Inside President Obama's War On The Fast & Furious Whistleblowers

Frank Miniter, Contributor

I expose the excesses of the bureaucracy. 

Image by Getty Images Europe via @daylife

Legal Dictionary: Whistleblower: an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or other employees to the attention of a government or law-enforcement agency and who is commonly vested by statute with rights and remedies for retaliation
Slang Dictionary: Whistleblower: n. 
someone who calls a halt to something; an informer; an enforcer; a stool (pigeon): I don’t know who the whistle-blower was, but a good time was really ruined.

"Fast And Furious" Just Might Be President Obama's Watergate Capital Flows Contributor

 

 

The synonyms thesaurus.com gives for “whistleblower” are even less charitable than the word’s definition: canary, nark, rat, snake, snitch, squealer, stoolie, tattletale, weasel…. But none of these labels seem harsh enough to federal bureaucrats. They’ve left whistleblowers in legal limbo; they’ve barred whistleblowers from offices and forced others to transfer to backwater districts; they’ve mined records to publically disparage at least one recently (more on him in a moment); they’ve deemed a few to be “traitors” and had them shunned by colleagues … and this is just the beginning of what they’ve been doing to the few courageous squealers who exposed Operation Fast and Furious, the once-secret operation that, by design mind you, let thousands of guns “walk” from U.S. gun stores to the arsenals of Mexican drug cartels.

To find what is being done to protect these and other government whistleblowers, I sat down with Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA). He’s the Obama administration’s gadfly on this topic. Grassley was one of the original authors of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. Thanks to this legislation, if authorities in a federal agency take (or threaten to take) retaliatory action against a whistleblower, then they’ve broken the law. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats who often make life difficult for whistleblowers have had little to fear from this law.

The quasi-judicial agency that adjudicates government whistleblower complaints (called the Merit Systems Protection Board) uses appointed judges to hear whistleblower cases. These judges have more often than not sided with the government; in fact, since 2000, this board has ruled in favor of whistleblowers only about 5 percent of the time (just three times in 56 cases) according to a Government Accountability Project study.

Senator Grassley has criticized this board for allowing the federal bureaucracy to have its revenge on those who uncover corruption. More recently, he’s been working to update the Whistleblower Protection Act and he’s written multiple letters to Attorney General Eric Holder telling him not to punish whistleblowers.

As Senator Grassley is clearly passionate about this topic, I said, “Just speak your mind Senator Grassley. Don’t let me stop you.”

He smiled warmly and leaned over his Capitol Hill desk as he said, “Whistleblowing ruins people professionally. I’d say there’s more retaliation out there than you and I know about. Because of this, though people want to do right, by golly they can’t because they know they’re going to get hurt. This is why I’ve always advised presidents, going back to President Ronald Reagan, that we need a Rose Garden ceremony celebrating a whistleblower now and then. That way they’d know there is some support for standing up against corruption.”

Senator Grassley then pointed out that the first whistleblower to come forward about Fast and Furious (ATF Agent John Dodson) had recently been attacked by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). According to Senator Grassley, “Someone in the Justice Department leaked a document to the press along with talking points in an attempt to smear [Dodson.]” The letter insinuated that Dodson went rogue and started a gun-walking operation on his own. This was easy to prove false; however, if Republicans hadn’t taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 election (meaning an opposing political party wouldn’t have had the power to do an investigation) then Dodson would have been left dangling in these political winds, as records giving the complete picture would likely not have been available.

Senator Grassley pointed out that the documents DOJ released to smear Dodson were actually supposed to be so sensitive that the DOJ wouldn’t provide them to congressional investigators. But then, to harm a whistleblower, someone from the DOJ provided these specifically selected documents to the press. In fact, the name of the criminal suspect in the documents was redacted, but Agent Dodson’s name was left for all to see. “This looks like a clear and intentional violation of the Privacy Act as well as an attempt at whistleblower retaliation,” said Grassley.

 

In a subsequent letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Grassley said, “In a private phone conversation with me, you already told me that someone has been held accountable for this. But your staff refused to provide my staff with any details. Who was held accountable and how?”
No one at DOJ is known to have been held accountable for this attack on Dodson. Meanwhile, the whistleblowers who blew the top off Fast and Furious are paying the price.

