Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, speaks in October at the 18th annual Legal Reform Summit, held at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi / NLJ

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Monday highlighted the U.S. Department of Justice's efforts to instill a sense of ethical responsibility within its ranks, a day after President Donald Trump demanded an investigation into whether the department or the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign for political purposes.

Trump's demand, made in a Sunday tweet, struck some legal observers as going beyond his regular approach of impugning the department's integrity and crossing into the more questionable territory of ordering up an investigation. The department responded by asking its internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General, to expand an ongoing inquiry into the surveillance of a former Trump campaign official. Rosenstein said Sunday: “If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action.”

Speaking at a conference in Washington, Rosenstein on Monday did not directly address Trump's Sunday diatribe about the Russia investigation, which the president again derided as a “witch hunt.” Rosenstein, standing before a crowd of corporate compliance professionals gathered for the event, hosted by Compliance Week Inc., spoke generally about the inspector general's office and other sections that collectively serve as the DOJ's own compliance department.

“The Department of Justice faces some of the same challenges companies do. We work to instill a culture of compliance from the first day a new lawyer takes the oath of office in the Department of Justice,” Rosenstein said in his remarks.

“We stress the need to act ethically and to do justice. We expect our prosecutors, our law enforcement agents and other personnel to be thinking about their ethical obligations with every decision that we make,” he added. “And we have integrated that into the daily operations of our business. Newly hired attorneys undergo significant training, including training about professionalism and ethics. We impose other mandatory, annual professionalism requirements, and we follow up and require our attorneys to complete them.”

Rosenstein's response to Trump's Sunday tweets marked just the latest instance of the DOJ inspector general's office finding itself in national headlines. Trump complained in February that the surveillance investigation had been handed over to the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, saying the move was “disgraceful” and that the inquiry would “take forever.”

Rosenstein stressed that the inspector general's office and the separate Office of Professional Responsibility serve as the “internal affairs watchdogs for ethical issues and other violations of department rules and policies.” In 1994, five years after the creation of the inspector general's office, the Justice Department started the Professional Responsibility Officer Program, which put a legal expert in ethics “in each one of our components,” Rosenstein said.

“And,” he added, “we formally created a professional responsibility advisory office in 1999 to provide a centralized hub for advice on ethics throughout the department.”

For at least the third time in recent weeks, Rosenstein also used his public remarks to draw attention to the U.S. Senate's delay confirming several nominees for top Justice Department posts, including the Trump administration's picks to lead the criminal, civil and civil rights divisions.

Two minutes into his remarks, Rosenstein said he was “very honored to be here”—but appeared to long for more Senate-confirmed company atop the Justice Department.

“Two months ago, I received invitations to several corporate fraud-related events focused on the department's role, and I expected to delegate some of these events to those outstanding nominees for assistant attorney general who are awaiting confirmation by the United States Senate,” Rosenstein said. “Drawing on their highly qualified backgrounds and experiences, they would help implement and spread our message about deterring corporate fraud and promoting the rule of law. Unfortunately only two of the seven litigating divisions of the Department of Justice have Senate-confirmed leaders.”

Rosenstein named Kirkland & Ellis partners Brian Benczkowski and Jeffrey Clark, the administration's picks to lead the criminal and environmental divisions, respectively. He noted that the Senate also has yet to vote on the nominations of Jody Hunt for the Civil Division and Jones Day partner Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division.

“Most of them have been waiting an entire year to get a vote for an executive branch job that typically only lasts for a few years,” Rosenstein said. “It's not a way to run a government.”

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