The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General recently released a report focusing on how the department’s various agencies respond to sexual-harassment and misconduct allegations. The Drug Enforcement Administration seems to have had several problems in these areas, according to the Huffington Post. Seven agents serving in Colombia were allegedly hosting “sex parties” with prostitutes paid with drug-cartel money. The DOJ was “particularly troubled” by these parties, which involved agents with top-secret clearances and took place “over a period of several years.”
The parties were held in government spaces that housed laptops, BlackBerries, and other devices with information that could “potentially expos[e] them to extortion, blackmail, or coercion.” The DEA inspector told higher-ups that it was “common for prostitutes to be present at business meetings involving cartel members and foreign officers.”
The report goes on to note that some of the agents were in the middle of investigating the police officers accusing them of misconduct.
House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz told Politico, “You can’t ignore this. This is terribly embarrassing and fundamentally not right.”
More broadly, the report found that the second most common offense agents at DOJ agencies were accused of was sexting, although the report was unable “to determine the actual number.” The most common alleged offense at DOJ agencies was “inappropriate relationship.” The report concludes that “[o]verall, we found there were relatively few reported allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the Department’s law enforcement components.”
There were several other cases mentioned in the report. An FBI supervisor was accused of “repeated unprofessional behavior, including cornering his subordinates in their cubicles and displaying the size of his genitals by tightening his pants, making graphic and inappropriate sexual comments and gestures, and otherwise creating a hostile work environment.” Another DEA officer was accused of requesting an assistant to “watch pornographic movies; and routinely threw items, yelled at employees, and used other vulgarities in the office and at official functions, among other allegations.”
