Tag: war on whistleblowers

‘Loyal Public Servants’: Whistleblowers Punished for Exposing Hunter Biden Protection Scheme Reach Settlement

Compensation being paid, and DOJ using ‘this example’ to train federal prosecutors.

Two former FBI officials who were punished under the Biden administration for their efforts to expose a protection scheme for first son Hunter Biden now have reached settlements in their lawsuits.

Hunter Biden, of course, faced both gun and tax charge convictions, cases that could have left him behind bars for years.

Then his daddy gave him a get-out-of-jail free card through a presidential pardon that Joe Biden actually signed, unlike many of his pardons that were issued through autopen signatures.

The settlements were reached for former Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joe Ziegler who had charged illegal retaliation against them.

The settlements with the IRS and Justice Department (DOJ) “included significant compensation for damages and a requirement for new training for federal prosecutors to deter future whistleblower retaliation.”

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COVID Whistleblower Sentenced to 4 More Years in Prison Over Reporting: Rights Group

Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan has been sentenced to another four years in prison for her early reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic as it initially broke out in China, according to French international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Zhang was initially imprisoned in December 2020 and put on trial again on Sept. 19 to face the same charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a controversial statute the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to target political dissidents.

“She should be celebrated globally as an ‘information hero,’ not trapped in brutal prison conditions,” RSF Asia-Pacific advocacy manager Aleksandra Bielakowska said in a Sept. 20 statement.

“Her ordeal and persecution must end. It is more urgent than ever for the international diplomatic community to pressure Beijing for her immediate release.”

It was a closed trial, with police surrounding the courthouse to prevent entry.

Although the case has gained significant international attention, Chinese authorities also barred foreign diplomats from observing the proceedings.

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“He Was Definitely Murdered”: Watch Sam Altman Squirm As Tucker Grills Him Over Whistleblower Death

In a tense exchange on the Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson grilled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the shocking death of whistleblower Suchir Balaji, an AI researcher whose explosive allegations of copyright violations had rocked the tech giant

Balaji, an Indian-American AI researcher who had worked at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in November 2024, just weeks after blowing the whistle on OpenAI’s alleged copyright violations in their AI training processes.

The medical examiner ruled it a suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, with no evidence of foul play discovered at the scene. Yet Balaji’s grieving family, backed by prominent public figures and growing public scrutiny, is demanding a full FBI investigation, alleging murder and a systematic cover-up designed to silence a dangerous whistleblower.

Carlson kicked off the explosive exchange by zeroing in on Balaji’s whistleblower claims and his sudden, mysterious demise that has left many questions unanswered. “So you’ve had complaints from one programmer who said you guys were basically stealing people’s stuff and not paying them, and then he wound up murdered. What was that?” Carlson pressed, his tone dripping with skepticism and barely concealed accusation.

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Military Officials Describe UFO Sightings, Demand Government Transparency

Several former and current U.S. military officials described sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) to Congress on Sept. 9 and called on the Pentagon to be more transparent about its disclosures on the phenomenon.

During a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” several past and present Department of Defense officials testified that they had witnessed UFOs—which the Pentagon now refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—while serving in the military.

The hearing also featured a new, never-before-seen video of an alleged UFO recorded near the coast of Yemen in October 2024.

Air Force veteran Dylan Borland told lawmakers that he encountered “sustained reprisals” and retaliation from the Pentagon after whistleblowing about an alleged UFO he saw while working at a military base in 2012.

“I saw an approximately 100-foot equilateral triangle take off from near the NASA hangar on the base. The craft interferes with my telephone, did not have any sound, and the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic,” Borland said.

“I was under the triangular craft for a few minutes, and then it rapidly ascended to commercial jet level in seconds, displaying zero kinetic disturbance, sound, or wind displacement.”

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DOJ Settles With Ten FBI Whistleblowers Targeted By Biden Administration

Ten FBI whistleblowers who say the Biden administration punished them for their “political beliefs” and for disclosing misconduct in the bureau will have their security clearances reinstated and collect back pay, according to a settlement announced Tuesday.

