Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for the Tuesday edition of our podcast and I gotta be honest with you, this is a treat for me on a number of levels. I've been trying to get this guest to come on.

Either television or podcast because and at the end you be the judge you tell me if I'm right or wrong and for my money he is one of the more under appreciated people in all of government.

You whether you know it or not are familiar with his work. You whether you know it or not are familiar with his investigations and yet most of you most of you probably could not give me his name.

You could not tell me who he works for and the really interesting part is he's okay with that in a world that rewards people who are provocative and loud and bombastic.

He is not any of that he is a fact centric former federal prosecutor former DOJ official currently I'll give it away.

The Inspector General for the Department of Justice Mr. Michael Horowitz is his name and he joins us Mr. Inspector General cannot thank you enough for joining us and and loaning your insight and your background and your perspective to our listeners.

Well it's great to be with you and I feel like I still need to call you Mr. Chairman at some level.

Sir given how many hearings we have together.

That's because you are a great witness and and you're right in the middle of everything and yet in an apolitical way but before I get into that I want I want you.

So we've got listeners they're going to say look I've heard of the inspector general and once we get into some of the investigations they're going to think okay I didn't realize that to that was.

Tell us where your jurisdiction lies how you receive leads or tips or how you decide what to investigate.

It's great to be here and I'm thrilled to be able to speak to your listeners about that and talk about some of these issues because I agree with you I think it is underappreciated.

The importance of what we've been set up to do particularly you know as we've seen the difficulty Congress and the executive branch have in effectively conducting oversight and performing their work so.

At the Justice Department we have broad jurisdiction that covers all almost all of the activities I should say of the Justice Department we have entire jurisdiction over the federal Bureau of investigation.

Entire jurisdiction over the drug enforcement administration entire jurisdiction over the federal prison system which most people don't realize is actually the largest employer at the Justice Department and the second largest budget at the Justice Department.

We have authority over the U.S. Marshal service we have authority to supervise and oversee the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and we have authority to oversee most but not all of the misconduct by federal prosecutors and that's an important issue an important exception something you and I worked on to try and fix.

For many years unfortunately we couldn't get the bill through the Senate but we have authority to oversee criminal wrongdoing by department lawyers but we actually don't have authority to oversee misconduct by them that would be considered professional misconduct in other words misconduct for example in the courtroom.

That goes to an entity called the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department and a problem that I've had and my predecessor's had with that and you had with that as you tried to move this bill through Congress is I have statutory independence as I'm sure we'll be talking about.

The head of OPR and Office of Professional Responsibility is appointed by the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General and reports that out and so they do not have the same level of independence that I.

All right so you can do pretty much everything except attorneys in non criminal investigations and what I find interesting is you are not a dentist you're not an accountant you are indeed a former federal prosecutor who worked at the Department of Justice.

I mean is the argument that they don't want to be judged by potentially non I can't imagine a non lawyer being in your job but what is their argument for why you should not have jurisdiction in that area.

So the lawyer issue has largely been resolved even though the statute doesn't say the IG has to be a lawyer for 30 years now it's been a lawyer my predecessors except for the initial IG was a lawyer and everybody agrees it should be a lawyer.

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