You took the course. You applied for the job. You got the job. You moved to DC. You’re excited.

You started. Boom. You’re under investigation. Front page of The New York Times. It’s called oversight and investigations, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today and what you need to know before you go in as a political appointee.

In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands.

Hello and welcome to the Oversight and Investigations course. I’m Mike Howell and I run the Oversight Project here at the Heritage Foundation, which is the name indicates is our oversight and investigations arm. Previously, I was on Capitol Hill for a number of years as an oversight attorney. And then when president Donald j Trump won, I went into, the Department of Homeland Security to help out with oversight matters there. And joining me today are are my good friends and colleagues, Tom Jones and Michael Ding, and we’ll kick it over to Michael to introduce himself.

Thank you, Mike. As Mike said, we are here for the oversight and investigations course. I am currently an attorney at America First Legal Foundation. Before that, I also was at the Department of Homeland Security handling oversight. And before that, I handled, oversight investigations at the House Oversight Committee.

Tom? Hey. Thanks, Mike. My name is Tom Jones. I run the American Accountability Foundation.

AAF’s job is to vet the individuals that the Biden administration sends up to serve in senior positions in the federal government. Before that, I ran an opposition research firm for a large Republican consulting firm. And prior to that, I ran the Oppo shop for crews for president in the 2016 campaign. So let’s jump right into it. Pretend for a moment we’re fast forwarding.

Boom. You got the job. Congratulations. You’re in the next, administration. Things are going well.

You moved your family to DC, but all of a sudden you’re in the front page of the New York Times and you get a subpoena for congress. You’re under investigation. So to better respond to this and to prepare for it, let’s talk about what that really means. And when we talk about oversight and investigations, what we’re gonna do is break it out into 4 categories. The first will be congressional oversight.

The second will be the inspector’s general community and the government accountability office. 3rd, we’re gonna talk about the Freedom of Information Act, which we’ll refer to as as FOIA. And then lastly, we’ll talk about opposition research and and the media. So let’s just jump right into it, and I’ll start with you, Michael. What is congressional oversight, and what should a, you know, potential administration official be prepared for?

Well, Mike, as we’ve seen before, it depends on who controls the 2 houses of congress. But as we’ve seen, when the opposition party is in control of 1 of the branches of congress, they seem to utilize aggressive congressional oversight tactics to try to embarrass the administration that you’re now working for. What you have to do is be mindful that everything you do, whether it’s legal or not, they’re going to come after you. Even if it’s something you believe in, you’re executing on the policies that you join this administration to advance. They will find every way to embarrass you along the way for implementing those policies and serving the American people.

And, Tom, what are some of those ways? What tools does congress actually have at their disposal to conduct oversight? Yeah. So they have a lot of tools at their disposal. I mean, at the extreme level, they have the subpoena.

They can request documents and and lawfully force you to turn them over to congress for their inspection and for for public, inspection. So that’s at the extreme end. But the more intangible tools that congress has are almost more powerful. What they can do is they can haul you up before the committee, embarrass you, force you not to answer questions, and make you look like you’re obstructing and and you’re not doing the business of the American people. So what they have a a wide variety of things kind of in between that.

They can call, witnesses in for depositions, and make you sit down, answer a lot of questions, and really put you in a box that if you get the answer wrong, you you could place yourself in legal jeopardy down the road. Or more importantly, make it look like the administration is lying. You know, they can cut the budgets. If if congress is effectively doing its job, they can say, look, we think this agency has been obstructing. We’ve got the power of the purse.

We’re gonna cut off their funding. So we’ve got a lot of tools, and maybe most importantly among those, the bully pulpit to call your activities to account and really kind of drag you out in the public, and make people pay attention to what you’ve been doing and, you know, particularly highlight that it’s problematic. So, Michael, how does this work in practice? You’re in the administration, the previous one. Is it mister congressman investigator just calls up a random political appointee or there are processes in place, officials to deal with it.

