‘Watchdogs’ author has no regrets about choosing civil service over the NBA

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the A BA Journal’s Lee Rawles. And today I’m here with Glenn Fine, author of the book, watchdogs Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government. Glenn, thanks so much for joining us.

Glenn Fine:

Thank you for having me.

Lee Rawles:

So you’re not just the author of a book about inspectors general, you yourself have been an inspector general. Can you give people an idea of your background?

Glenn Fine:

Sure. I was a lawyer. I am a lawyer. I graduated law school and the first job out of law school was as an assistant United States attorney in Washington dc. Terrific job, really enjoyed it, did it for three and a half years and then went to a law firm and after a while I decided I wanted to get back into public service, and so was introduced to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. At the time, I did not know what an Inspector General was. Most people don’t know what an Inspector General does. They have been called some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of. I didn’t hear of them, but when I met the Inspector General at the time, Michael Bromage, he described the work and the vision of building up the office and the impact that they had. So I signed up and became his special counsel and the head of the special investigations unit of the Department of Justice Inspectors general’s office.

And then when he left, I became the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, was nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and I served from 2000 to 2011 in that role. After that I went back to a law firm. Change is good, change is good for an individual and organization I thought I wanted to change and I did that for a few more years. But then, what can I say? I guess I’m a recidivist because I wanted to go back into government and took a job as the principal Deputy Inspector General, the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office. Then became the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense. Served in that role for four and a half years from 2016 to 2020.

Lee Rawles:

So as you said, there are plenty of people, maybe the majority of people who don’t know what an Inspector General is or does, and the office officially is a little newer than I had understood before reading your book. So they are watchdogs. Can you talk about what a Federal Inspector General does and how we started having them essentially in the United States?

Glenn Fine:

Sure. So there have been military inspectors general for a long time, and in fact, one was instrumental to the birth of our country. There was one who was the Inspector General of the Continental Army, Baron Steuben, and he met the troops at Valley Forge who were disorganized and on the verge of collapse. He drilled the troops and still discipline and they left us a much more effective fighting force. And there have been an Inspector General in the Army and then in the Navy Marines Air Force since their creation. But civilian inspectors general is a much more recent phenomenon. It started in 1978 as a result of the Inspector General Act, which was one of series of post-Watergate government reforms including civil service reform, financial disclosure reform, and then the Inspector General Act was passed over the opposition by the way of the administration at the time,

Lee Rawles:

Which was Jimmy Carter. Correct.

Glenn Fine:

Jimmy Carter opposed it saying that we didn’t need inspectors general, that we already had the government accountability office, that it would just hamper management. But he eventually signed the bill that Congress passed almost unanimously because he had run on a good government pledge later on the 40th anniversary of the IG Act. As a matter of fact, he said that that was one of his biggest mistakes to oppose inspectors general. And he then recognized the value of inspectors general in 1978. They created inspectors general in 12 cabinet agencies, some opposed it. For example, the Department of Justice for example said, we don’t need an Inspector General, we already have an internal oversight body and we’re a department of lawyers. Well, eventually that opposition was overcome. Same with the Department of Defense. So now there is an Inspector General in virtually every agency, both big and small.

There are 74 in total according to the IG Act. They’re nonpartisan, they’re independent. They report both to the head of the agency in Congress and their mission is to detect and deter waste, fraud and abuse and promote the economy. Efficiency, effectiveness, integrity of the agency. It’s an unusual position because you are independent and you decide what to audit, what to evaluate, what to investigate, and you do that independently from the agency head and Congress, but you report to both of them, which has been analogized to akin to straddling a barbed wire fence. It’s not easy, but it’s an important role and has a consequential role as well.

Lee Rawles:

One thing I found striking that you say an inspector general has to be really embedded in their agency, know the people know what’s going on and yet maintain that independence. You hear about regulatory capture where the watchdog just becomes a little too friendly with the people that they’re supposed to be overseeing and then misconduct might go past. So it has to be a little bit of a balancing act. Can you talk about how, for example, when you were at the Department of Justice, you were able to handle that?

