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PHOENIX — Joseph V. Cuffari was so enthusiastic about what he called Donald Trump’s “huge win” in the 2016 presidential election that he applied for a job with the incoming administration within days.

Cuffari, then an adviser in the Arizona governor’s office, floated the idea of serving as an undersecretary in the Defense Department or in the Air Force or as the U.S. marshal for Arizona.

“I am proud to be a supporter and very interested in helping the administration meet the many challenges it faces,” Cuffari wrote in a letter dated Nov. 15, 2016, to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was the chairman of Trump’s transition team, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post via a public-records request.

Ultimately, Trump picked Cuffari as the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, a watchdog position that is considered nonpartisan and audits the department for fraud, waste and abuse. For weeks, key Democratic lawmakers have accused him of bungling the search for the Secret Service’s missing text messages from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, one of the most consequential probes in U.S. history, and have called for him to step aside. Cuffari has refused.

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The public standoff has focused attention on Cuffari, 62, a military veteran and public servant whose path from a politically appointed policy adviser for two Republican governors to DHS watchdog remains unknown to many of those around him, let alone the general public.

Cuffari had been a supervisor at a small office for the Justice Department’s inspector general office for more than a decade when he retired in 2013 after federal authorities determined that he had violated ethics rules in an Arizona case.

When the Trump administration picked him to serve as DHS inspector general, one of the largest such offices in federal government, he told the Senate at his confirmation hearing that a panel of government watchdogs had endorsed him for the job.

The watchdog panel, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, did not recommend Cuffari for the DHS job, however, according to a person familiar with the recommendation memo and its contents, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive material.

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A five-member candidate panel had interviewed Cuffari for the Defense Department inspector general position, the government’s largest watchdog agency, his emails show. But panel members advised Trump against nominating him for the Defense job, instead recommending that the White House consider him for a smaller agency — and did not suggest the DHS role, the person said.

Council members’ recommendations are not binding, but they can influence the White House and lawmakers, who approved Cuffari’s nomination after he told them that he had the council’s seal of approval. It is unclear whether Cuffari knew that he did not have the council’s support when he testified under oath before the Senate.

Council Executive Director Alan Boehm said the council sends such recommendations to the White House and does not share them with anyone else, including the candidates.

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Cuffari did not respond to interview requests or written questions about his path to his current role. In an earlier response to questions about the ethics report, his office said in a statement, “Dr. Cuffari is extremely proud of his 31-year federal service career.”

More than two dozen people who worked with Cuffari or were involved in his confirmation process said in interviews that they did not know how his name arrived on Trump’s desk.

Cuffari’s nomination marked a high point for the South Philadelphia native who joined the military right out of high school. His investigative career began in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, after he joined the military in 1978. He also worked as a reservist assigned to the Defense Department’s inspector general office in Washington.

His longest stretch as an investigator was in the Justice Department’s inspector general office, from 1993 to 2013, where he was selected to be part of a group that critiqued the FBI’s performance in uncovering the activities of former CIA spy Aldrich Ames, according to his resume obtained via a public records request and the report.

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His last assignment was as the assistant special agent in charge of a small field office in Tucson, where friends and former colleagues say he developed a reputation as a strait-laced and thorough investigator. He probed crimes and fraud, according to his resume.

“He was capable, sincere and competent,” Paul Charlton, the U.S. attorney for Arizona from 2001 to 2007, said in an interview.

Cuffari never rose high in the agency’s ranks. In November 2012, Justice Department lawyers filed an internal complaint against him saying that he had improperly testified in a civil lawsuit that an inmate had filed against the government, according to a copy of the report on the matter which a pair of House Democrats made public in August.

In the lawsuit, the inmate alleged that a pair of prison guards had beaten him inside the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson in 2008. The inmate’s lawyers considered Cuffari a valuable witness because he had investigated the possible criminal case against the guards, court records show. Prosecutors declined to file charges, but Cuffari told internal investigators that he had found “overwhelming evidence” of crimes.

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The Justice Department’s inspector general’s office concluded in 2013 that Cuffari violated ethics rules by referring the inmate and his family to law firms where his friends worked and then by testifying in the civil lawsuit without his supervisors’ permission, according to a copy of the report made public in August. Cuffari told investigators that federal law obliged him to inform the inmate of his right to file a civil suit.

Gerald Maltz, a lawyer who represented Leigh Weeden in the civil case, said in an interview the government settled the case for $500,000 in 2013. He described Cuffari as a “true Boy Scout” and said they did not discuss the case.

Cuffari retired as the assistant special agent in charge of the field office in Tucson weeks after the 2013 report.

Weeks later, he started a new job as a policy adviser in the Arizona governor’s office, first for Gov. Jan Brewer and later Gov. Doug Ducey, both Republicans. He stayed for six years and focused first on public safety issues, then on military and veterans’ affairs, state officials said.

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A former aide for Brewer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about a former colleague, said Cuffari seemed to have “a great pedigree” because he had a doctorate and had worked at the Justice Department. But Cuffari irked some staffers by encouraging them to call him “doctor.”

Cuffari’s resume says he has a Ph.D. in management from California Coast University, a college that the government in 2004 flagged as a “diploma mill.” California Coast University Chief Academic Officer Murl Tucker said the school disagreed with that characterization, and requires coursework and a dissertation. Tucker acknowledged that the school was not nationally accredited when Cuffari attended, from 1998 to 2002.

