Between 1993 and 2013, he worked for the Department of Justice, culminating in an assignment as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the Office of the Inspector General in Tucson, Arizona.[3] A 2013 investigation into Cuffari’s conduct concluded that he misled investigators and violated the inspector general manual when testifying in a civil lawsuit without approval of his superiors.[4] The report raised doubts about Cuffari recommending law firms run by his friends to a complainant in a case he had worked on.[5] The report also stated that while analyzing his government e-mail account the investigation found other items that could warrant further investigation. However, Cuffari left the position a month after the report was issued to work as policy advisor for Military and Veterans Affairs for Governors Jan Brewer and Doug Ducey of Arizona.[3][6]
Cuffari was nominated by Donald Trump[11] and was confirmed by a voice vote[12] in the U.S. Senate as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General (IG) on July 25, 2019.[3] Upon being confirmed he pledged to continue unannounced inspections of immigration detention facilities.[13]
Cuffari also sought to limit the scope of the investigation into the spread of COVID-19 within the Secret Service, which had been attributed to the Trump Re-Election Campaign's not following COVID guidelines.[14][15] It was later reported that 881 employees of the Secret Service had been infected with COVID, more than 11% of the agency.[16]
Following Brian Murphy's September 2020 whistleblower complaint about Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli, and Kirstjen Nielsen politicizing Department of Homeland Security assets to support the views of both Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, Cuffari began his inspector general (IG) investigation into alleged misconduct at Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the November 2020 elections.[17][18][19][20][21][22][23] The DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis released no "intelligence products specific for the January 6", 2021 attack on the Capitol.[24] On April 27, 2021, Brian Volsky, the former head of the DHS inspector general's whistleblower protection unit, filed a memo with CIGIE accusing Cuffari and James Read, who was the DHS IG counsel to Cuffari and Kristen Fredricks (who was Cuffari's DHS IG chief of staff) of mishandling Brian Murphy's complaints.[25][26]
In December 2021, Cuffari's office learned that Secret Service text messages from the time of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 had been deleted. Staff members of his office planned to contact the respective offices, collect the phones and use data recovery specialists to try to recover the messages. However, Cuffari decided not to review any of the phones. He informed Congress in July 2022 in a letter that the text messages were lost. Cuffari learned in February 2022 that text messages of former acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and acting DHS Deputy Ken Cuccinelli were lost in a reset after they left the DHS. He did not investigate the deletion of these records.[27][28] In August 2022, the chairs of the Oversight and Reform Committee and Committee on Homeland Security accused Cuffari of hampering the Congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and made public a letter he wrote refusing to share documents related to the investigation or to allow members of his office to be interviewed. [29][30][31]
In October 2022, NPR reported that the majority of lawyers in the Office of Counsel had left. The departures often stemmed from the lawyers' unease with how Joseph Cuffari managed the watchdog role. Earlier in 2022, the Senate Judiciary Committee's top leaders raised concerns that Cuffari downplayed widespread reports of sexual harassment and misconduct at DHS. In May 2022, Cuffari issued a scathing response, shifting the blame onto lower-level employees in his agency.[32]
^ abcdefgh"Meet the IG". U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General. Archived from the original on 2019-11-08. Retrieved 2019-10-22.
^"Meet the IG". Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Archived from the original on November 30, 2019. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
^ abLeonnig, Carol D. (20 April 2021). "DHS watchdog declined to pursue investigations into Secret Service during Trump administration, documents show". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 11 June 2021. Retrieved 20 April 2021. Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, rejected his staff's recommendation to investigate what role the Secret Service played in the forcible clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square on June 1, according to internal documents and two people familiar with his decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the discussions.
^Leonnig, Carol D. (20 April 2021). "DHS watchdog declined to pursue investigations into Secret Service during Trump administration, documents show". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 11 June 2021. Retrieved 20 April 2021. Cuffari told the team they should narrow the probe, and suggested only examining how the spread of the coronavirus affected the Secret Service's investigative work rather than its protection assignments. But coronavirus infections in the Secret Service were falling the hardest on agents and officers working protective roles, who were required to travel around the country to secure public rallies for Trump's campaign.
^Boak, Josh (2021-06-22). "Almost 900 Secret Service employees were infected with COVID". Assoc. Archived from the original on June 22, 2021. Retrieved June 22, 2021. Secret Service records show that 881 people on the agency payroll were diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 1, 2020 and March 9, 2021, according to documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. More than 11% of Secret Service employees were infected.