Glenn Fine:

Yes, you’re right, you’re part of the agency or within the agency, but you are not exactly the same as other people in the agency. You have to maintain a professional distance, but you don’t want to be isolated. You want to be communicating with the agency head but not too close to the agency head. So I worked with as the Inspector General of the Department of Justice five Attorneys General, and that is the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense for Secretaries of Defense. And even when they came into office, didn’t always understand the independence and the need for independence for an inspector general. So I would brief them about the role and about the independence and how we would decide what to audit, what to evaluate and what to investigate. And I’ll never forget the reaction of one of them. It his first week in office when I had the meeting, he said, oh, wait a minute, Glenn, wait a minute.

So you’re telling me, he said that I can order around everyone else in this building the main justice building and tell them what to do, what to investigate, what to evaluate, but I can’t tell you what to do. And I said to him, yes, that is what I’m telling you. That’s what the Inspector General Act requires. He stared at me intently and then he said, okay, if that’s what the law is, we followed the law around here and he did and as did the others. But you are sometimes in an awkward position. You are called upon to help improve the agency to communicate with them. But sometimes you’re asked to investigate high level government officials including the head of the agency. So I’ll tell you another story. When I was the acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense, I would see the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Millie in the halls of the Pentagon.

And he was a strong supporter of igs and a strong leader. And he would say to me when he’d see me, hi Glenn, how are you? And I would say, fine. And then he would say, Hey Glenn, am I under investigation yet? And I would say to him, not yet, but the day’s not over. And he would laugh and I would laugh, but it shows that the somewhat different relationship you have with agency leaders because you work with them, but you could be investigating them. So you have to maintain a professional distance and independence at all times.

Lee Rawles:

And now let’s get into actual enforcement mechanisms. What happens? So the inspectors general and their staff do these investigations, create reports, make recommendations, deliver them to Congress and deliver to them to the agency. Then what powers do inspectors general have because they seem to have a lot of leeway when it comes to show me these papers, show me the files, show me the data and show me what the agency has been doing. But once they deliver their report and their recommendations, what next?

Glenn Fine:

Right. So on the audit and evaluation side, inspectors general do the audits and evaluations and not only find problems but make recommendations for improvements. And an inspector General can’t force management to take action. The Inspector General is not management, but management does have to respond to the recommendations as to whether they agree or disagree. Most of the time they either agree or propose something that will reach the intent of the recommendation in a slightly different way. And it’s up to the Inspector General then to follow up to ensure that management actually takes the action and the power that the Inspector General has is the power of sunshine, a spotlight to keep a spotlight on the problem until management actually implements the recommendations. Another lever is when Congress gets involved, because we do make our reports to Congress, sometimes Congress holds hearings on those reports and the sense of urgency of management to implement the recommendations when a hearing is scheduled ratchets up dramatically.

So it’s important for the Inspector General to be tenacious to do follow-ups. We did follow-up reviews regularly to make sure management had actually implemented the recommendations. When I was the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense, I decided to put together a compendium of all the open recommendations that we had issued that management had said they would implement, that were still open now, some of them were new and you would’ve expected them to remain open, but some of them were old. We found there were 1,298 open recommendations and all but 50 of them management had agreed to. So we put together this compendium, we gave it to the Secretary of Defense, secretary James, Matt at the time, and he was not pleased and he told his senior leaders, the heads of the Army and the Air Force, Navy, Marines, and the civilian agencies, we need to address these IG recommendations. And when the head of the agency, the Secretary of Defense does, that action trickles down. So ultimately our role is to make recommendations and provide a spotlight on them and keep at it until they are implemented.

Lee Rawles:

So as an attorney and particularly a government attorney, you are already well acquainted with the fact that we rely a lot on norms for governance and for our government to function and work. And it occurs to me that, as you say, the Inspector General, the inspector’s general can make these recommendations, but it’s a sunshine and it relies on the people in charge to then decide to move away from corruption, correct misconduct, all of these matters. And there’s been a big disruption of norms in our government within the past decade, I would say. Could you talk about how you left government and the slow Friday night massacre of the inspectors general, because a lot has happened since then. People may need a little refresher on what went down.

