Internal Probe to Embarrass Justice Department

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 3, 2000 | by Jaime Dettmer

The Justice Department is bracing itself for the release early this month of the results of a two-year inquiry by Inspector General Michael Bromwich into Justice programs tasked with training foreign police and prosecutors. Department insiders suspect the report -- there is considerable interest in its contents, too, on Capitol Hill -- will prove highly embarrassing for Attorney General Janet Reno and her senior criminal-division officials. They predict it will excoriate endemic mismanagement at the programs, citing instances of serious security breaches, sexual favoritism in hiring practices and awarding of contracts and even possibly an attempt at visa fraud by top officials.

Bromwich's investigation likely will finish the career of onetime Reno favorite Robert Bratt, the former executive officer of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program, or ICITAP, and the Office of Prosecutorial Development and Training, or OPDAT, insiders say.

Reno removed Bratt a year ago from a temporary troubleshooting post at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where he had been sent from the foreign-training programs, and placed him in a "nonjob" back at Main Justice. Department spokesmen insisted at the time that the abrupt transfer wasn't a demotion or related to the IG probe. According to Justice sources, Reno fought tooth and nail against the shift but was informed that the IG eventually would be, at the minimum, highly critical of Bratt in the investigation's report. At the height of the probe Bratt and ICITAP official Joe Lake were advised by IG investigators to retain attorneys, sources say. Now Bratt has been telling colleagues that he plans to retire next year though only in his mid-forties.

The IG probe, launched in April 1997 and first revealed by news alert!, was triggered by Justice whistle-blower Martin Andersen, whose ICITAP contract subsequently was not renewed by the department. Andersen charged that classified CIA and DEA information was not being safeguarded and that a buddy system for awarding contracts and junkets was endangering the programs. He cited Bratt, Director Janice Stromsem and officials Cary Hoover and Lake as being most egregious in their handling of classified information. His claims, supported later by several other Justice employees and even added to, prompted Bromwich to widen and deepen the inquiry. An assistant U.S. attorney from Philadelphia was brought in to aid IG investigators.

At times the inquiry took ever more bizarre turns. In trying to get to the bottom of allegations concerning the "extracurricular activities" of some senior ICITAP officials while on workrelated visits to Russia in 1996 and early 1997, IG investigators were dispatched to Moscow to question U.S. diplomats there about rumors that ICITAP officials visited gay S&M nightspots and homosexual clubs with death and torture themes. The IG also probed whether Bratt and others committed visa fraud by securing U.S. visas for two Russian women whom they claimed were translators and crucial for ICITAP's work. Neither was a translator, say Justice sources, who spoke to news alert! on condition of anonymity. What was found soon will be public.

The IG's probe also encountered burgeoning allegations that ICITAP's senior staff regularly showed classified DEA, CIA and State Department reports and cables to uncleared consultants. Consultancy contracts also have been scrutinized. Several witnesses told IG investigators that some contracts with past Justice employees breached ethics rules, including one awarded to former assistant attorney general JoAnn Harris shortly after she left the Justice Department. That contract was approved by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard, sources told the IG. Richard is blamed by some staffers at ICITAP for failing to monitor their program rigorously. Other contracts were given to people who were "unqualified, knew nothing about mining and were simply there as the playthings of senior management" says one source.

Since the launch of the investigation, Justice chiefs in the department's criminal division have been scurrying to distance themselves from ICITAP colleagues. Whether there will be any criminal referrals arising from the IG's report isn't clear yet, although several months ago Justice insiders predicted there may be a couple. If there are no prosecutions, Andersen and other critics of the programs likely will charge that Justice has engaged in "a circling of the wagons." House Majority Leader Dick Armey and members of the House and Senate Judiciary panels in the last few months have taken a close interest in the investigation. The IG report has been awaited eagerly for the best part of this year. Justice insiders say Bromwich has given strict instructions that nothing contained in the report must leak out ahead of its release. There have been claims within Justice that Bromwich has come under subtle pressure from the department's top brass to "go easy." Bromwich is staying mum, though.