James McDevitt, the U.S. attorney for Eastern Washington, reversed his earlier public promise to release the names, saying last week that a Justice Department policy prevents him from releasing them.

The region’s senior federal law enforcement official took that stand Wednesday after one of his staff prosecutors, assistant U.S. attorney George J.C. Jacobs, said in court that the buyers’ use of such bogus degrees in the health care, engineering and other professions “puts the public at risk.”

“I was hoping at some time we could release the list of names of these buyers,” McDevitt said in an interview. “I’d love to release the list, but I’ve been convinced it would be contrary to (Department of Justice) policy,” he said.

That decision is expected to draw criticism from higher education and academic accreditation agencies, as well as open-government groups.

“I can’t imagine why they would not make this information public,” a woman who works at a Spokane-area college said Thursday in an e-mail requesting buyers’ names from The Spokesman-Review.

“Who are they trying to protect?” she asked. .

McDevitt said the task force investigation did forward the buyers list to the federal Office of Personnel Management – the federal employee clearinghouse – in the hope that the agency will forward identities of federal employees to the appropriate agencies. The federal agency has refused federal Freedom of Information Act requests for the information.

Court hearings in the Spokane case disclosed that at least one of the purchasers worked in the White House and dozens of others were Department of Defense employees. One Army enlisted man became an officer and went off to lead soldiers in Iraq with one of the Spokane degrees, according to court testimony and documents.

McDevitt’s office did file as public record a detailed analysis of “Operation Gold Shield,” the four-year investigation that led to the indictment and conviction of Dixie Ellen Randock, of Colbert, and seven others.

The analysis shows 7,298 degrees were sold throughout the United States and 9,165 more to purchasers in 130 countries around the world. Some purchasers bought multiple degrees from the Spokane-based operation, which also sold counterfeit diplomas from real universities.

The Spokane diploma mill sold to 32 individuals living in what the U.S. State Department labels “terrorist nation states,” including Iran and Syria, and more than 100 others in a half dozen other countries in the Middle East and Latin America that harbor terrorist groups. Their names are on the same buyers list that’s being kept from the public.