• Agent John Dodson, after nearly a year of harassment, including being given menial assignments and being barred from areas of the ATF building in Phoenix, is in the process of trying to sell his home in Arizona so he can transfer to South Carolina.
• Agent Larry Alt transferred to Florida. He still has unresolved legal claims against the ATF.
• Agent Pete Forcelli was demoted to a desk job after he testified before Congress. He has requested an internal investigation to address retaliation targeting him.
• Agent James Casa took a transfer to Florida.
• Agent Carlos Canino, who was a deputy attache in Mexico City, was moved to Tucson.

Meanwhile the officials who went along with the operation and its subsequent cover up have mostly been rewarded. “These transfers/reassignments have never been described as promotions in any of the documents announcing them,” said an ATF statement after journalists noted that those who didn’t become whistleblowers profited from their silence. The ATF says that because these officials pay didn’t go up they weren’t promoted; however, in many cases their titles and positions have inarguably been enhanced.

• Former Acting ATF Chief Ken Melson, after refusing to be a scapegoat for this operation, became an adviser in the Office of Legal Affairs in Washington, D.C.
• Acting Deputy Director Billy Hoover is now the special agent in charge of the D.C. office.
• Deputy Director for Field Operations William McMahon—he’d received detailed briefings Fast and Furious—is now at the ATF’s Office of Internal Affairs.
• Former Special Agent in Charge of Phoenix William Newell—he oversaw Fast and Furious and lied by saying guns hadn’t been allowed to go south of the border—is now at the Office of Management in Washington, D.C.
• Phoenix Deputy Chief George Gillette is now in to Washington, D.C., as ATF’s liaison to the U.S. Marshal’s Service.
• ATF Group Supervisor David Voth—he managed Fast and Furious out of the Phoenix office—is now in a management position in Washington, D.C.
• Agent Hope McCallister—she had management duties on the team that ran Fast and Furious—was given a “Lifesaving Award” after it came to light she’d ordered agents to stop tailing suspects who the ATF had allowed to buy guns.

In light of all of this, Senator Grassley pivoted and said, “With regards to Operation Fast and Furious, we want the person at the highest level of government who approved Fast and Furious to be fired. We want justice for Brian Terry’s family—they still don’t know what happened that night when Brian was killed. And we want to know that this stupid program will never happen again.”

Then Senator Grassley highlighted a related issue that hasn’t made the headlines. This issue puts the politics behind the cover up of Fast and Furious in perspective. In November internal documents showed that the DOJ was considering changing existing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regulations (this is a process that allows citizens to seek and obtain unclassified documents) to allow agencies responding to a FOIA request to answer the person by saying “no records exist,” even if the records do, in fact, exist. This way when someone makes a request for government documents, the agency would be able to fib and thereby work to discourage other such requests. The idea was that agencies could do this whenever someone requested a document that the law allows the government to keep from the public, such one that has a “top-secret” rating.

“They were giving themselves a license to legally lie,” Senator Grassley deadpanned. “This was supposed to be the most transparent administration we’ve ever seen. Well, they’re not.”

After Senator Grassley’s staff made this attempt to give themselves a “license to legally lie” public the DOJ was “so embarrassed they withdrew the proposal right away,” said Senator Grassley.

So whistleblowers who’d been ordered to let guns “walk” in Operation Fast and Furious—and those federal employees who find themselves in other misguided programs or corruption—either can keep their mouths shut or they can come forward and be crushed by the bureaucracy as they attempt to reform the system. This isn’t a decision citizens in a country with the freedom of speech enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights should have to contend with.

Just when did the federal bureaucracy get so strong that it lost its fear of the people? Just when did the people become more afraid of the bureaucracy? Given the gauntlet whistleblowers now face, it isn’t surprising that Americans have become cynical about Washington; however, perhaps instead of deciding all politicians are tainted, we should instead realize it’s the growing bureaucratic swamp that needs to be drained.

In fact, saying all of Washington’s politicians are corrupt is too convenient a philosophy; such fashionable cynicism can even be self-fulfilling, as deciding all politicians are crooked doesn’t allow a Senator Grassley, for example, to now and then be a shining example of what a statesman should be.


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