How’s it work? Well, that’s a good question, Mike. It it seems like over the years decades, congress, on the one hand and the executive branch on the other, they’ve more or less settled into, customs and procedures for how these investigations take place. What typically happens first is a member of Congress or perhaps a chairman of a committee will write a formal letter, to your head of agency, expressing their concerns, maybe requesting some documents, requesting some pieces of information, and it it kind of snowballs from there. Things can escalate.

Documents might need to be produced, and potentially witnesses might need to be called and interviewed. And, you know, for you as a potential political appointee, you certainly have to be careful about that. You know, something just to jump in here, something that Tom mentioned earlier was about there’s a potential risk of legal jeopardy, and so I would, you know, stress that, you know, in my experience and in Mike’s experience being counsel at a department, the lawyers there, even if they’re also a fellow political appointee, they represent the agency as their client. So if you as an individual are under investigation, that would be a good time to realize that you might need independent legal counsel. And just general advice for any political appointee out there, there are certain insurance plans you should get, where you will get the counsel you need, and it could be very expensive potentially, whether it’s congress investigating you or OIG investigating you or, god forbid, criminal prosecution, going taking place.

Tom, I got a perfect question for you, and it’s because you’ve laid these traps for the other side before. What should a political appointee going into administration not do? What are the mistakes to avoid the common pitfalls? Yeah. Thanks, Mike.

I I I think this is really important. As a new political appointee, you have an opportunity to go into the job with a blank slate, because you always have to remember your conduct, whether it’s before you join the administration or during the administration, is gonna reflect on the principle you staff and ultimately on on the president. So really some due diligence is kind of cleaning up your profile before you get in there. And look, like, I know everybody loves social media. Nothing good comes of Twitter.

Nothing good comes of Facebook. So to the maximum extent possible that you can lock these things down and clean up the stupid things that we all say, and do it with a critical eye, you’re gonna save yourself a lot of trouble down the road. Like, we you know, people think the Internet’s forever, but it it it’s actually not. If you can get in front of cleaning up some of this stuff and locking it down, you do yourself a a really significant service. We were very frustrated by some of the noms who were controversial.

I spoke to people who knew these people, and they’re like, this guy said all kinds of crazy stuff in this Facebook group. He’s on. Like, that’s awesome. Send me a screenshot. And they’re like, oh, yeah.

He’s deleted it. And if it’s gone, it’s it’s really difficult to get that information. So you need to go back into the maximum extent, clean that up. Look. There’s some stuff.

If it’s ended up in the newspaper, there’s only so much you can do with it. So you have to come in, and you have to be forthright with the people in the office of presidential personnel and at the agency and say, look. There’s this thing. And you need to let them make the decision of, okay. Well, we know this is a thing, and we can deal with it.

We can we have ways to manage it. Or, hey, This is just this is just too much. It’s too much trouble it’s worth. We’d love to have you here, but it’s not gonna work. So you really need to be forthright with folks, because the last thing people wanna be is surprised by some stupid thing you said in the student newspaper, college, or, you know, something that’s gonna come back.

And they have to answer, hey. Why do we hire this chucklehead who said all these terrible things years ago that are completely out of step with the with the president’s agenda? So you really need to get in front of those clean clean them up the maximum extent you can and come up with good answers for what’s what’s happened beforehand. That’s great advice. You you don’t wanna be a chucklehead.

No. So let’s turn this more an optimistic note. So, Michael, what are ways that you could work with congressional oversight to further the president’s agenda? Mike, so, you know, as we talked about, there there will be folks out there trying to lay traps for you. On the other side, congress at the end of the day, there’s a bipartisan aspect of it.

So there’s a majority and there’s a minority. And when one side is trying to investigate you and embarrass you, the other side of that same committee, will have staffers and members that might wanna work for you, might that might agree with the policies that you are implementing, that the president is advancing. And so that is an opportunity to work with them as well to try to get your side of the story across. Every hearing that the Hill has, every committee, they have rules where both sides get to ask questions. So when one side is asking a question, trying to take something you said out of context, or trying to make a policy you implemented look bad, make sure that the other member on the other side of the aisle can give you the opportunity to rephrase that answer or to put it into context and tell your side of the story and sell your policy to the American people.

