Even in better times, the Justice Department’s international unit would work around-the-clock, only to see the piles of requests for overseas evidence and fugitives keep growing.
Its pace often frustrated impatient prosecutors, who risk losing valuable information, witnesses, or arrests if they fail to seize on a time-sensitive tip, said several former DOJ attorneys.
And when the Office of International Affairs does navigate sensitive diplomatic relations to deliver a star witness or complex extradition to help secure a major conviction, the trial attorneys they assist gain the acclaim.
More recently, the longstanding difficulties confronting OIA appear to be exacerbated, according to a description of its “workload challenges” tucked inside the department’s latest budget analysis for Congress. And that’s three years after an internal DOJ watchdog diagnosed the office as suffering from soaring caseloads, antiquated technology, morale concerns, and high attrition.
Driven by the increasingly globalized nature of crime, OIA is taking on more responsibilities yet with stagnant staffing, the Criminal Division alerted Congress in the budget document. That’s among the forces that “will continue to slow down” the US response to cross-border offenses, the division said.
The trend worries former prosecutors and agents, who expect an under-resourced OIA will pose impediments to a wide range of investigations, from white-collar corruption to drug trafficking.
Law enforcement veterans say they couldn’t have achieved prison sentences for high-profile targets like former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman without OIA leveraging international relationships and deep institutional knowledge.
“They’re not the ones trying the cases, they’re not the ones taking the credit, but they are absolutely indispensable to the process,” said Bryan Earl, a retired FBI official. Earl said he worked “hand in glove” with OIA during his six-year investigation that took down Lazarenko for money laundering.
Gina Parlovecchio said the office was also instrumental to her Brooklyn prosecution team’s trial of El Chapo. On top of extraditing him to New York, OIA collaborated with the governments of Colombia, Ecuador, and the Netherlands to collect the evidence culminating in his guilty verdict and life sentence.
Yet in other matters, she witnessed its shortcomings.
“They would always do their best, but sometimes even if you had good intelligence about where someone was located, you wouldn’t be able to get the paperwork in place in time. So that was an issue back then,” said Parlovecchio, who left DOJ’s Eastern District of New York in 2020. Now that OIA is even more overworked, “I can imagine it creates difficulties across the entire spectrum of a criminal case.”
The office is currently funded to hire a maximum of 170 employees. Headcount has “remained relatively stable” in the past few years, the department said, after the DOJ Inspector General’s Office last tallied it at 154 in fiscal 2020.
‘Extremely Complex’
OIA functions as a 24-hour hotline of sorts. It juggles demands from federal, state, and local prosecutors in the US and other countries seeking US-stored information. The evidence often has nothing to do with domestic crime except a defendant communicated on Gmail or other services based in the US.
It also prepares briefings for constant overseas trips taken by other DOJ officials and has a new team dedicated to implementing a 2018 evidence-sharing law by negotiating agreements with foreign counterparts.
“I don’t know of another federal office that has that kind of responsibility,” Bruce C. Swartz, the Criminal Division deputy assistant attorney general overseeing OIA, said in an interview. “It is an extremely complex process, and layered on top of it all is just the need for being able to change focus immediately if there’s an emergency case where you have to have somebody apprehended and transferred.”
Swartz, a veteran department adviser on international issues, said the volume of requests for extraditions and evidence under Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties has continued to rise in the time since the 2021 inspector general report chronicled an overworked team.
That audit showed the number of OIA cases opened per year grew nearly70% from fiscal 2014 to 2020. Each OIA attorney typically manages at least 120 to 150 open cases at once—and that’s an ideal level—the inspector general found.
The typical case runs the gamut from gang violence and drugs to cybercrime and financial misconduct.
OIA serves a “really important” function by working with foreign law enforcement, but “the problem is that they have a very large docket, they have high turnover, and they have a lot of assignments,” said Jerrob Duffy, who left DOJ in 2022 after two decades, most recently as chief of litigation for the criminal fraud section. “Oftentimes the pace of their work and workflow is slow and it can be inconsistent with the pace of your average federal criminal prosecution.”
Former attorneys in the office said they cherished working as the go-between for the US with international prosecutors. Some acknowledged that it could be thankless at times, as their need to maintain relationships with the nations they covered are sometimes in tension with the desires of their colleagues prosecuting cases for DOJ.
Samer Korkor, who covered the Middle East, Asia, and Africa in his stint at OIA, said his work often involved a “necessarily slow process,” particularly involving countries that lacked treaties with the US.
Budget Challenges
Despite highlighting OIA’s situation as one of the Criminal Division’s top challenges, the department’s budget was noticeably silent on whether Congress should provide additional resources to resolve the problems.
That may speak to an obstacle the office has previously experienced in convincing more senior DOJ officials and congressional appropriators to prioritize its finances over other units that attract more publicity. They include offices that lead foreign bribery or sanctions evasion investigations.
“One of the challenges that you always have with a section like OIA is that it’s not the shiny new toy that everyone wants to play with,” said Leslie Caldwell, who headed the Criminal Division from 2014-2017. “It’s the toy that’s always been there and will always be there.”
Asked to explain why an increase wasn’t sought for OIA, a department spokesperson said in a statement that the president’s fiscal 2025 budget request “represents the balance that has been struck for many different needs” in a “fiscally-constrained environment.” While the Criminal Division and OIA “can certainly do more with additional resources,” the requested amount would allow the division to “successfully execute its mission.”
Chief Negotiator
One more recent source of strain came when OIA assumed new duties as the principal US implementer of the 2018 Clarifying Overseas Use of Data, or CLOUD, Act.
While the statute is expected in the long-run to reduce the deluge of requests from overseas for US-hosted information, it has the short-term effect of making life more difficult for the office, which now must negotiate country-specific individual agreements.
“This new mission and role have required OIA to shift personnel and resources that would normally support other operations to a new CLOUD Act team,” the budget stated. “At the same time, and without additional personnel, OIA must maintain sufficient staffing on its traditional work streams.”
Swartz said the department is trying to find creative solutions to maximize the office’s limited resources. For instance, he’s working on spreading the message to prosecutors that they should pursue informal means of gathering evidence directly from overseas counterparts, reserving their formal Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty requests with OIA for scenarios when the information is necessary for trial.
The fact remains, however, that as bank records, fleeing individuals, and other necessary information is increasingly found abroad, the international unit is likely to become more central to the department’s overall criminal enforcement mission.
“They just have a huge job,” Caldwell said, “and it’s kind of one of those neverending jobs, like pushing the rock up the hill and having it roll back down, and having to push it again.”
