Last month, President Donald Trump removed Glenn Fine, the acting Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Defense (DoD). Despite media reports that Mr. Fine had been “fired” he just returned to his previous position as Principal Deputy Inspector General, the #2.
President Trump then appointed Sean O’Donnell, the IG of the Environmental Protection Agency, to serve as acting DoD IG until the Senate acts on his nominee for the position, Jason Abend, from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
By removing Fine, the President made him ineligible to head the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PARC), charged with overseeing the $2 trillion of CARES Act stimulus spending. Fine was appointed to head PARC by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice (DoJ) IG and Chair of the Council of the Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) and not, according to some media reports, by the acclamation of his fellow IGs. (Horowitz was Fine’s subordinate when Fine was the IG at DoJ.)
CIGIE is a council of federal IGs that has legal authority, as does the CIGIE Chair. One of the authorities of the CIGIE Chair is to appoint the Lead IG for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCOs). A Lead IG is appointed for each major military operation and coordinates oversight in places like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. The Lead IG’s main task is to report quarterly to Congress on the operation, a sizable and politically sensitive responsibility.
The CARES Act created several oversight mechanisms, including a new Special IG. Most importantly, it created the PARC in CIGIE to coordinate all IG oversight. The PARC has a five-year charter and the membership is comprised of the IGs whose organizations receive funding under the bill.
Fine joined the DoD as Principal Deputy IG in June 2015, and was named the Acting IG in January 2016. President Obama nominated him for the permanent IG position, but the Senate did not act on the nomination and President Trump withdrew it in March 2017. From that point forward, Fine was neither Senate confirmed, nor nominated to lead the agency.
After Fine became Acting IG, Horowitz appointed him as Lead IG for OCOs Operation Inherent Resolve and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, instead of the State Department IG, Steve Linick, who is Senate confirmed.
When other OCOs were declared (Operation Pacific Eagle – Philippines, for example), Horowitz appointed Fine as Lead IG for them, despite the fact that by that time both the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development had Senate-confirmed IGs.
This may have seemed unusual but wasn’t entirely unreasonable as DoD has the bulk of the OCO money, but it put an “acting” official in a superior position to Senate-confirmed officials — like a Colonel supervising General Officers.
Despite all that, Fine had to go.
First, because one official would have been the acting DoD OIG, the Lead IG for several OCOs, and most importantly, Chairman of the PARC and in charge of all pandemic response oversight. Aside from the management challenge, no one official could be allowed to control so many politically sensitive activities, especially one who was neither nominated to his primary job, nor confirmed by the Senate.
Next, Fine was appointed as Chairman of PARC by his long-time colleague Horowitz. Aside from appearing Swamp-like by favoring his former boss — Fine — with all the high-profile assignments, Horowitz may have cast a shadow on his motives not by what he did, but by what he didn’t do.
In December 2019, Horowitz released a review of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court targeting Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide. Though the report said the FBI had sufficient cause to investigate Page, it found seventeen “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI applications. (In a troubling portent, U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is leading an investigation of intelligence collection against the Trump campaign, took issue with the report’s findings and announced, “…we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”)
Horowitz then reviewed a sample of FBI warrant applications to the FISA court and, in March 2020, announced his office found systemic deficiencies in the Bureau’s warrant application process, including missing exculpatory material (the “Woods file”) that must be presented to the FISA Court.
Horowitz’s reports looked good for the administration — on the surface — but Page was a peripheral player, and this isn’t the first time the FBI violated someone’s civil rights.
Horowitz’s “didn’t dos” were revealed in April 2020 when it was announced that his December 2019 report contained classified information that cast doubt on the veracity of the dossier written by Christopher Steele, the former British spy hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to seek compromising information on candidate Trump. The information was declassified at the request of Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley. Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell followed up a week later with even more disclosures.
The public thus learned: the FBI knew as early as January 2017 that allegations about Trump attorney Michael Cohen were Russian disinformation; in February 2017 the Bureau was informed the story of Trump’s Moscow hotel room frolic in 2013 was authored by the Russian security services; the Russians knew in the summer of 2016 that Steele was pursuing kompromat on Trump, giving the Russians an opportunity to penetrate Steele’s project; and numerous Steele contacts had ties to Russian intelligence, one being a Hillary Clinton partisan.
Why was Horowitz apparently uninterested in seeking to declassify as much information as possible in order to inform the public?
Most likely, it was the “stay in your lane” mentality developed over a government career: his task was to study the FBI’s FISA warrant process failings, not whether the uncorroborated document that paralyzed Washington, D.C. — the Steele dossier — was credible or not. It is akin to not calling the fire department because your house isn’t the one on fire.
But that’s not how the political level sees it.
If you live in the White House, the name “Horowitz” keeps popping up, reminding you of the old saw about the third time being enemy action. First, there was Durham’s warning that Horowitz’s December 2019 report is an incomplete rendering of events. Next, Horowitz gave a key ally who doesn’t have the full confidence of the administration (that had withdrawn his nomination) the most politically sensitive job, oversight of the COVID-19 response. Last, he demonstrated a disinterest in declassifying any information that would shed doubt on the Steele dossier and so inform the public.
Most significantly, Horowitz’s December 2019 report claimed then-FBI agent Peter Strzok did not act out of bias. That assertion was undermined by the recent revelation that, after the FBI found Trump’s then-national security advisor Michael Flynn did not act improperly, Strzok kept the investigation open, saying “7th floor involved,” in other words the FBI’s senior management, Messrs. James Comey and Andrew McCabe.
What do you do?
Before you neutralize a potential threat, you isolate it, so first defang an ally — Fine — by sending him back to his previous job and removing him from oversight of CARES Act spending. Then, declassify information in Horowitz’s reports that undermines the Steele dossier so surrogates can ask What is he trying to hide? Last, pivot to the FBI and point out the Bureau knew the Steele dossier was bogus from the start — an assertion amplified by the recent revelations about the “7th floor.”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler’s demand that Horowitz investigate the Justice Department decision to drop all charges against Michael Flynn is an in-kind donation to Trump’s reelection campaign, as the President can inveigh about relentless bureaucrats and “dirty cops” persecuting “an innocent man.”
So, are Fine and Horowitz propelled by “Just the facts, ma’am” or political bias or motivated reasoning? The public may never know for sure, but what counts now isn’t an official’s political intent but his political effect.
We haven’t seen evidence Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, but he may have been inspired by the old Russian proverb: “A good man, maybe. But it’s best to shoot him.”
James Durso (@James_Durso) served as a U.S. Navy officer for 20 years specializing in logistics and security assistance, retiring with the rank of Commander. His overseas military postings were in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and he served in Iraq as a civilian transport advisor with the Coalition Provisional Authority. He was a professional staff member at the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission and the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served afloat as Supply Officer of the submarine USS SKATE (SSN 578).