Work closely with your fellow team members at your agency, whether they’re in the Office of Legislative Affairs or the Office of General Counsel, and your boss, and just try to get that all coordinated ahead of time so you don’t show up to a hearing and look like, you get caught, in one of these traps. That that’s so true. The opportunities are there because so often in these environments, members are thirsty for the best clicks, the most clicks. And so there’ll be the opportunity for them to overleverage themselves and go too far and leave open the flank to a counter assault, which really proves the point and, you know, delegitimizes their efforts. Why don’t we shift topics here?

Because congress isn’t the only folks you should be worried about in oversight and investigations. There’s this whole other community of permanent bureaucrats that are out to to, you know, look after your conduct. And what I’m talking about here are the inspectors general and the government accountability officer are 2 that come to mind. So, Tom, why don’t you just explain what inspectors general are, IG and GAO? Yeah.

So the inspectors general are, permanent staff within the agency that are responsible for rooting out fraud and abuse within the agency operation. And these are guys you don’t wanna get crossways with. These are guys that show up with badges, and they can conduct investigations. And they have the power to investigate, in a way that really a lot of other, investigative agencies in Oregon’s don’t have. So, you know, they’re they vary in the quality.

Some agencies have outstanding inspectors general who are impartial, who are looking at rooting out fraud. Some agencies have guys that are kinda, meh, they’re they’re less than stellar. But at the end of the day, you you don’t wanna be in the in kind of the crosshairs because they you know, they can get information from outside sources or within the building that says, hey. We think there’s a problem going on within this department. We think this political point has misbehaved, done misappropriated funds, used things, you know, outside the the proper course, coordinated with political actors, and can really create a lot of difficult problems for you.

The GAO has similar investigative abilities. They’re an organ in the United States Congress and are often when when members of congress and committees, are concerned about problems within agencies and they want investigations, but they wanna they wanna see them occur outside of, you know, maybe the partisan atmosphere of a congressional investigation. They may task the GAO to investigate, do an assessment. The GAO is, regularly coming back and reporting on, the functioning of programs and and and departments. So you don’t wanna be on the kind of the receiving end of GAO saying, this program’s been maladministered.

It’s problematic. It’s it’s rife with with waste because it’s often congressional staff are like, where can we cut budgets? And the first place you go is, hey. Let me grab the high risk series from GAO. Let me grab the latest report because they have a lot of credibility because they’re seen as impartial even though they’re part of congress.

And it’s really difficult to push back against GAO if the GAO report comes back and says your your program’s rife with with waste. And those reports are something just Joe Public can go on the Internet and get access to. So it’s also probably a good idea if you know what department or agency you wanna go into. Look at what GAO and the IG have said about it before because that’s what you’re gonna get asked about either by the IGs or Capitol Hill. Michael, wanna see if you wanted to add some more color to what Tom said.

Maybe share some experiences with IGs and GAO. I know you have a lot of those. Yeah. With GAO, as Tom mentioned, they’re supposedly nonpartisan, independent, and also congress and not executive branch, you know, which certainly presents some trickier constitutional law issues there. So on the one hand, you have OIG, and, you know, as Tom mentioned, they’re they’re hardcore investigators.

Right? Some of these guys have badges and guns, so you don’t wanna be in their crosshairs. And it’s, you know, in some ways harder to push back on those investigations. It’s almost, you know, like dealing with law enforcement. But GAO, they kind of walk this gray area, so navigating is kinda tricky.

You know, as always, I suggest any political appointee to immediately loop in their supervisor and or the office of general counsel and kind of mediate that relationship. Because at the end of the day, if they’re a part of Congress, they also have to adhere to some of the, dynamics that are present inherently between coequal branches of government. So, sometimes they need to preserve their relationship with your agency in a way that provides them access, an ease of access for their regular audits, their investigations. So if they get carried away with what they share with Congress immediately without respecting the executive branch privileges, they might lose some access to that, and they they also don’t wanna hurt their relationship that they’ve built over the years, working very closely with your agency. So navigating that, you know, it’s a little tricky, but it’s not necessarily the case that they can get whatever they want just because they asked for it.

