Michael Shaheen

Michael E. Shaheen Jr., the only man to hold the Justice Department’s top internal watchdog post since it was created by reform-minded Atty. Gen. Edward H. Levi in December 1975, brought an unlikely set of credentials to a position that called for a skilled tight-rope walker.

The sensitivity and importance of the job can be seen in the cases his office tackled--from FBI officials engaging in self-enriching activities, through FBI harassment of Martin Luther King Jr., to prosecutorial misconduct, to evidence of ethical insensitivity that led to the firing of FBI Director William S. Sessions. With public attention fixed on the wisdom of having independent counsels step in whenever the going gets sensitive, Shaheen’s office presents another model.

The son of a wealthy Mississippi doctor who broke local color taboos by treating black patients equally with whites, Shaheen ventured into Yankee territory for his prep school and Yale University education. After Vanderbilt Law School, he clerked for a federal judge in Tennessee and lawyered there and in his hometown of Como, Miss., where he was elected mayor while still in his 20s. Shaheen, 57, is married to Polly Dammann, an attorney in Justice’s civil division. They have two sons.

He joined the Justice Department in 1973 and, after two years in various civil-rights division posts, became Levi’s special counsel for intelligence. His work as a bridge to Senate investigators probing counter-intelligence excesses, most notably those of the FBI, won the attorney general’s confidence. The insights from files not intended for outsiders led Shaheen to propose the institution of centralized, more effective Justice Department controls over FBI investigative activities. Soon after that, Levi created the Office of Professional Responsibility and named Shaheen to head the new office whose bureaucratic title obscured its potential power.

Shaheen’s style helps explain his staying power under eight attorneys general, most of whom have come under some criticism by OPR. He combines a Southern courtliness with an explosive sense of humor, the kind of appreciation usually associated with knee-slapper jokes.

But not all Shaheen’s work has been trouble-free. In fact, his decision to take advantage of an early-retirement provision that ran out Dec. 31 results in part from his tiring of a turf struggle with the department’s inspector general over investigative jurisdiction. Whatever caused him, after 22 years, to leave a post he first thought he would hold for no longer than a year, his lengthy tenure afforded him a rare insight into ethics at the highest level of federal law enforcement.

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Question: You were named to this post by a reform attorney general, Edward H. Levi. It was in the wake of disclosures of FBI and intelligence agency abuses. Twenty-two years later, are those problems worse or better?

Answer: In the course of the Church and Pike Special Intelligence Committee investigations, the disclosures were a running litany of outrageous intelligence agency conduct. We are a far cry from that situation now. I am satisfied, and I believe the leadership of the department is satisfied, that there is no systemic program of abuse by any component in the Executive Branch, and I can assure you that includes the FBI and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]--the law enforcement components over which we have the most immediate oversight.

Q: Have the reasons for those problems changed over the same span? For example, perhaps greed motivated wrongdoers in the past, and it’s now something like arrogance and power.

A: Now, as then, personal greed remains the overarching human frailty that invites people to engage in misconduct. Back then, however, there were a couple of things that are not as much a factor now . . . . We don’t have a nation with a movement of discontent in its youth as we did back then. We don’t have a frustrated civil-rights movement, and that frustra- tion evidencing itself in street protests. As a result, we don’t have intelligence communities or law-enforcement entities with intelligence components responding to fight these back. The final reason for the change is the certainty of accountability we have established in the department and its law enforcement components.

Q: An important part of your job from the beginning was to serve as the attorney general’s eyes and ears for ethical and perhaps legal wrongdoing inside the Justice apparatus. Were there any offenses you relayed to attorneys general over the years that you did not make public?

A: In fact most of the offenses that we encountered, investigated and got to the core of, and brought a department solution to, have always remained unrecorded publicly. Always have been reported in one form or another to the attorney general or the deputy attorney general, but most of our work has been confidential in nature, with the results remaining confidential as well.

Q: Can you give us some idea of what some of these offenses and problems were?

A: Speaking cryptically, given the provisions of the Privacy Act, there was, for instance, an investigation involving how a member of an organized crime family, who was in federal court defending against criminal proceedings, had significant portions of the government prosecution file in his hands. We discovered that he had substantial and significant portions of the government’s documents in a serious case, when his attorney, who, as an honorable man, informed the government of the defense attorney’s possession of that material and turned it over to the government.

We learned that an employee of the division, of the litigating division in the department, on his own, without the help of anyone, stayed late at night, found out which of his colleagues had this case, and got into this division file and made it available to the defendant--not suspecting or anticipating that this defendant’s attorney was going to be honorable.