Glenn Fine:

Right. So inspectors general are nonpartisan. According to Inspector General Act. They have to be selected for their nonpartisan qualifications. And the norm was that inspectors general remain. When the administrations change, other presidential appointees submit the resignations, but inspectors general do not. So that’s why, for example, I was nominated and confirmed in the Clinton administration, but I remained as the Justice Department IG in both terms of the Bush administration and also in the Obama administration. Same at the Department of Defense. I was the Acting Inspector General under President Obama remained under President Trump. So that is the norm, but ultimately the President can replace an inspector general and has to only give the reasons why to both houses of Congress and wait 30 days. It hasn’t happened in the past. Well under President Trump, we all remember covid occurred, it hit the country very hard and Congress appropriated trillions of dollars in covid relief funding, but also created a committee of inspectors general to oversee the money to deter waste, fraud and abuse in that money and created the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Committee of igs to do that.

It also required one IG to be the head of that committee. I drew the short straw, my fellow IG selected me to chair the committee as well as continue to be the acting D-O-D-I-G. And within five days of my being announced as the head of that committee, president Trump who had said about the Covid relief funding, I will be the oversight. He had famously said, he replaced me as the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense, and therefore I could not be on the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. I could not chair it. And my career as the acting Inspector General came to a sudden halt. It was not illegal, but it was the norm that had happened in the past, but I was not the only one at the time. He replaced or denounced five inspectors general in a very short period of time, including the intelligence community ig, who had brought the Ukraine whistleblower matter to Congress. He fired the State Department ig, he replaced the transportation ig, he replaced me and he also denounced and nominated someone to replace the Health and Human Services ig. So that was called by one article, the Slow Motion Friday Night Massacre of igs because they were normally announced late on a Friday night and it did violate the norm of igs being nonpartisan and remaining in office unless there was some serious misconduct that they had participated in.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Glenn Fine about watchdogs inspectors general and the Battle for Honest and Accountable government. Welcome back to this episode of the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with Glenn Fine. So Glenn, we have thrown a lot of fairly technical information at our listeners, and I want to assure them that although you do provide this information in the book, and it was incredibly educational, I learned a lot. It’s not dower, it’s not dry. And you share a lot about your personal experiences. And one of those that I think we have to talk about is your last Harvard basketball game in December of 1978 in which the characters who later appear in Goodfellas were involved. You got to share this.

Glenn Fine:

Yes. So most people don’t believe I played basketball when they meet me. I’m five foot nine inches tall. When I would meet the generals and admirals and the Department of Defense, they were very skeptical of my basketball career. And there is an amazing story related to that. It may have been one of the reasons why I decided to pursue a career fighting corruption. It was 1978. I was the co-captain of the Harvard basketball team. The biggest game of the season that year was against Boston College and the Boston Garden highly rated team. The only problem for me was it was the same day that I had the final interview for a Rhode scholarship. I had applied to be a Rhode Scholar and the interview for the Rhode Scholarship was in Baltimore and the game was in Boston. So I didn’t know what I was going to do.

I wanted to compete for the Rhode Scholarship, but I felt an obligation to my teammates. So alum who was a big supporter of Harvard basketball said he had a solution and his solution was to send down a private plane to pick me up at the Baltimore airport before the selections for the Rhode Scholarship was made. But after my interview was over, fly me to the Boston Garden, which it did, I changed into my uniform on the plane. I was met on the tarmac by a state police car that whisked me to the Boston Guard, got me to the game just in time. I had my best game ever in my entire college career. Boston College was favored by 12, but it was a close game all the way. I had 19 points, 14 assists and eight steals. That’s a lot of steals, more than I ever had back and forth. And in the end, Boston College pulled out a win at the end by three points. Then I remembered, oh my goodness, I have to CallRail back to Baltimore to find out about the Rhode Scholarship. So in my uniform, I went to a payphone on the concourse of the Boston Garden, called back to Baltimore, asked about the results, and they said to me, congratulations Mr. Fine, you’re a Rhode Scholar. So what a

Lee Rawles:

A day, Glen. What a day.

Glenn Fine:

Yeah, exactly what a day. There was only one problem. Turned out that the game was fixed. Mafia mobsters had bribed the Boston College players to do what they CallRail shaving points meaning to win by less than the point spread so that the mobsters could bet on the opposing team, in this case Harvard and win a big payout. And the first time they did it was the Harvard Boston College game in the Boston Garden. And the story broke and Sports Illustrated. About a year later, a friend of mine sent me the article and wrote on the top, Hey Glenn, I guess you played your best game when the other team was in the tank. And in fact, it wasn’t just any old mobsters. If you’ve seen the movie Goodfellows, it was the two main characters in the movie Goodfellows who bribed the Boston College players. Henry Hill played by Ray Liotta and Jimmy Burke played by Robert De Niro.