At the end of the day, they are an arm of congress, which is a coequal branch of government, and so they have to respect those norms. Yep. Absolutely. And on IGs, they work for the executive branch, which is going to be led by you all watching this. Political management or the bureaucracy is something I know is spoken about in a lot of these other courses.

So I got a absolute softball for Tom because I know his thoughts on this. Should the next administration exercise their authority to select and appoint their own IG’s? Yeah. Most certainly. And, you know, I’m a firm believer in in the unitary executive and that they should have control of the people that work within that government.

So yeah. 100%. You know, I’m confident the next administration can select among a large pool of competent investigators to ensure that waste, fraud, and abuse is is rooted out, but also that there’s not witch hunts to to really, target political adversaries, which I I think is a concern with some of the the IG’s that have been around for a little bit too long. That that’s absolutely correct. I mean, in a new administration, would you rather have some fresh eyes on programs or, you know, miss IG Debbie DC who’s been around for half a decade and, you know, is up to the same old stuff.

It’s it’s fresh eyes, fresh administration, makes for better oversight and, you know, better political management and bureaucracy. Now we’re gonna talk about the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA. My favorite law. Okay? But it’s not effectuated as it should be, enforced as it should be.

Michael, can you talk about what FOIA is, what it does, and what folks should know? So the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA, it’s a federal statute that lets anyone request records from the federal government, and whatever agency you’re at. So there’s a lot of laws about what is an agency or what is a record. What every political appointee needs to know is that all their communications, all their emails, all their calendars, that is all subject to FOIA, and anyone can request those records from a federal agency. That’s a frightening proposition, but one that comes in very handy for, you know, public accountability of the bureaucracy.

So, Tom, why don’t you add a little more color to that? How does it work? Sure. So fundamentally at its core, the Freedom of Information Act is a records access statute that’ll as as Mike said, allows the public to access records. So what happens is groups like heritage, groups like AAF, groups like AFL, they go and say, hey.

I want this record. And, you know, as a political point, you really need to be conscious that while there while there are guardrails on what is a record, it’s a pretty expansive, definition. So a lot of the things that the federal government is a steward of is arguably a record. So what we can do is we can go and say, look. As long as we can reasonably describe the record in a way that a competent professional can find it and that it’s not subject to certain exemptions, we can get access to those.

And those exemptions are important. We should probably discuss them. But in this light as a as as a political pointy, you know, the adage we hear a lot now is, like, wow. This meeting could have been an email. Well, the federal government, the this email probably should have been a meeting, because what you probably wanna do is if you need to resolve something, it’s probably if if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy, and say, hey.

What are we gonna do here? Talk through the decision. Work it out. If you reduce it to writing, maybe you can protect it under some of these exemptions. But, man, that’s a lot of a fight.

You’re probably better off going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through, and making the decision as opposed to sending them an email and creating a thread that accountable dot us or or one of those other groups is gonna come back and seek, and they’re gonna have to explain why why you’re withholding it and you’re gonna fight in court. It’s gonna be a lot of expense. It’s a it’s an email that’s better resolved with a meeting. Yep. And you mentioned emails a lot, but, Michael, what are other records?

Do signal chats count as records? Yeah. So that that’s where things get really tricky as a political appointee, especially, you know, for those who’ve never worked in federal government before. There’s plenty of apps and other messaging platforms out there, whether it’s deleting messages, encrypted communications, or whatnot. But, all the agencies under the federal government are governed by certain records retentions policy.

So you have to be careful with, whatever agency you’re working at that you’re following those policies. That’s another way that political appointees get into trouble sometimes is they’re using these encrypted chat platforms or self deleting messages, and they are, in some sense, violating the law by deleting those. Because if you’re conducting official business, whatever communication was transmitted to conduct that, official business, that’s a federal record, and it needs to be properly retained so that someone can request it under FOIA. That go ahead, Tom. Yeah.

No. And so I think that brings up an important point that’s sometimes frustrating to me as a requester. If you’re conducting official business on, you know, joe.smith@gmail.com about, hey. Here’s what the agency needs to do tomorrow. Just because you’re sending that email from joe.smith@gmail.com, that is still discoverable under FOIA and still should be produced, under, you know, the current state of federal jurisprudence on this.

