Under the Radar Blog Archives Select Date… August, 2020 July, 2020 June, 2020 May, 2020 April, 2020 March, 2020 February, 2020 January, 2020 December, 2019 November, 2019 October, 2019 September, 2019

The Office of Inspector General report doesn’t criticize Attorney General William Barr directly, but says investigators found little evidence of a thorough legal review of the secretive program he created at its outset. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images Watchdog report critiques DEA program Barr approved 27 years ago

It’s been just six weeks since Attorney General William Barr was sworn in, but the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General has already issued a report slamming a program Barr created.

On Thursday, the department's main in-house watchdog publicly released a long-awaited review of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s use of bulk collection of telephone-call data — a practice similar to the National Security Agency snooping program revealed in 2013 by contractor Edward Snowden.

Mentioned in passing in the 144-page report and again in a timeline at the end of the document is the identity of the official who approved creation of the DEA’s first bulk-collection program back in January 1992: the attorney general at the time, Barr.

The OIG report doesn’t criticize Barr directly, but says investigators found little evidence of a thorough legal review of the secretive program at its outset. Most of the report’s focus is on how the program evolved and expanded over time, with other law enforcement agencies being approved in 2006 to use the telephone call metadata in connection with cases having little or nothing to do with drugs.

“There were significant legal issues raised by the DEA's use of ‘exploratory subpoenas’ that warranted a careful examination, and … this did not occur,” the report says.

The bulk-collection program was halted by the Obama Administration in 2013 following the Snowden revelations. The OIG report says a similar effort to identify telephone calls related to international drug trafficking is now conducted by DEA by querying data stored by private companies, rather than by putting large sets of data in government databases.

Curiously, just last Friday — hours before receiving Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report — Barr traveled to a DEA office near Dulles Airport that houses the unit which handled the telephone data collection: the Special Operations Division. The briefing was closed to reporters, but the DEA did tweet out a picture of Barr flanked by DEA Administrator Uttam Dhillon and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said there was no link between Barr’s visit and the OIG report issued Thursday. Barr also had no immediate comment on the review.

In letters accompanying the report, officials at the Justice Department and the DEA said they agreed with the OIG’s recommendations. But, in keeping with the secrecy surrounding the underlying program, the full text of ten of the watchdog’s 16 proposals were blacked out in the report released to the public.

The inspector general’s office said the deletions were made at the request of the DEA and “another government entity” not further identified. “The OIG continues to believe that some redacted material is not [law enforcement sensitive], but defers to the judgment of DEA and the other government entity,” a note accompanying the report says.

Some of the secrecy in the report is puzzling. For example, an iteration of the snooping program called “Hemisphere” has been widely discussed in press reports and publicly confirmed and detailed by DEA through a Freedom of Information Act suit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Yet, that term appears nowhere in the public version of the report.

The DEA has long sought to keep a tight lid on its bulk-collection efforts, encouraging the use of a technique called “parallel construction” to prevent disclosure of the programs by omitting mention of them in court documents and instead relying on “parallel” observations that could plausibly have been made without the bulk-collection efforts.

The report warns that the efforts to keep DEA’s bulk-collection programs secret could potentially interfere with prosecutors’ duties to disclose to defendants evidence that could be helpful to their defense.

The report also faults the DEA for failing to cooperate with the OIG investigation, although the watchdog said the drug-fighting agency eventually became more responsive.

“For a substantial period after we initiated this review, the DEA took many actions that hindered the OIG's access to information available to it that the OIG was plainly authorized to obtain under the Inspector General Act,” the report says. “These actions included failing to produce or delaying the production of relevant and responsive materials without any compelling or sufficient basis.”

In another indication of the longevity of the DEA program, Inspector General Michael Horowitz did not take part in the review released Thursday because he was a senior official in Justice’s Criminal Division in the late 1990s and early 2000s when a version of the program was in operation.