We conducted an investigation and discovered that a member of this department attorney’s family is heavily in debt to this organized crime figure, so a deal had been made that if the family could somehow or another assist this criminal defendant with his federal prosecutor problems, there would be forgiveness of this debt. That is an example of something that we didn’t publicly report.

Q: What was the outcome?

A: The attorney in the litigating division was prosecuted and sentenced to prison.

Q: Looking back on the attorneys generals that you’ve served in your 22 years, and judged in some matters, are there any threads that link the lapses by attorneys general? Are there motivations that various attorneys general share for questionable actions?

A: There’s a common thread--if one can use carelessness, inattention to detail as the cause here and there. In all instances that we had occasion to investigate, we never uncovered, and this would surprise the public perhaps, but we never uncovered a venal motive behind the events that resulted in our findings of inappropriate conduct or required the return of a severance payment or improper investment or misuse of a government automobile. It was inattention to detail or being unaware of, in some cases, arcane department regulations.

Q: You’ve also looked into White House conduct. In connection with steps taken after the death of Vincent Foster, you characterized the current White House in congressional testimony as the least responsive or more controlling than any you’ve dealt with. What is the problem?

A: I don’t have a good answer. We’ve given it considerable thought. We’ve come up with a tentative view that the people in charge of the White House’s cooperation with regard to this case have had a high turnover rate, most especially in the White House counsel’s office, and there’s not been one single overriding and supervising authority. People in the White House counsel’s office have sort of come and gone in waves, and the outstanding subpoena requests have remained, and the lapses have, in some instances, been a function of inattention, carelessness and the siege mentality that comes from a White House that feels beset by more than just one casual investigative committee. There have been several committees investigating various aspects of alleged White House involvement in the the Whitewater affair, the Vince Foster suicide and derivative matters.

Q: Are there problems involved in having FBI agents investigate, especially when the subject is FBI wrongdoing?

A: You’re asking how effective can self-policing be. We believe that self-policing can be the most effective--if it’s honestly done. We believe that the bureau and the DEA, with the commitment of enormous resources over the years to their own internal inspection components, have demonstrated their ability to keep their own houses clean and in order.

Take a look at history that predates the creation of this office in 1975, when two investigations by Hoover’s inspection division reported they could find no evidence of wrongdoing by an FBI agent out of New York. The allegation was that he had taken a bribe in return for giving a member of organized crime the fruits of electronic overhears of telephone conversations. Once this office was created, the allegations resurfaced and we investigated. We put a prosecutor on it, and in fact that FBI agent pled guilty to taking a bribe in return for providing a member of organized crime the substance of electronic surveillance over the years. That was in 1975. And we used FBI agents to do the investigative work that led to the grand jury.

Fast forward by approximately 20 years. You now have an agency that demonstrated to the whole world its ability at self-policing by assembling an overwhelming mass of evidence that resulted in the dismissal by the president of the United States of the director of the FBI himself. I’d say that’s a pretty commendable record of achievement and accomplishment at self-policing.

Q: The Independent Counsel Act is coming in for increased criticism. I know you don’t work on the preliminary investigations, but you must have some views as to what the act’s shortcomings are.

A: One observation I have about the Independent Counsel Act and its provisions is that it really puts the department’s investigative functions and resources in a straight-jacket. Once the provisions of the Independent Counsel Act are invoked, it forbids, for instances, subpoenaing of records or the interview of putative subjects and targets. The provisions are immoderate. Once the provisions are invoked, we have to surrender everything. There’s not enough discretion left in the department to do a little more fleshing out of the allegations before invoking the irretrievable provisions. That sets in motion all the powers and prerogatives of an independent, separate, mini-Department of Justice and all the authority that carries with it.

Q: One of your responsibilities has been to investigate leaks of government information. How successful do you think this effort has been?

A: I refer to leaks--assignments to investigate unauthorized disclosures--as a fool’s errand. Leaks are very frustrating. I know the media can’t appreciate that. Without them, the media would have much less to do and fewer newspapers to sell. But for the government and for an investigative component like OPR, leaks are a bedeviling frustration. To investigate them requires a disproportionate commitment of resources--almost always unsuccessful. The ratio of success to failure in concluding unauthorized disclosure investigations is about one out of every 10. And those involve the voluntary cooperation of a member of the media. Leak investigations are, in my opinion, a big waste of resources.

Q: Have you communicated that to attorneys general?

A: I have. And I think every attorney general I’ve worked for agrees they are a waste of resources. But in most instances, to the extent that we can, we have to pursue them because they do, in almost all instances, involve--in fact we won’t pursue them unless they involve--violations of the law, such as a disclosure of classified information or grand jury-protected information. We do not conduct--and it’s an important point--we do not conduct investigations into unauthorized disclosures of information that are merely embarrassing and by themselves do not involve or constitute a violation of law or department regulations.