And in the movie for example, there’s a scene which shows that mobsters in a bar and there’s a basketball game in the background on the TV of theBar. And they said, oh, is that the game? We’re shaving points up in Boston. And one of the mobsters said, yes, don’t worry, it’s a lock. And then the next scene, they strangled a mob colleague. So it was amazing that that game was involved with the movie Goodfellows and the Mob. And in fact, later on when I was nominated to be the Inspector General, the Department of Justice, a senator, Senator Herb Cole from Wisconsin went on the floor of the Senate and gave a speech to support my nomination. And he said that maybe the reason that Glenn wanted to devote a career to fighting corruption and weeding out corruption in the Department of Justice was because he was involved in the infamous Boston College Point Shaving scandal. Maybe that’s right. I don’t know for sure, but it might’ve had an impact.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and you also have another basketball factoid about yourself. One day you open the paper and

Glenn Fine:

I’m drafted by the NBA. So yes, I was ready to go to Oxford as a Rhode Scholar. It was a summer, I was working in Boston. I’m writing the subway to work. The night before was the NBA draft. And so I’m reading the paper and it’s an article about the draft. And in big letters at the top it said who the number one draft choice that year was Magic John. And so I’m reading down and I’m riding the subway and I’m reading round after round. Back then they had 10 rounds. Now they only have two rounds, but back then they had 10 rounds. And finally I get to the 10th round at the very bottom of the article in Tiny Print. There it was. There was my name Glenn Fine Harvard, drafted by the San Antonio Spurs. I couldn’t believe it. It was so exciting.

I missed my subway stop. I went to work. I showed it to everybody. They were all excited. My friends called me. We speculated why I was drafted by the San Antonio Spurs. One of them said he thought he knew why I was drafted by the Spurs. I said, why do you think that was? And he said, well, they already have one of the all time leaders leading scores in the NBAA Gyi by the name of George Gervin, whose nickname was the Iceman. My friend said, I think they drafted you so they could also have the ice cube. I ended up not going to try out for the Spurs. I thought my career as a lawyer was a much better bet than making it as a five foot nine point guard from Harvard. So I don’t regret that I chose a career as a lawyer. And to be honest, my chances of making it were slim and none.

Lee Rawles:

No, no, it was a loss to the NBA Hall of Fame.

Glenn Fine:

I don’t know about that. But I will say whenever I met Admirals and generals, they would say, they go over, they just gloss over everything else on my resume and then say, were you really drafted by the NBA by the San Antonio Spurs? I got that question a lot. So eventually I started answering the question, yes, I was drafted by the San Antonio Spurs in the 1979 draft. In the 10th round. I’m five foot nine inches tall. Before I started this job as the Inspector General, I was six foot nine inches tall.

Lee Rawles:

You’ve worn me down, folks. You You’ve

Glenn Fine:

Wor me down. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Lee Rawles:

Well, again, let’s get into some of the details of various investigations that you did because I think it’ll help illustrate for people. Okay, so this is what an Inspector general does, but what are some outcomes? The very first one that you bring up in the book involves a whistleblower at the FBI laboratory. Now I have a lot of attorneys in the audience and many of those in both prosecution and defense of criminal cases may rely pretty heavily on evidence that passes through the FBI laboratory or other criminal processing labs. So could you take us through what the whistleblower told you and how that inspection was carried out?

Glenn Fine:

So when I first got to the Inspector General’s office under the Inspector General Michael Bromwich, a whistleblower in the FBI lab, A FBI laboratory analyst had made whistle blowing complaints that the lab was engaging in faulty forensic science. There was contamination in the lab, the testimony wasn’t accurate. A whole series of complaints that implicated some of the most important cases that the FBI laboratory was handling at the time, including the OJ Simpson trial and the trial and the Oklahoma City bombing case. So the Inspector General had to decide what to do with this whistleblower complaint. He asked me and another investigator to go interview the whistleblower, which we did, and we found him to be credible, although we couldn’t corroborate all that he said. But we thought that there needed to be an investigation of this, an evaluation of his complaints. So Inspector General Bromwich decided to do that.

