Glenn A. Fine

Glenn A. Fine
Inspector General of the
United States Department of Defense
Acting
Assumed office
January 14, 2016
Inspector General of the
United States Department of Justice
In office
December 2000 – January 2011
Preceded by Michael R. Bromwich
Succeeded by Michael E. Horowitz
Personal details
Spouse(s) Beth Heifetz

Glenn Alan Fine is the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense. He has served in that position since January 2016. He joined the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General in June 2015 and has received significant criticism since then from good government groups and the Government Accountability Office as well as Members of Congress for not protecting DoD whistleblowers from reprisal.[1][2]

Fine previously served as the Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) from 2000 until January 2011. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 15, 2000. Prior to his appointment as the DOJ Inspector General, Fine served as Special Counsel to the DOJ Inspector General from January 1995 until 1996, when he was made Director of the OIG's Special Investigations and Review Unit.[3]

Immediately prior to joining the OIG office at the Department of Justice, Fine had been in a private law practice in Washington, D.C. Before entering private practice, Fine served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Washington, D.C. United States Attorney's Office from 1986 to 1989. In those three years, he prosecuted more than 35 criminal jury trials and handled numerous grand jury investigations.[3]

Personal life

Fine's father was an antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department for 28 years.[4]

In September 1993, Fine married Beth Heifetz, a former law clerk to United States Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. The wedding was jointly officiated at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC by Justice Blackmun and Rabbi Howard Gorin.[5] They have two children and she is currently a partner at Jones Day, where she heads their Issues and Appeals Practices.

Education

Fine attended Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. In 1979, he graduated with an A.B. degree in economics from Harvard College, magna cum laude. He was co-captain of the Harvard varsity basketball team.

Though only 5'9", he was a 10th-round draft pick by the San Antonio Spurs, an NBA basketball team, in 1979. Instead, he accepted a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.[3][4] Fine earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at Oxford. He received his JD from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 1985.[3]

Inspector General

Fine was appointed Inspector General of the Department of Justice by President Bill Clinton in 2000. The office is expected to be non-partisan and The New York Times even claimed that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III accepted his work investigating the Bureau with "gritted-teeth public gratitude."[4]

You're part of the department, but you’re also independent... You have to recognize that you’re not going to be popular. You have to be as fair and aggressive as you can and just accept that you’re not going to please everyone.

— Glenn A. Fine[4]

However, one truth teller, who was backed in his case by the FBI and who later went on to become the first national security whistleblower to receive the "Public Servant Award" of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for his disclosures while Fine served as Director of the OIG's Special Investigations and Review Unit, told Congress:

The IG's office could have protected me. It did not. In the summer of 1997, two of its investigators used the same phrase at different times: 'Do what you need to do to save yourself.' When the IG later found I had gone to Congress and the press to do just that, they started warning colleagues who had remained friends to stay away from me. (A senior ICITAP manager who had remained my friend, a person of normally unflappable and sunny disposition, said the pressure brought to bear was so blatant that he ended up telling the investigators to go [expletive deleted] themselves. According to this friend, one senior investigator even suggested I had engaged in whistleblowing for the money. There was no potential money to be made. Federal Whistleblowers are limited to actual, not punitive, damages.)"

As Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde noted in his opening statement:

The 415-page report is troubling. Senior managers at the Department of Justice, the folks who wear the white hats, engaged in potentially criminal misconduct and serious mismanagement, and other senior managers paid no attention to the problems. According to this report, security violations, visa fraud, financial mismanagement, abuse of the travel rules and regulations for self-aggrandizement, preselection and favoritism for some employees, were the norm in the Criminal Division's international criminal investigative training assistance program and Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training.

The OIG report does a fine job laying out the facts. However, it does not answer the basic questions that will help fix the long-standing problems at ICITAP. ... The report lays out the facts, but does not answer those essential questions and others that we will seek answers to today.

I want to say a word about the whistleblowers who had the courage to come forward and tell the Inspector General what they knew. But for their courage, the Inspector General would not have uncovered the problems that we will review today. I believe they deserve our thanks. I can tell you that they felt intimidated and scared over the last several years. A couple of the whistleblowers have cases pending before the Office of Special Counsel. I trust the Department will do the right thing with regard to the whistleblowers whose allegations have been largely substantiated by the Office of Inspector General.[6]

In his own prepared statement before the Committee, Fine fulsomely claimed credit for the Inspector General's uncovering gross wrongdoing while offering the barest mention of key whistleblower contributions, which included--according to the IG's own words--"security problems we found were pervasive, recurrent and persistent" and even extending into Department of Justice programs in proto-Putin Russia.[7][8]

Retirement as DOJ IG

Fine resigned as the DOJ Inspector General in February 2011. He joined Dechert as a partner in the White Collar & Securities Litigation Practice on September 6, 2011.[9] Shortly after he announced his retirement, the New York Times praised Fine's tenure as the DOJ Inspector General:

