Public Servants Are Risking Everything to Expose Government Corruption; Trump Is Making Their Lives Hell

Trump has abused, threatened, and intimidated whistleblowers. Now people are terrified to come forward.  This is how authoritarian states work.  This is a banana republic.

In the months since the Senate acquitted Trump of two impeachment charges, the president has declared an all-out assault on whistleblowing.

Beginning in April, the president dismissed inspectors general—the very people whistleblowers can confidentially turn to in order to report corruption, waste, and abuse of power—in five different departments in the span of just six weeks, starting with Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who alerted Congress to the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s Ukraine phone call.

Between 2014 and 2018, more than 14,000 federal employees filed whistleblower disclosures or retaliation complaints, according to data compiled by the Government Accountability Office.

And while advocates were outraged by the treatment of the intelligence officer in the Ukraine matter, they’re more concerned about the atmosphere of rank-and-file corruption that has flourished within the Trump administration and the less obvious attacks on the system, and how the current political atmosphere might impede the sort of whistleblowing that is required for competent government.

Trump's war on whistleblowers is worse than you realize. 

Since Trump took office, the climate for whistleblowing at the VA and across the federal government has never been worse. Federal workers who want to report wrongdoing or corruption in their workplace don’t just risk becoming a professional pariah, but can be turned into pawns in a hyper-partisan political landscape.

Retaliatory actions against whistleblowers are increasingly common and GOP lawmakers threaten to dox and punish these public servants for exposing corruption. And it’s all legal thanks to the weak federal whistleblowing laws that the Trump administration has skillfully exploited.

One of the most important whistleblowers in history led to Trump being rightfully impeached.  That incredibly patriotic individual was attacked endlessly because of it.

In hundreds of statements about the whistleblower—from bullying tweets to negative comments made to reporters—Trump didn’t just publicly question the person’s motives and dispute their account; he threatened retaliation and called for the person’s identity to be revealed.

Several Republican members of Congress also claimed to know the whistleblower’s identity and repeatedly tried to name them. When the House Intelligence Committee released its official impeachment inquiry report, it offered a particularly grim summary: “Most chillingly, the President issued a threat against the whistleblower and those who provided information to the whistleblower regarding the President’s misconduct, suggesting that they could face the death penalty for treason.”

“It’s really a democracy preserving system, consistent with the Constitution,” said Allison Stanger, author of the book Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump, of modern whistleblowing laws. “It’s specifically rooted in law, and it’s something that both Republicans and Democrats alike, until very recently, supported.”

Whistleblowing, after all, has a long history of bringing lawmakers together. Ever since the Revolutionary War, when 10 American naval officers reported on their commodore torturing captured British soldiers, Congress has recognized that protecting the rights of whistleblowers is the best defense against corruption.

The Whistleblower Protection Act, which passed through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in 1989, set up modern whistleblowing laws, granting several federal offices with the authority to properly investigate any disclosures while protecting the employees who filed them. 

In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act into law, which added more protections from retaliation for federal whistleblowers. It had passed Congress with unanimous consent.

That changed with Trump.

Please read the full article below.

Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/donald-trump-war-on-whistleblowers/