He opened a full review of the Atory FBI laboratory and the faulty scientific practices that the analyst had alleged. He put together almost a dream team of outside scientists and prosecutors who were detailed to the igs office to do an exhaustive investigation and determined that there was some truth to what the analysts had alleged, that there were faulty practices, that the laboratory which was not accredited needed to improve its practices, that some of the testimony was not completely supported by the evidence. Not all the whistleblowers allegations were substantiated, but many were. And as a result, the team of investigators and scientists made significant recommendations to the FBI laboratory to improve its practices, including attain accreditation and to have an outside person lead the laboratory, which is what happened. And as a result of this very exhaustive investigation, the laboratory did change its practices and improved the science behind the laboratory analysis, which shows the impact that an IG can have by exposing problems and exposing weaknesses in agency practices.

Lee Rawles:

And one thing I really like about this anecdote is it both shows the importance of whistleblowers within the government to report things to the ig, but also the importance of actual investigators following up on what a whistleblower says, A whistleblower does not need to be a perfect employee, a perfect person, and an infallible witness to be an important piece. But you needed to go through and actually evaluate everything that this person was reporting.

Glenn Fine:

Exactly. Some of the most important whistleblowers either come with baggage or don’t understand the full story or exaggerate or have a seed of truth in what they say, which is why the Inspector General has to look at everyone carefully, every whistleblower complaint carefully to separate the wheat from the chaff to corroborate what the whistleblowers is saying to don’t necessarily take it on face value, but to take it seriously. Because some of the most important cases that an IG does is a result of whistleblower disclosures often by whistleblowers who sometimes have baggage or maybe an ax to grind, but also know that there’s something wrong going on and come forward with it. So that is why it’s incumbent upon the igs to take all the complaints seriously and give them all the attention that they deserve.

Lee Rawles:

So I think it’s somewhat natural that we concentrate a little bit more on your work for the Department of Justice because many of my listeners are going to be most interested and concerned about what the lawyers are up to, what the Justice Department is up to, but it’s not necessarily straightforward within the Department of Justice and igs role. There are some things that over time you mentioned that when in 1978 that Inspector General Act, it didn’t apply to the Department of Justice. So could you describe a little bit what makes the Department of Justice’s current IG system different perhaps than some other agencies

Glenn Fine:

In the Department of Justice? The Inspector General does not have full authority throughout the entire Department of Justice. Unlike in every other federal agency where the IG does have unlimited authority, there is an entity within the Department of Justice called the Office of Professional Responsibility, which since the creation of the IGS for the Department of Justice has retained authority to investigate attorney’s conduct in the exercise of their legal duty, meaning attorney’s conduct when litigating, investigating or providing legal advice that is within the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility. And the IG cannot investigate that unless granted permission to do that. That is unique. Every other IG has authority throughout the entire department, including over attorneys in their department. I argue as well as other igs, the current ig former igs that the Department of Justice IG should have full authority within the Department of Justice.

They are independent, they’re nonpartisan, they’re more transparent than the Office of Professional Responsibility. They don’t report to the Attorney General in the same way. So they have less of a conflict. And I believe that they have the ability and this experience and the skill to handle those kinds of cases as we have shown over the years, both in my tenure and in the tenure after I left, that igs can and should have full authority within the Department of Justice. We argue for that, and it has not happened yet, but I still think it’s an important reform that would improve both the credibility and the oversight within the Department of Justice.

Lee Rawles:

There also used to be limits and perhaps there still are limits to your ability to investigate the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I very much enjoyed reading about your investigation of a spy case. Could you talk about Robert Hansen and what the FBI’s initial story was and what you found after your investigation?

Glenn Fine:

Sure. So Robert Hansen was the most damaging spy in FBI history. He spied from within the FBI for the Russians and the Soviets for over two decades. He handed over some of our most important intelligence secrets, nuclear secrets, military assets, sensitive technologies, as well as the identity of assets who were spying for us from within the Russia and the Soviet Union for us. And as a result of his disclosures, several were executed. Eventually he was uncovered after two decades in 2001. When that happened, everybody asked, well, how could he evade detection for so long? The FBI responded. Well, he was an counterintelligence analyst, so he used his spycraft and he was very clever and his wily nature and expertise allowed him to evade detection.