The Department of Justice's inspector general, Glenn Fine, stepped down on Friday after a decade of pushing to clean up and depoliticize a hyperpoliticized department. He will be missed. Mr. Fine's best-known efforts came in 2008 when he documented the George W. Bush administration's politically driven firings of four United States attorneys and its politically driven hirings (breaking the civil service law) of scores of civil servants at the Civil Rights Division. Last year, he continued to detail the F.B.I.'s widespread misuse since 2001 of 'exigent letters'... President Obama should appoint a vigilant successor to Mr. Fine, one who will continue to expose the department's shortcomings and their costs.[9]

Other newspapers also praised his tenure as the DOJ IG. The Washington Post wrote, "The job of Inspector General is often thankless one, requiring the ability to make unflinching and crucial assessments that are not always well received by colleagues. The Justice Department employed one of the best during the past decade in the person of Glenn A. Fine, who recently stepped down. Mr. Fine was instrumental in unearthing problems and identifying solutions in the mammoth agency since joining the IG's office in the mid-1990s. He took over the reins in 2000 and led investigations into all facets of the department's operations".[10] A segment on NPR praised Fine as "a model IG."[11]

Return to public service

In June 2015, Fine returned to Public Service and accepted a position as the Principal Deputy Inspector General of the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DOD OIG). The DOD OIG has over 1500 employees and is responsible for providing oversight over the entire Department of Defense.[1]

On January 10, 2016, Fine became the Acting Inspector General for the DOD.[12] In October 2017 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report criticizing the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General’s (DOD OIG) process for investigating whistleblower-retaliation complaints brought by DOD civilian and contractor employees. The GAO report found that DOD OIG routinely missed timeliness targets and often failed to follow its own internal processes for ensuring the independence and thoroughness of its investigations. GAO also identified deficiencies in DOD OIG’s processes for protecting the integrity of its investigations. Approximately 29% of the DOD OIG staff members interviewed by GAO “reported observing acts they perceived to demonstrate bias on the part of one or more whistleblower reprisal unit staff or management.” GAO found that DOD OIG could not adequately monitor its internal recusal processes—designed to eliminate bias from its investigations—because it failed to document recusals and conflicts of interests.The report was published at the request of several members of Congress from both parties, including Senators Chuck Grassley, Claire McCaskill, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Mark Warner, as well as Congressmen Trey Gowdy and Elijah Cummings. To conduct the study, GAO analyzed data on DOD OIG’s cases from 2013 to 2015, reviewed a random sample of 178 investigations closed by DOD OIG in 2015, and conducted interviews with relevant officials.

References

  1. 1 2 WHISTLEBLOWER PROTECTION: Opportunities Exist for DOD to Improve the Timeliness and Quality of Civilian and Contractor Reprisal Investigations, September 29, 2017, U.S. Government Accountability Office. Accessed September 25, 2018.
  2. ↑ Internal Misconduct Regarding Military Whistleblower Reprisal Investigations, March 8, 2016, Project On Government Oversight. Accessed September 25, 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Glenn Fine (United States Department of Justice)".
  4. 1 2 3 4 Glare of Publicity Finds an Inspector General, March 26, 2007, New York Times. Accessed September 7, 2007.
  5. ↑ "WEDDINGS; Beth Heifetz and Glenn A. Fine". New York Times. September 6, 2003.
  6. ↑ {{cite news| url= http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju67329.000/hju67329_0.HTM%7Cwork=Committee on the Judiciary|title=INVESTIGATION OF MISCONDUCT AND MISMANAGEMENT AT ICITAP, OPDAT AND CRIMINAL DIVISION'S OFFICE OF ADMINISTRATION,|date=September 21, 2000
  7. ↑ "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Story of Whistleblower Martin Edwin Andersen". progressive.org.
  8. ↑ "U.S. OFFICE OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ANNOUNCES MARTIN ANDERSEN'S SELECTION AS RECIPIENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL'S PUBLIC SERVANT AWARD, AND SETTLEMENT OF HIS PROHIBITED PERSONNEL PRACTICE COMPLAINT AGAINST THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE,". U.S. Office of Special Counsel. July 16, 2001.
  9. 1 2 "Justice and the I.G." The New York Times. February 1, 2011.
  10. ↑ "A Fine job". The Washington Post. February 12, 2011. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  11. ↑ "Glenn Fine Praised As Model Inspector General". NPR.org. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  12. ↑ "Biographies". www.dodig.mil. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  • "The Constitution's Ombudsman - Harvard Law Today". Harvard Law Today. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  • "Watching over Justice". Los Angeles Times. December 3, 2010. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  • "The National Law Journal Names DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine as 2008 Lawyer of the Year". www.businesswire.com. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
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