Chertoff Building More of an Investigative Empire

by emptywheel

I've been obsessing about the way that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (part of DHS) seems to be subpoenaing records that would more logically be investigated out of DOJ. Well, via scout prime, I see that DHS head Michael Chertoff is building his empire in other ways:

House appropriators are questioning the Homeland Security Department's plan to help finance and staff a new computer investigations center in Alabama, saying the project smacks of an administration "earmark" that might have been allowed to proceed without competitive bidding or congressional approval.

[snip]

In this case, they said, Chertoff made a unilateral decision to divert money away from state and local grants to support the Alabama training center.

"This is outrageous," Rogers said at the hearing. "By the Constitution, no dollar can be spent but for an appropriation of the Congress. That's as elementary as you can get.

I'm with Rogers (who is a Republican, btw). There's something called the Constitution which prevents Chertoff from just reallocating money like this. But I'm particularly struck by the last two paragraphs of this article:

Appropriators also demanded a legal opinion "providing the legal basis for the actions taken in establishing this activity."

"In addition, the report shall include a justification outlining why this activity is properly undertaken by the Secret Service and DHS rather than the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice," they added.

A very good question. Why is Chertoff, again, consolidating investigative functions that belong in DOJ into DHS?

Comments

[Swopa]

Obviously, the Bush/Cheney folks have been stealing their tactical ideas from the plays of Joe Orton:

HAL: Have you a search warrant?
INSPECTOR TRUSCOTT: What for? [. . .]
FAY: It's common knowledge what police procedure is. They must have a search warrant.
INSPECTOR TRUSCOTT: I'm sure the police must, but as I've already informed you, I am from the water board. And our procedure is different.

Regrettably, Mr. Orton is no longer with us to appreciate the prescient irony of Truscott being from "the water board."

[emptywheel]

Oh, that's quite good Swopa, worthy of its own post.

[earlofhuntingdon]

The first reason Chertoff is building his empire is because he can. Gates has stopped building Rumsfeld's fiefdoms and given some of the lands back to the king. Sir Alfredo is having trouble sitting on his donkey; Sancho Sampson has left him to tilt at his windmills alone, under Lord Rove's banner, but with a broken army. The Marches are free for Lord Chertoff to build his castles, which he seems to be doing with a vengeance.

The second reason is that DHS is untested ground. It is not as visible as the DOJ and has few, if any, traditions to uphold or be measured against. I believe it has few, if any, unions, which makes it that much harder for a whistleblower to survive the first blast on his or her whistle. DHS is bigger and has much more money to spread around on tasks and to keep Congress Critters happy with local spending.

Many critics believe that Adm. Poindexter's TIA never went away, it just went underground. The busy bees Chertoff is raising, and his virtual admission to having spent money on activity not approved by Congress, suggest TIA lives and may have been split into cells, like a terrorist organization. Effective on their own or when coordinated, the loss of one won't affect the whole hive. Sounds more like a cancelled SciFi show than a government, but then this is BushWorld.

[hauksdottir]

How many spying agencies does a free country need?

With all our records gathered and consolidated, and everybody BUT US having access to them, and the President and anybody and everybody he delegates having the power to declare any citizen including my cat an "enemy combatant" with no proof whatsoever, well, what else does a free country need?

With a half million people on the terrorist watch lists, how many more suspects does a free country need?

If the neocons really want to live in a totalitarian state, why didn't they simply move to one and leave my America alone?

The only hope we have is that an agency which proved to be so inefficient mismanaging disasters and making a mess out of airline travel will also stumble while trying to usurp jobs not their own.