Lee Rawles:

He was just a super spy Glenn.

Glenn Fine:

Well, that’s what they said. And then the United States Senate and the Attorney General asked my office and asked me to investigate that and how he was able to evade detection in the internal security practices at the FBI. And what we determined was that the FBI’s explanation, nothing could have been further from the truth. He was a mediocre agent who exhibited all sorts of red flags that the FBI ignored the FBI, extremely weak internal security practices that relied solely on trust, trust that FBI agents would not be spies. Trust is a bad internal security practice. Hanson did all sorts of things that should have raised suspicion such as depositing huge amounts of money in a bank account, a block from the FBI, using the FBI phones to contact the Soviets, giving information classified to people within the government who did not have a need to know hacking into the FBI’s computer systems to look at classified information.

And when he was caught, he said, well, I was doing this to show how weak the internal security system was in the computers. And the FBIB blindly accepted that he was a difficult person. Instead of dealing with him, they sent him off to the State Department on a detail where nobody supervised him. He was a person that should have aroused the suspicion and those red flags should have been followed up on, but they weren’t. And so we made recommendations to the FBI to improve their internal security practices. For example, he had never been given a polygraph, he had never been required to do a financial disclosure form. He had only been given one perfunctory and very perfunctory background investigation in 20 years. They needed to improve their internal security practices and we made a series of recommendations. The FBI initially resisted some of them, they agreed to many of them but resisted some. There was a hearing before Congress at which I testified at and eventually the FBI agreed to implement those recommendations. So in my opinion, that’s an example of the value of an independent IG as opposed to just relying on the agency to police themselves, the agency in this case, the FBI was hesitant to admit embarrassing mistakes and they wanted to justify the conduct as opposed to having an outside objective look very hard, hard eyed, look at what went wrong here to help make improvements. And that’s what happened in the Hanson case.

Lee Rawles:

And listeners who pick up watchdogs are going to get to read about a lot more of your investigations, including after September 11th, looking into intelligence failures, looking at the treatment of detainees, the Patriot Act, warrantless wire tapping when C moved to the Department of Defense, the Fat Leonard Scandal and a lot of overseas work and looking into what happened in Afghanistan. So much awaits you if you pick up watchdogs, but that’ll just have to be a teaser. We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Glenn. Fine.

Welcome back to the Modern Law Library where we are discussing watchdogs Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government by Glenn. Fine. So Glenn, it seems incredibly appropriate as a former inspector general that the last section of your book deals with recommendations and there are a number of these recommendations where you feel like inspectors general could be more useful, their power strengthen, their misconduct of inspectors general guarded against. But the one that I think is going to be really of the most interest to my listeners right now is your recommendation about the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. And just to alert everyone, you and I are speaking on October 10th. Listeners, I think you’ll be hearing this in November. There will be an election. Neither of us know anything about the outcome, but we are speaking today about what you think should be done when it comes to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary who at the moment do not have an Inspector General

Glenn Fine:

Well, yes, you’re right. The last section of the book does talk about 12 recommendations to support, protect, and extend the role of inspectors general to protect them when they’re doing their jobs well. To also have a better answer to the question who’s watching the watchdog? So if an Inspector General is not up to the job, that we have a better system for removing them. But you’re right that one of the most provocative, perhaps the most provocative recommendation is that there needs to be an inspector general for the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Confidence in the Supreme Court is at an all time low. I believe it’s partly because of controversy about the decisions they’ve reached, but also because of unaddressed allegations of ethical misconduct. We rely on the Supreme Court justices alone to say nothing to see here or to provide their explanations and selected media outlets.

I believe an Inspector General would be useful to establish the facts of what happened and to report on the facts so that we’re not disputing them in a partisan way. In addition, the federal judiciary is a huge operation. It has an $8 billion budget. It has 30,000 employees. It has more than 2000 judges in any organization of that size. There is going to be waste abuse and some misconduct. And we need a better system to investigate, to evaluate and to actually recommend improvements before problems happen. I believe an Inspector general would be useful and that the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary would benefit from one. So I recommend that there be one. There’s different ways that it could happen. Congress could legislate, although there is some who say that that would be a violation of the separations of power, I don’t think it would, but who would decide that? The Supreme Court basically. So I think the ideal solution, the preferred solution is for the Supreme Court and the judiciary itself to establish one, perhaps reporting to the Chief Justice or the head of the administrative office of United States Courts and have that inspector General be within the judiciary, maintain the independence of the judiciary, but improve the operations of the judiciary. I think one is urgently needed.

