After vowing to run a transparent government, President Obama oversaw an unprecedented legal assault on whistleblowers, only now offering up a modest concession, as Linda Lewis explains.
By Linda Lewis
A finding by an Obama administration panel – reached last May but only now becoming public – that the National Security Agency’s inspector general improperly retaliated against a whistleblower may be an attempt to gussy up President Obama’s otherwise ugly legacy for punishing government officials who protest wrongdoing.
Seal of the National Security Agency
The private watchdog group, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), reports that a three-person panel — authorized by Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 19 and consisting of inspectors general from the CIA, Treasury and Justice — concluded last May that the NSA’s inspector general retaliated against a whistleblower whose identity has not been released.
Based on the panel’s finding, NSA Director Michael Rogers sent NSA Inspector General George Ellard a termination notice. Ellard is now on administrative leave while he appeals the decision.
This newly disclosed finding also is relevant to the high-profile case of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who decided in 2013 that the only way to alert the public to the NSA’s warrantless bulk collection of electronic data on Americans was to take his information to the news media. After Snowden fled the United States and ended up stranded in Russia, Ellard disputed Snowden’s claim that internal protests would not have worked. Ellard said in 2014, “Snowden could have come to me. We have surprising success in resolving the complaints that are brought to us.”
Now, Ellard faces termination over his alleged retaliation against a whistleblower who did go through channels with a complaint reportedly about alleged overspending on a conference, an abuse far less sensitive than the ones Snowden exposed.
This controversy appears to be the first whistleblower case in the intelligence community to receive a high-level review since Obama’s PPD-19 was issued in 2012. Information about the case, described by POGO as “closely held but…