The Justice Department’s internal watchdog has seemingly ignored 20 instances of possible wrongdoing by the Trump administration, lawyers for a whistle-blower said in a letter on Monday urging lawmakers to address the “apparent collapse” of an office meant to root out misconduct.
The lawyers pointed to the case of their client, Erez Reuveni, who was fired in April last year amid a legal fight over the administration’s decision to send migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. It was only one of many issues that the department’s Office of Inspector General appears to have ignored, they said.
“The epidemic of alleged misconduct has been met with a shrug by the agency whose job it is to address such allegations,” they said in their letter, which was sent to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
The office of the inspector general did not respond to a request for comment.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has dismissed or demoted more than 20 inspectors general, sharply undermining the ability of the offices to act as a check on misconduct. According to a congressional report, in the 2024 fiscal year alone, the inspectors general fired by Mr. Trump identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse.
The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, was spared in Mr. Trump’s purge, but he left to oversee the inspector general’s office at the Federal Reserve in June. The role has since remained vacant, and William M. Blier, the deputy inspector general, has served as the acting chief of the office.
Mr. Reuveni, in whistle-blower disclosures to Congress and the inspector general last year, accused senior administration officials of trying to mislead federal judges and ignore court orders.
A day after receiving Mr. Reuveni’s allegations, the inspector general’s office notified him that it did not plan to act. In a letter, it said that it had “thoroughly reviewed the material and concluded that the issues raised do not warrant an investigation by our office.”
“Accordingly, we will take no further action regarding your correspondence and consider the matter closed,” the letter continued.
Mr. Reuveni’s lawyers, Michael Bromwich, Dana L. Gold, Kevin L. Owen and Kathleen Clark, complained about the swift rejection, prompting the office to re-examine the issue. In January, the inspector general again closed the case, according to correspondence among the lawyers. It said it would not investigate because of pending litigation surrounding Mr. Reuveni’s allegations, and because the proper authority to examine such issues belonged to a different Justice Department entity, the Office of Professional Responsibility.
“We view these as excuses for inaction rather than good-faith concerns,” Mr. Reuveni’s lawyers wrote in their letter. The administration had “decapitated” the Office of Professional Responsibility, they said, referring to the firing last year of the lawyer who ran it.
The inspector general has long conducted far-reaching investigations into possible wrongdoing at the Justice Department. In particular, that has applied to the department’s handling of politically sensitive cases, like the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the inquiry into Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and potential ties to Russia.
In the second Trump administration, however, the inspector general’s office has been noticeably quieter. Some lawyers for whistle-blowers have complained that the office seems less willing or able to examine problems inside the department, at a time when the administration has fired more than 200 people from the F.B.I. and Justice Department, many of whom worked on past cases related to Mr. Trump or his allies.
Mr. Reuveni’s lawyers argue that the department is supplying a weak defense in stating that the other watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, has the primary purview over accusations of lawyer misconduct.
“Instead of leaning in to conduct an investigation of great importance implicating potential criminal misconduct by high-level D.O.J. officials, the O.I.G. makes excuses for why it will not undertake the investigation,” the lawyers wrote. “Those excuses for inaction reflect a failure of nerve and a shirking of duty.”
The lawyers noted that lawmakers had asked for investigations of 20 different areas of potential misconduct at the Justice Department in the last year, and there has been no indication that the inspector general is examining any of them.
That figure does not include any private complaints or whistle-blower filings made by Justice Department employees.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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