dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Did you read it? Holy moley lots of good info in his speech. And a few stabs at POTUS

"We are the dotters of I’s and the crossers of T’s. Small details like commas and semicolons matter to us."

The Office of the Attorney General was created in 1789 as a one-person, part-time position. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice with the Attorney General as its head. Thereafter, as the country grew, so did the Department, along with its United States Attorneys and law enforcement agencies. Today, we have more than 115,000 employees.

It took more than 100 years after the founding of the Department for the Department to create the Office of Professional Responsibility, in 1975.

That office was created in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Today, OPR is staffed by a Deputy Counsel, three Associate Counsels, and more than 20 Assistant Counsels.

In 1989, our compliance function expanded again with the establishment of the Office of the Inspector General. The Inspector General’s mission is to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct involving Department programs and personnel, and to promote efficiency.

The Inspector General has both criminal and administrative authority. It investigates violations by Department employees and crimes perpetrated against the Department. It also conducts audits and inspects Department programs.

The Department established the Professional Responsibility Officer program in 1994 and formally created the Professional Responsibility Advisory Office in 1999, to provide expert ethical advice for our attorneys.

The role of Deputy Attorney General involves helping to manage all components of our $30 billion Department. It is similar in many respects to the role of a Chief Operating Officer.

In an organization the size of the Department, we rely on professionals to ensure compliance with the myriad ethical rules, court rules, regulations and statutes that affect our employees.

When any one of our 115,000 employees makes a mistake, it can affect the entire organization. So, I can empathize with many of you.

The 2008 revisions to the Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations are known as the “Filip Factors” – after a former Deputy Attorney General. The Department directed prosecutors to determine “whether a corporation’s compliance program is merely a ‘paper program’ or whether it was designed, implemented, reviewed, and revised, as appropriate, in an effective manner.”

That same year, the Department resolved a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation of a German conglomerate with combined civil and criminal penalties of $800 million. The Department pointed out the inadequacies of what it described as a “paper program” in place at the time of the misconduct. Failure to act has consequences.