Word: doj
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That fight for jurisdiction was a "low point" for federal agents in Seattle, part of a long-simmering national rivalry that has festered since Congress moved the ATF from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice (DOJ) after Sept. 11, according to an audit of explosives investigations that was released on Friday by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General. Acrimony between the agencies has been common knowledge for years, but the report represents the most comprehensive public accounting to date...
...concerns internally; after being rebuffed and later finding himself in a dispute over a bonus payment, he decided to expose the wrongdoing. After talking with the IRS, Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission and appearing before the Senate - and being told on at least one occasion by DOJ officials that they were not looking to prosecute him - Birkenfeld was arrested in June 2008 as he returned from Switzerland, where he had been living for the past 13 years, to his native Boston for a high school reunion...
...Unfortunately, this "gotcha" reflex runs deep in the government, says Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department attorney who was forced out of the DOJ after she blew the whistle on the department's destruction of e-mails related to the Bush Administration's prosecution of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban." "Basically, the government doesn't like whistle-blowers, and they have demonstrated time and again mountainous bad faith - as in this case, turning a perfectly good whistle-blower-incentive law into virtual entrapment," says Radack, who is the homeland security director...
...that Birkenfeld isn't a true whistle-blower, the IRS has yet to make its own determination. An adverse ruling "may make more sense legally than it does from a policy standpoint," says former IRS commissioner Margaret Richardson. But if the IRS comes to a different conclusion from the DOJ - and under a new law, Birkenfeld can challenge the IRS decision in court - the UBS whistle-blower could end up collecting the first of millions of dollars from the government even as he sits in one of its federal penitentiaries...
...report abuses and reinvigorated oversight mechanisms, like an ombudsman and independent review board - which most observers (including the state inspector general) agree had been terribly neglected under her long-serving predecessor, John A. Johnson. (Reached at his home in Buffalo, Johnson declined to discuss his tenure or the DOJ report he claimed not to have heard about. "There's the truth, and then there's God's truth, and I believe in the latter," he told TIME.) (Read "Do Early-Release Programs Raise the Crime Rate...