After Ducey was elected governor, Cuffari considered returning to investigations, according to a former Ducey aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the administration.

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Cuffari supported the governor’s push for a state inspector general’s position, according to three former Ducey aides. One of the aides said Cuffari told him that he wanted the job. Lawmakers rejected the plan, handing the governor a loss at the state capital.

Cuffari job hunted in earnest — often using his governor’s office email address — after Trump’s election in 2016. In an October 2017 email to the Trump administration’s White House Personnel Office, also obtained by The Post through a public-records request, Cuffari suggested he be named as an assistant secretary for Homeland Security.

In another email that month to then-Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), Cuffari said he had interviewed for the Defense Department’s inspector general job. He thanked Shuster for offering to speak with a White House official on his behalf. Shuster did not respond to requests for comment.

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“While I am still very interested in that position, I have become aware that there are existing vacancies at the Department of Homeland Security,” Cuffari wrote, mentioning that Senate barber Mario D’Angelo was a mutual connection and that Cuffari had relatives in Philadelphia.

D’Angelo said he has known Cuffari for years, and cut his hair, but did not remember how he helped him. “I introduce a lot of people to each other,” D’Angelo said.

Trump picked Cuffari for the DHS job in November 2018. Then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Cuffari would be “an invaluable member of the Department’s leadership team,” raising concerns about his independence as a watchdog. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) temporarily put a hold on his nomination until they could meet in person, Senate aides said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations.

Cuffari assured Durbin that he would “clean up” the DHS inspector general office, Cuffari later recalled in a letter. The DHS office was riddled with problems long before he arrived — problems that the Government Accountability Office flagged would take time to address — such as difficulty meeting deadlines and quality-control failures that led to the retraction of 13 reports.

At his 2019 confirmation hearing, lawmakers from both parties praised him and he had letters of recommendation on file from the retired chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, who had been appointed by a Democrat, the state inspector general in Louisiana and retired Air Force officers.

It is unclear how much the senators knew about his record then — Cuffari disclosed the Justice Department’s internal investigation to them, but the 2013 report’s findings were not made public until August, more than nine years later.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that it vetted Cuffari for the Senate and, as part of that process, would have asked Cuffari’s former bosses at the inspector general’s office for “any potential derogatory information” about him.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office would not say if his agency provided the FBI with a copy of the 2013 ethics report on Cuffari. The FBI declined to say if the bureau received the report from Horowitz’s office. Horowitz’s office and the FBI referred questions about the report to each other.

Cuffari told the Senate during his confirmation process that he was not punished after the ethics investigation. A Cuffari spokesperson said last month via email that he retired with a “spotless” record and “glowing written feedback” from top officials, including Horowitz.

Stephanie Logan, a spokeswoman for Horowitz’s office, said the office does not comment on personnel matters.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that held Cuffari’s confirmation hearing, did not respond to questions about the committee’s vetting.

A committee staffer for Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the committee’s top Democrat at the time, asked Cuffari about the ethics report in a meeting, according to a Democratic Senate aide who spoke the on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The aide said members of both parties did not press for a copy of the report.

In July 2019, the Senate unanimously confirmed Cuffari in a voice vote.

Months into the job, Cuffari and his office faced criticism for weakening oversight of DHS. Lawmakers and the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight said his office failed to report details about domestic abuse and sexual harassment inside DHS. Critics also noted that his office rebuffed requests to investigate issues such as the legality of the appointments of top DHS officials and the Secret Service’s role in the forced clearing of protesters near the White House in 2020.

Then, in July, Cuffari stunned the House and Senate Homeland Security committees with a letter that said the Secret Service had “erased” text messages from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol after he’d asked for them. Lawmakers at first demanded more information from the Secret Service.

But lawmakers soon realized that Cuffari’s office had known about the missing messages for months and never told them, and that his office also blocked efforts to retrieve the texts.

Agents shadow the president and other top officials and the texts could provide information about their communications and actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to overthrow the presidential election. Pence, among many in danger at the Capitol that day, did not respond to questions about Cuffari.

Three leading Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), head of the House Oversight Committee, and Durbin, who voted to confirm Cuffari, have urged him to step aside from the Secret Service investigation.

Durbin said on the Senate floor Aug. 2 that Cuffari was not the right person to investigate what happened.

“I don’t know whether the failure to preserve these critical government texts of January 6 is a result of bad faith or stunning incompetence, but I do know that the man who has overseen this fiasco is not the right person to investigate it,” Durbin said. “This man has lost whatever credibility he may have once had on this matter.”

Cuffari told Democratic lawmakers that he would not recuse himself. He has also opened a criminal investigation into missing texts, paralyzing other agencies’ efforts to retrieve the messages. He told the Secret Service to stop trying to find the messages.

The National Archives and Records Administration asked about the missing records but said July 25 that they typically let internal investigations resolve before pursuing answers to their questions.

Durbin has urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to use his authority under federal law to remove Cuffari from the Secret Service inquiry.

President Biden has the authority to fire inspectors general, but the White House has declined to intervene so far.

Cuffari has signaled that he intends to stay.

“Thank you for the past three years,” Cuffari wrote to his staff in a July 29 email obtained by The Post. “I look forward to many more to come!”

Wingett Sanchez reported from Phoenix and Sacchetti and Rein reported from Washington.

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