So don’t think just because, hey. Let’s take this offline. Taking it offline doesn’t get you out from under FOIA. Because, look, at the end of the day, the taxpayer’s paying you to do this work, and the taxpayer should be expected to get this information back from you. You know?

And you shouldn’t be able to get out from under it because you stuck it in a Hotmail account. Yep. That’s absolutely correct. And just a foot stomp on this condo, so often in these congressional oversight disputes, where it ends up are questions of records retention. I mean, look no further than the dispute with, you know, president Trump versus the National Archives.

It’s about fundamentally records retention. These are where when congress and the executive branch get into conflict, they start fighting over whether the records were properly kept, and then you start budding things that could have criminal penalties in terms of records retention. So it’s very important to make sure you have solid information security, processes in place, storage, etcetera, because that’s how you can really get crosswise. Yeah. And I and I think, you know, particularly for younger people that are gonna come into the federal government, don’t behave electronically like you did with your friends in college or kind of your first job because kind of the the casual nature that we communicate nowadays is is not appropriate for communications within the federal government.

It really can come back to to bite you. You send it what you think is kind of an offhand comment, and you end up in a foyer production, and then you gotta explain it. It’s always gonna sound worse than, you know, you were just trying to be cool or you’re just sending a you’re sending a quick email as you’re walking to Starbucks. You really need to be careful. You really need to be disciplined, and you don’t you gotta not let yourself fall into the ease of conversation that things like, you know, text messaging or snap or any of any of these other things, Slack let you do.

It can be really, it’d be really disastrous when you have, you know, a Slack message waved up in front of you in front of a congressional hearing. I mean, look, like FTX had the daylights beaten out of them for approving ridiculous expenses in a Slack, conference room. You can’t be doing that kind of stuff if you’re a federal employee because it’s gonna come back. You’re gonna get whacked upside the head with it. Right.

And you got no say in whether it comes out. I mean, these things are stored on back end, you know, devices and central databases that bureaucrats access to respond to the foyer. So you might not even know if your deepest, darkest, most embarrassing emails have gone out the door already. Let’s shift though again into our final pillar. Oppo Research, and we’ll say slash the media because they’re so often one in the same.

Tom, you run a essentially an Oppo Research firm you have before. What is Oppo Research? Tell us about it. Sure. Fundamentally, at its core, Oppo Research is about storytelling.

It’s about taking, gathering facts, and presenting them in a way to tell a story. And I think the important thing that people coming to Washington need to understand and particularly remember about opposition research is, oppo guys like me, our responsibility is not to tell both sides of the story. Our our job is to aggressively and thoroughly tell the story that we wanna tell. Your job is to go fight it out on the other side of the story and tell your side, but it it you can’t come in expecting to get a fair telling. That’s not what APO is, and that’s not what the media is about.

So what we look to do as opposition researchers is we look to pull facts and and pull information from a person’s history that tells a story that helps flesh out what we think we already know about this person. They’re a radical leftist. They, you know, they don’t share our values. And we pull information. We put it together in a in a story that is persuasive and difficult for them to rebut, so that we create an indelible understanding in the in the public about who this person is and makes it difficult for them to act within the within the political sphere because they’ve been they’ve been shaped by us in the narrative of of here’s who they are.

So that fundamentally, it’s about telling that story about someone else without their support. And the fights over this often peak at the nomination process. And so maybe add some color for folks as to they’re gonna be working on nominations or bosses will be up for nominations. How does that all play out? Yeah.

You really, you know, you really need to anticipate these fights long before you get into them. I was talking about the guy who had cleaned up his Facebook. This was a guy that knew he was going into a very, very confrontational, very, controversial position at at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He knew this was gonna be a fight, so he got in front of it. He did a good job.

It made it harder for me to find this information. So you have you have 2 sides that you have to do in this, what we call a vulnerability assessment. You need to treat your guy like he’s your target. Treat him like the bad guy. Dig in and approach him from if I was someone who wanted to drag my boss through the mud and blow up his confirmation, what would I do?

Think like them. Okay. I’m gonna pull this item from his history. Alright. Is there is do I have an answer?

