Darlene Hutchinson Biehl, an Alabama Republican who has headed the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) during the Trump administration, will leave her post next week and become a “senior advisor of victim affairs” in the agency.
Gary Barnett will be acting OVC director as of Sunday. Barnett was an aide to former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and later chief of staff to Matthew Whitaker, who served as acting Attorney General between former AG Jeff Sessions and current AG William Barr.
The changes were made by Katharine Sullivan, the senior official in the Office of Justice Programs, which oversees OVC and other DOJ grant-making, research and statistics agencies.
Sullivan did not explain the reasons for the shift in a short email to OVC staffers late Monday, just before the federal Christmas Eve and Christmas Day holidays. She called the former director, who is listed officially under her middle name in OVC’s web page, “an incredible, valuable member of our team.”
Justice Department insiders said Hutchinson was considered an inadequate manager who had made controversial decisions.
The agency granted more than $3.4 billion in the last federal fiscal year from a national crime victim fund created by Congress in 1984. It was the bulk of the agency’s largest budget in history.
The money was awarded to thousands of local victim assistance programs across the U.S. “to help compensate victims in every state for crime-related losses,” the agency says.
Congress recently reduced the annual allocation for victims to about $2.1 billion in the current fiscal year, to insure that the national fund is not unduly depleted.
Observers of the agency interpreted this week’s personnel move as a removal of Hutchinson, but it was not immediately clear whether she is leaving her position of her own accord.
In September, Reuters reported that Local 2830 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents employees in the Office of Justice Programs, filed a filed a complaint with the Justice Department’s Inspector General, alleging that Hutchinson may have improperly used political criteria she learned from social media to remove people who expressed views contrary to Trump’s from serving as “peer reviewers” to assess potential OVC grants.
Reuters said the union’s complaint included copies of internal documents showing lists of peer reviewers’ names along with notes indicating that Hutchinson checked potential peer reviewers’ profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Some employees believe the rejection of some peer reviewers was based on views expressed on social media, the complaint alleged.
A Justice Department official denied that Hutchinson was making politically motivated decisions. The official acknowledged that she had eliminated about 20 resumes out of hundreds of reviewers.
The official said that Hutchinson was justified in looking into peer reviewers’ views on prostitution because the law that funds grants on human trafficking that are awarded by OVC bans recipients from using the money to lobby for or promote the legalization of prostitution.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee described the union complaint as containing “disturbing allegations.”
Current and former DOJ officials said the OVC director has not been actively involved in the final stage of selecting peer reviewers.
“I never once in 10 years selected a peer reviewer,” said Laurie Robinson, former head of the Office of Justice Programs, of which OVC is a part. “That is how it should be – that the person who signs grants is not involved in selecting peer reviewers.”
The agency also made the news in October when the Trump administration abruptly delayed a $13.5 million grant to house human trafficking victims five days after saying that “non-citizens” could be served by the program.
The funds had been sent by Hutchinson to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and later were returned to OVC, NBC News reported.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been critical of the crime victim agency, noting last month that since Congress tripled the annual amount of spending on victim-aid programs in recent years, “some states had difficulty adhering to spending requirements as a result of ambiguous and evolving … grant expenditure criteria.”
However, the Horowitz report did not single out Hutchinson by name, and some of the agency’s grant problems may have predated her tenure.
According to the DOJ website, Hutchinson had volunteered for 10 years as a victim advocate at rape crisis centers in Alabama and Texas and served for seven years as president of an Alabama victims’ support and advocacy group.
She also worked in publishing, including eight years as editor of law enforcement publications in Alabama, Washington, D.C., and Texas.
The site said Hutchinson “first became aware of the inadequacies of the justice system and the needs of crime victims after being kidnapped at gunpoint from a small-town post office when she was 20 years old.”
Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Journalists and Washington Bureau chief of The Crime Report.