“These ten (whistleblowers) collectively suffered 12-years-worth of unjustified suspension time,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted on X after getting word of the settlement. “They were punished (because) of their disclosures/political beliefs. In other words, they were treated like skunks at a picnic. Now they receive justice.”

Sen. Grassley has long advocated for the whistleblowers and has helped navigate the settlements to their retaliation complaints. According to the Senator’s office, under the Biden administration the ten whistleblowers received retaliation that included demotions, loss of pay, and revocation of security clearances.

The legal nonprofit Empower Oversight represented the ten FBI employees. The organization detailed in a 12-page, March 5 letter to the FBI’s general counsel the improper “retaliatory targeting” of the men and women it represented.

The letter also stated:

While it is our belief that new leadership of the FBI has the authority to remedy the wrongs suffered by our clients through management directives and should do so immediately, we are willing to work cooperatively on each of the fronts outlined above in order to explore amicable resolutions in each case.

The New York Post highlighted several whistleblowers and some of their conduct that spawned the reprisals.

One special agent was suspended indefinitely and lost his security clearance after he objected to a SWAT team being used to arrest a January 6 riot defendant on a misdemeanor charge.

Another was suspended without pay and lost his security clearance after being wrongly accused of leaking information to Project Veritas, a conservative undercover journalism operation.

Another agent in New Orleans lost his security clearance when he reported prosecutorial misconduct related to a sweetheart plea deal given to a district attorney charged with sex crimes.

A female FBI staffer was punished for reporting mismanagement and a “gross waste of funds” in connection with how criminal background checks were being processed.

“The actions taken against our clients were in reprisal for protected whistleblowing and/or improper targeting because of their political beliefs,” the March 5 letter by their attorneys stated.

Four of the whistleblowers remained anonymous.

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Trump IRS seeks to block whistleblower trial that alleges Clinton Foundation tax irregularities

AU.S. Tax Court judge has tentatively scheduled a Dec. 1 trial allowing two whistleblowers to show they were wrongly denied an award for identifying alleged tax irregularities inside Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation, but the case is meeting resistance from an unexpected source: the Trump administration. 

The Internal Revenue Service under Trump filed a motion last week in the case brought by retired federal agent John Moynihan and private fraud expert Larry Doyle seeking to dismiss the case. Judge Alina I. Marshall set a deadline of September 15 for the petitioners to respond to that motion. The IRS also filed leave for an extension of time to file the Administrative Record with the court.

IRS says plaintiffs lack standing to sue

The agency argued that, as a matter of administrative and procedural law, the judge should not let the case proceed to trial because after an initial review, the IRS declined to look into the whistleblower complaint and, therefore, the plaintiffs don’t have standing to sue.

“In this case, the Whistleblower Office denied petitioners’ claims because the petitioners’ claims were never considered in an IRS action. Here, the Whistleblower Office forwarded petitioners’ claims to a classifier,” the IRS motion to dismiss argued last week “Following the classifiers’ preliminary review, the Classifier declined to forward petitioners’ claims to exam and recommended that it be forwarded to the CI [criminal investigation] division.

“The IRS did not proceed with any potential action when it investigated petitioners’ claims,” the IRS added. 

Obama’s Deputy Attorney General: “Shut it down”

The effort by the IRS to thwart the whistleblower case from going to trial was filed the same week Just the News reported that a bombshell memo recently uncovered by FBI Director Kash Patel shows the Obama Justice Department and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe roadblocked three separate probes into possible pay-to-play corruption allegations against the Clinton Foundation.

“Shut it down,” Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates was quoted as saying in March 2016 in the memos.

You can read that memo here:

FBI Memos – Classified Leak Investigations – Declassified

Spokespersons for the IRS, the Treasury Department and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment on Sunday.

The Clinton Foundation has long denied it did anything wrong and said any suggestion of wrongdoing was politically motivated.

Doyle told Just the News the latest twist is just another example of the resistance the government has displayed to investigating the Clinton Foundation over many years.

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FBI Won’t Say If It Will Reinstate Whistleblowers Who Were Booted After Exposing Biden-Era Corruption

The FBI is refusing to say if it will reinstate whistleblowers who said they were previously retaliated against after disclosing information about the agency’s Biden-era corruption, The Federalist has learned.

