By Dan Friedman, National Journal
Thursday, April 17, 2008

After five years and $58 million in estimated government savings generated by his investigations into Iraq contracting, could Stuart Bowen go down for reading employee e-mails?

	A grand jury in Virginia probes possible misconduct by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction -- the office commonly referred to as SIGIR -- and probably the government's best-known investigator, is himself under investigation by a Virginia grand jury. Federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and administrative investigators appear to be focused on allegations that Bowen and his deputy, Ginger Cruz, approved possibly illegal reviews of staff e-mails, sources said.

After months of interviews, prosecutors picked up their pace last month, bringing at least nine current and former SIGIR employees before the grand jury, according to people familiar with the inquiry. Prosecutors interviewed Bowen in January, sources said.

For Bowen, a former White House lawyer lauded by congressional Democrats for his aggressive investigations into Bush administration missteps in Iraq, the inquiry represents a turnabout. A recipient of much positive press, Bowen faces scrutiny over the e-mail review he launched last spring to identify employees suspected of leaking damaging information to the media, according to current and former SIGIR officials.

The grand jury is impaneled in Richmond, Va., in facilities of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has prosecuted many of the corruption cases brought by SIGIR. Because of that potential conflict of interest, an assistant U.S. attorney from the Western District of Virginia, Thomas Bondurant, heads the grand jury inquiry, according to four people familiar with the case. Those people were among a dozen sources who declined to be identified because of the secrecy of grand jury proceedings and, in some cases, because they remain in federal oversight roles and said they fear retaliation.

Bowen and Cruz have both denied any wrongdoing. In e-mails to National Journal, Cruz argued that the probe is based on trumped-up and outright false charges by a small group of former employees angry about the circumstances of their departure.

The investigation is "driven by the disgruntled employees. It would not exist but for their personally motivated complaints," Cruz wrote in an e-mail. "The point is, they are abusing the system. The system has no choice but to investigate when colluding disgruntled ex-employees make allegations."

Prosecutors' apparent focus on the e-mail reviews strikes some observers as a picayune issue over which to hang an investigator whose role is to oversee more than $20 billion a year in annual spending in a war zone. Most government agencies tell staffers that their e-mails may be monitored.

But many former and current employees argued that the e-mail investigation is just the most prominent of many signs of managerial mayhem at SIGIR. "They're just bad managers," said one former employee.

Because SIGIR was created as an emergency organization, critics say, the agency suffers from a lack of oversight and from an unhealthy focus on public relations driven by its need to stay in business and expand its authority.

The overemphasis on public relations was apparent in the decision to review e-mails for possible press leaks, these critics say.

Bowen and Cruz could face serious legal jeopardy. If they engaged in open-ended e-mail reviews, as some former employees allege, they and other officials could be accused of breaking a law against accessing government computers without authority or a statute barring officials who are conducting e-mail reviews from exceeding the authorized scope of an inquiry.

Four former employees also said they suspected that Cruz used information from the e-mail reviews in decisions to fire employees, an action that could raise other legal issues if proved. A former senior SIGIR official said that "Ginger said, 'If you saw what this person or that person said in their e-mail, you would agree they should be fired.'" Cruz denied making any such statement. Citing the ongoing investigation, Bowen declined to comment for this story, referring questions to his attorney, Bradford Berenson.

"No open-ended review of employee e-mails was ever conducted at SIGIR," Berenson said. "The review in question was strictly limited to the accounts of a small number of individuals, covered e-mails during only a short period of time, and was limited to the single, authorized subject of the investigation." Berenson said that no information from the review was used for disciplinary or employment action.

A key question before the grand jury appears to be whether SIGIR could reasonably assert authority to independently conduct e-mail reviews. According to witnesses who have been interviewed, prosecutors have assembled a timeline and appear to be focused on whether Bowen and Cruz read e-mails or authorized reviews by other officials after the Army's general counsel told them in March 2006 that they lacked authority to do so. One ex-employee called the Army's intervention a "cease and desist letter." The Army manages SIGIR's e-mail system and asserted authority over the matter in its letter.

SIGIR officials have repeatedly pointed to an internal policy statement that by using office e-mail, employees "imply their consent to disclosing the contents of any files or information passed through government office equipment." SIGIR also provided a June 2005 memorandum of understanding between itself and the Army, which spells out that SIGIR "retains statutory authority" over areas of its operations that include information technology policy; that memo could arguably override the Army letter.

Prosecutors looking into SIGIR declined to comment, and the prospects for an indictment are uncertain. But even if charges are not filed, the investigation could revive questions about the continued value of SIGIR, which in early 2007 fought off a sunset provision backed by House Republicans. The 2008 Defense authorization bill gave the inspector general's office a five-year extension and expanded authority over U.S. reconstruction funds used in Iraq.

Although the defeat of the sunset clause was widely hailed as a victory for accountability, some career employees favored the move, arguing that after doing laudable work before other auditors reached Iraq, SIGIR has been rendered redundant by the beefing up of other audit organizations working in Iraq. "SIGIR served its purpose well initially," said one former investigator. "They were trying to get more people in there, and SIGIR was surged for that.... But it's time for them to go."

SIGIR officials acknowledged that the agency's troubles result in part from its temporary status. Created to quickly fill an auditing void in Iraq, the organization is composed of temporary employees who are not protected by all federal civil service rules. Cruz acknowledged robust use of that flexibility, arguing that it increased SIGIR's effectiveness. "SIGIR employees have no civil service protection for a fundamental reason: to avoid burdening the organization with the views of individual employees about their place and opinions in the organization," she said.

But current and former employees said nearly unanimously that a tendency to unceremoniously sack not just incompetent but also independent-minded staff members left the agency with a growing cadre of angry alumni. "If they don't get along with people, they just get rid of them," one official said of Bowen and Cruz.

In 2006, six ex-SIGIR staffers who left on bad terms filed an eight-page complaint with the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, an organization of senior oversight officials that oversees all federal inspectors general. The former SIGIR staffers leveled more than 20 professional and personal accusations against Bowen and Cruz.

Investigators from the Social Security Administration's inspector general's office eventually looked into three of those accusations, including a complaint that Bowen wasted resources on a project to complete a lessons-learned book about Iraq reconstruction. A grand jury convened in the District of Columbia to review those allegations was dissolved without filing any charges. But the 2006 complaint's authors, who wrote they would "remain focused on the pursuit of this complaint until the top management of SIGIR is changed," continued updating their accusations with information from former colleagues at the agency.

In May 2007, news of the investigation of SIGIR by the president's council and of the accusations from ex-employees broke in major newspapers. SIGIR's investigation into press leaks was partly a result of those news stories, SIGIR employees said.

Several former SIGIR officials said that the decision to review the e-mails, over the objections of several top staffers, reflected both concern that leaks were hurting the agency in Congress and the lack of clear authority over SIGIR, which officially reports jointly to the State and Defense departments. "Nobody quite knew how to deal with SIGIR," said one ex-staffer.

Another official, who defended Bowen's e-mail reviews, was more equivocal about his boss's management style. "Bowen's problem is that his government office isn't really a government office, and he has used that authority maybe unwisely," the official said. "He might have been smarter to trim his sails."

-- The author is a reporter with CongressDaily.