with the filing.
That the office received, but did not act upon, a potentially explosive set of allegations two weeks before news of Mr. Bove’s nomination to become a federal appeals court judge has raised serious concerns from current and former department lawyers that the unit responsible for policing not just the department but agencies like the F.B.I. and D.E.A. may have gone largely dormant.
“We were all stunned,” said Libby Liu, the chief executive of Whistleblower Aid, a group representing the person who filed the complaint. “Clearly the inspector general failed in their basic function here. If they don’t even open whistle-blower complaints, then what is going on?”
A spokesperson for the inspector general declined to comment on the handling of the complaint.
The filing, which is not public, was submitted to the inspector general’s office in electronic form on May 2, and a longer, printed version that included documentary evidence was delivered on May 5, according to people familiar with the filing.
The inspector general appears to have done nothing with the information for more than two months, and many in that office did not realize they even had the material until a day or two before the full Senate voted on Mr. Bove’s nomination. He was confirmed Tuesday by a razor-thin margin, 50 to 49.
Last Friday, when the whistle-blower group went public about the filing’s existence, the inspector general’s office told lawmakers that it had no such complaint, according to people familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The office only found the documents after lawyers for the whistle-blower presented electronic and FedEx delivery receipts for them.
The implications of that inaction are potentially significant, given that Republicans have cast skepticism on another Justice Department whistle-blower, Erez Reuveni, describing his account as part of a politically timed effort by Democrats to scuttle a Trump nomination.
That someone appears to have come forward about Mr. Bove’s conduct well before his nomination was known would undercut those claims. The complaint, according to people familiar with it, outlines a set of allegations that largely tracks with Mr. Reuveni’s account.
The mishandling of that complaint underscores a growing concern among current and former Justice Department officials that the inspector general seems strangely silent in the second Trump administration.
In his first week back in the White House, President Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general across federal agencies — though not the Justice Department’s. Earlier this week, administration officials attacked that agency’s inspector general over an investigation into the defense secretary’s use of a messaging app to discuss pending military operations. A Pentagon spokesman called that inquiry “a sham, conducted in bad faith and with extreme bias.”
The longtime leader of the Justice Department inspector general’s office, Michael E. Horowitz, recently left to take the same job at the Federal Reserve. Unlike the rest of the Justice Department, the senior ranks at the inspector general’s office remain largely intact, mostly untouched by the Trump administration staff cuts or firings. It is now led by acting inspector general William M. Blier.
That makes the office’s seeming inaction even more baffling to those well versed in its work.
Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general during the Clinton administration, said that even before the second Trump administration began, the pace of internal department investigations had noticeably slowed.
Mr. Bromwich said he represents clients in three issues before the inspector general. One of those, he said, could have been resolved in a few months but instead has been pending for more than two years.
In the other, more recent cases, he said, “we’ve filed complaints in the last three months that provide details of misconduct at high levels of the department and have received no indication about whether they will do anything meaningful.”
One such case involved Elizabeth G. Oyer, the department’s former pardon attorney who was dismissed shortly after she resisted pressure to recommend restoring the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson. In that instance, the inspector general has opened a “preliminary” investigation, though the progress of the case is unclear.
It is “very disappointing that there is no evidence of any serious investigative activity in the face of highly publicized allegations of misconduct,” Mr. Bromwich added. “Maybe the collective decision is, if we just hunker down we can outlast them and we’ll start doing our work again. But we’re in a time when that’s just not an appropriate attitude for the I.G. to have, particularly when there’s no such thing as congressional oversight over D.O.J. right now.”
In declining to comment, the spokesperson for the inspector general would say only that the office has a general practice of not confirming or denying the existence of investigations.
The inspector general does have significant limits on what it can investigate inside the Justice Department. Issues concerning how lawyers make legal decisions or handle cases, for instance, are typically reserved for the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which reports to the attorney general.
In the case of Mr. Reuveni’s complaint, many of his allegations were the type of concerns about conduct that would typically be left to the Office of Professional Responsibility.
But as Mr. Bove and other administration officials have fired more than a hundred lawyers and agents without any stated cause, in seeming violation of civil service protections and longtime Justice Department practice, the inspector general has been publicly silent.
That silence and apparent inaction, according to Ms. Liu, only deepens the fear among current department employees of speaking out if they see wrongdoing by their superiors or colleagues.
“If the people inside know that the Justice Department inspector general is doing nothing, then the intimidation of potential whistle-blowers is extreme,” she said.