Lee Rawles:

And as you say, when you’re outlining this recommendation in your book, just like the other inspectors general, you could make, they would not be binding on the court. The court still would have the power to decide whether or not they saw this as an issue or needed to address something. No, I thought it was very interesting.

Glenn Fine:

Yes, and I mean that’s a very important point. The IG could not impose any changes. It just makes recommendations. And the IG would have nothing to do with judicial decision making that should not be the role of the Inspector General, but on administrative issues, on ethical issues, on process issues, an IG could help improve the work and the operations of the judiciary and the Supreme Court and in my view, improve trust in the judiciary.

Lee Rawles:

And when we talk about public confidence and public trust, so much about the United States relies on a public confidence in the government, and you through your work, have tried to make sure that the people who we trust to make these decisions are doing so in the country’s best interest and not their own pecuniary interest and that there’s not waste, et cetera. But over your career, how have you watched public sentiment change? And if we’re worried about the direction of public sentiment, what are things that we can and should be doing to restore it?

Glenn Fine:

So I think you’re right. I think we are living in an even more polarized time where there is more tension and polarization and retreating to different sides and less compromise. On the other hand, I think the Inspector General bridges that gap and is nonpartisan and is the middle and does speak the objective truth and speaks truth to power. I think inspectors general are one of the critical checks and balances in our government and an important strength of our democracy. But I think we need to support them, protect them, extend their role. And I think that’s the message of my book. I think that the public has a right to know how their government operates. That’s one of the critical missions of an inspector general to make transparent how government is spending taxpayer dollars. But also, I wrote the book to let citizens and others know that there is this critical check and balance within government to make government better, to improve its practices, to keep it honest and accountable. Is it perfect? No, I believe in what Harry Truman said, which is no government is perfect, but one of the chief virtues of a democracy is that its defects are visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected. That’s what an IG does, and I think we need to support them and expose more people to their critically important role.

Lee Rawles:

So it’s obvious from your own career that you heard the siren song of this mission, and even after you left for private practice, they pulled you back in. You now talk to law students at Georgetown and other places, and for our younger listeners or even maybe people who are attorneys but are thinking of a change in their profession who hear this and they’re intrigued, they say, interesting. So if I am now considering going to work for an inspector general, what are some of the characteristics that you think make a good inspector general or a good member of the team?

Glenn Fine:

Well, I think you have to be independent. You’re not going to be the most popular person in government. I know I wasn’t the most popular person in the halls of the Justice Department or the Pentagon Food Court. Sometimes you’re viewed as a skunk at the picnic, but you have an incredibly important impact on government. And so I think it has tremendous meaning and satisfaction. You are involved in the issues of the day. What you do helps improve the government. You are viewed as a nonpartisan truth teller, and so you have to be both objective, tenacious, and independent. So I think that’s critically important. I also believe that you can get tremendous satisfaction out of it. And there are plenty of opportunities in the Inspector general community. There are basically 15,000 employees in inspectors general’s offices throughout the federal government, and there’s about that number on the state and local level.

So you’re right, I do speak to students. I am an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School where I teach a course on government accountability. I have taught in the past and will teach again this winter quarter at Stanford Law School. Same thing. I try to encourage students to think about public service either as a career, which is can be tremendously satisfying, or as a stint at some point during their career in public service. You may not get the same income that you get in the private sector, but you get a lot of psychic satisfaction of trying to do the right thing at all times and trying to improve the operations of our government.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Glen, thank you so much for coming on this episode of the Modern Law Library to talk about watchdogs. If people want to pick up the book or maybe learn a little bit more about you, is there someplace they could go?

Glenn Fine:

Well, the University of Virginia Press, which is the publisher of my book, has a website about the book under watchdogs in my name. And obviously you can buy it on Amazon or hopefully in your local bookstore. But thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the important role of inspectors general

Lee Rawles:

And thank you to you, my listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate review and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. And if you have a book that you’d like me to discuss on an upcoming episode, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com.