What do I say when they say you wrote this article in law school that says such and such? Do you have a response? Do you need to have a response? So you need to go through and do all those things. Ideally, you wanna do those things way before you get to the the president who intends to nominate.

You wanna clean all those things up, and you wanna have the answers ready. And you wanna sit down, and you have what, you know, what we call murder board, where you go through this really kind of terrible and unpleasant conversation where people ask you questions that are uncomfortable. You may not have good answers, and you work through those. Do you do you eventually get to the point, hopefully, where you say, yeah. This will be a little bit bumpy, but I’ve got good answers for everything.

I can explain everything, and there’s nothing out here in my past that we haven’t discussed that I don’t feel comfortable with. You wanna do that thorough because the last thing you wanna do is is have your boss up on the hill, ask a question about something in his past that you didn’t talk about beforehand because he’s gonna mumble. He’s gonna look stupid. He’s gonna look evasive. You need to have a clear answer that that has been practiced but isn’t isn’t you know, doesn’t sound rehearsed.

So you really need to spend the time to put them in that position to be effective, and, and you gotta be thorough to do it. It’s heavy stuff. It’s the price of admission, though, if you wanna serve. Media. Michael, let’s talk about media.

I know America First Legal’s in the media all the time. You guys use it to put out your your findings, your investigations. What’s the role of media in this whole oversight investigations conversation? Well, what well, Mike, the media is how we get your story told. As as Tom just said, this is all about storytelling at the end of the day.

That’s what a lot of congress does. Right? Like, with their hearings. What’s the point of doing a hearing if they don’t get any media coverage? So with everything that’s going on while you’re there as a political appointee, you’re trying to get your policies done, at the same time, other than thinking about the actual policy itself, which is complex stuff.

Right? This is, the governance of the of the republic. It it’s not easy stuff. You also, though, have to keep in mind that of how all your actions, all your decisions are gonna play out in the media. So that could be the policy itself and how it’s rolled out or also, you the deliberations that went into making that policy.

Right? Maybe you guys considered many options along the way. You have to wonder, if you’ve put these things in writing or discussed it, if this gets out in a hearing or in a document release, how is that going to look? Did you pick the most reasonable option, or did you pick some other, choice that there was another ulterior motive there or other hidden agenda? So those are all stories that people will tell whether or not it is what actually happened because they weren’t there.

They weren’t there in the room with you making those policies, but you still have to be mindful that there might be a plausible story that someone can tell. So you need to, you know, just like with the murder boards on Apple Research as an individual under the gun, you also have to think about, you know, how all the things you’re doing are going to play in the media. And if there’s a vulnerability there, someone’s gonna jump on it. They they absolutely are, especially when you account for the fact that 90% of the media is never going to give you a fair shake. So disabuse yourself then.

You know, should I give one piece of advice here that you’re gonna get a fair shake from the media? They’re out to get you from day 1. They’re not on your side. If they’re presenting themselves as as if they are, it’s because they wanna get you in a trap. So don’t fall for it.

Gentlemen, this has been a lot of fun talking about oversight investigations. But before we close it out, opportunity for for closing thoughts, piece of advice. Tom. Yeah. I I think despite all the doom and gloom we we presented for the the last few minutes, it’s a privilege to serve in the government.

And you’re gonna have, hopefully, an exciting president who’s really gonna lead the way. So do it right and serve him well, and you it’ll be the be the time of your life. And and you can do it if you take some precautions and you’re smart and you behave well and you and and do the job well. But, just be smart about it. Michael?

Yeah. Along the same lines there, there’s certainly going to be traps there, but you’re not gonna be alone. You’ll you’ll be there with a team. You’ll have other political appointees there with you who are also there to serve the president, serve the country. You’ll have, you know, attorneys, people who specialize in media and public relations.

You have people who specialize in dealing with Congress. So you’re not going to be the one who’s gonna have to figure it all out. You can certainly fall back and, you know, talk to them, and they’re gonna look out for you and look out for the president. That’s terrific. Gentlemen, thank you.

This is a lot of fun, and thank you all for watching. I hope this was helpful.