Remember

[BumRushDaShow]

59. Again, unless you are working for DOJ

which has over 100,000 employees, you have no idea what they have or have not been doing. It's idiotic to get out in the press for the benefit of DU and lay out a criminal case to be discussed by the teevee pundits so that the other side knows how to defend themselves.

This current issue is dealing with a civilian (regulatory) agency - NARA - who has attempted for the past almost 2 years, to get their documents back. Every agency and Department (including the WH) has a "Records Control Schedule" of what is and is not a "record", and how long it is to be held before destruction (or whether it would be held "permanently" ). We had to have annual training on that law. There are NARA warehouses located all around the country where documents that are archived, per their schedules, are stored, and everything is tracked.

The Schedules are listed here - https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/schedules/index.html

Someone had to go through that schedule for the Office of the President to see what is and is not covered and then do an inventory, cross-checking with the curators. And once NARA got some stuff back, they had to sort through it and determine which agency/Department "owned" the document(s) and then look at their records schedules, as well as work with them to come up with next steps for dealing with their document inventories.

NARA cannot independently criminally prosecute a damn thing. They go to DOJ once they have exhausted their own internal escalation procedures, no different from the agency that I retired from, which was also "regulatory" civilian and would also go through steps with our own internal Office of Chief Counsel to attempt to get regulated industry to comply with our requests. When that didn't work, we would finally go to DOJ and the U.S. Marshall's Office, to "take it to the max", with injunctions, searches, seizures, criminal prosecutions (e.g. prosecuting CEOs of companies), and what have you. It's a MAJOR production to do this.

I think a lot of it is understandably a lack of understanding of how the civilian/regulatory agencies differ from and deal with the law-enforcement ones, and how interdependent they are.

DOJ is not going to "reach in and grab workload". An agency that would need them would be providing them with evidence that they will use to build the civil and/or criminal cases. They can only work as fast as the regulatory agency provides them evidence and can then supplement that, from the law-enforcement side (through searches and seizures once a warrant is obtained). Then they put it all together to present to a grand jury if they feel they have enough to go for it.

I know in my agency, having worked in a government lab, both my worksheets and diary were subject to (and were used for) evidentiary purposes for cases that DOJ locally here in Philly, were putting together for firms in this area. In most cases, these companies would settle out of court and we would often negotiate Consent Decrees (which itself is a lot of work to put together), but in other cases, some of my colleagues (thankfully not me) actually testified in the trials of the arrogant asses.

So it's not like what is "on TV". It's messier than that. Hell... DOJ had (and I expect still has) it's own Word Perfect "template" that we had to use to fill in our applicable CFR citations, etc.

So unless you have "been there done that", you can't know what is going on "behind the scenes" in cases like this and it doesn't happen "overnight".