The saga became public roughly two years ago, when a handful of FBI officials came forward with allegations highlighting “egregious abuse, misallocation of law-enforcement resources, and misconduct with the leadership ranks of the FBI,” as the House Judiciary Committee summarized. The list of whistleblowers included special agents Steve Friend and Garret O’Boyle, Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen, and Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill.

As The Federalist previously reported, several of the whistleblowers testified in a House committee hearing on their experiences in May 2023, in which they “accused the FBI of engaging in a complex series of highly corrupt and partisan activities, including the manipulation of statistics, targeting of political opponents, and retaliating against whistleblowers seeking to expose the agency’s corruption.” With the exception of Hill (who had retired), Friend, O’Boyle, and Allen faced suspension in apparent retaliation after filing whistleblower complaints and raising concerns about the agency’s conduct.

Allen “voluntarily resigned under a settlement agreement with the FBI that includes full restoration of his pay and benefits for the entire 27 months of his suspension by the bureau,” according to a June 2024 Washington Times report.

With President Trump having returned to office and Director Kash Patel now leading the agency, The Federalist decided to reach out to the FBI to inquire about whether it is in the process of or planning to reinstate the agency whistleblowers who faced apparent retaliation under the Biden administration. The FBI did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment, however.

The agency’s refusal to answer whether it will fully reinstate officials such as Friend and O’Boyle comes shortly after both former agents marked 1,000 days since being placed on suspension. In a recent X post recognizing the latter’s anniversary, Friend called O’Boyle’s continued punishment “unconscionable.”

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Former Intel Officer Drops Truth Bomb – CIA and ODNI Covered Up 2020 CCP Election Interference, Fired Him for Speaking Out

A former National Intelligence Officer for Cyber under President Trump and Joe Biden has come forward with explosive allegations: the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) deliberately buried evidence of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in the 2020 presidential election—and fired him when he refused to play along.

The whistleblower’s damning post came in response to General Mike Flynn’s tweet Monday questioning why foreign election interference by the CCP wasn’t exposed back in 2020:

“So there was foreign interference by the CCP in the 2020 presidential election. Who was running the USIC at that time and why didn’t this get exposed back then? @CIADirector.

Can we get four years of our lives back!?” Flynn asked, tagging President Trump and former DNI Tulsi Gabbard.”

Former intel officer Christopher Porter didn’t mince words in his reply:

“Sir, I WAS in charge of election analysis and DID call it out. CIA and ODNI tried to cover up the evidence and when I wouldn’t go along with it, terminated me.”

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ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle pleads guilty to four charges

Australian Taxation Office (ATO) whistleblower Richard Boyle has pleaded guilty to four charges, including taping private conversations without consent.

The former debt collection officer became an internal whistleblower in October 2017, when he grew concerned about operations in the tax office.

When he felt his complaints were ignored, he went public on Four Corners about the culture at the ATO, including allegations his area was instructed to use heavy-handed tactics on taxpayers who owed the tax office money.

Boyle was originally facing 66 charges, but over time many were dropped.

In South Australia’s District Court on Tuesday, he pleaded guilty to disclosing protected information, making a record of protected information, using a listening device to record private conversations and recording another person’s tax file number.

Boyle had been trying to invoke whistleblower protections to avoid a criminal trial.

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Biden’s Weaponized DOJ Crushed Texas Developer Who Blew Whistle on CCP Land Grab Scheme

In a saga that reads more like a political thriller than a real estate dispute, Texas businessman Timothy Barton is at the center of a high-stakes legal storm that some allege is less about justice and more about silencing dissent.

Timothy Barton—a Christian businessman, proud Trump supporter, and founder of the successful JMJ Development—has, in yet another glaring example of Biden-era political persecution, become the latest target of lawfare by a weaponized federal government more interested in shielding the Chinese Communist Party than protecting American citizens.

Barton’s “crime”? Sounding the alarm on what he believed to be a covert Chinese land acquisition scheme on U.S. soil.

Back in 2019, Barton was approached by a Chinese national named Haoqiang “Michael” Fu and his associate Steven Wall. They pitched him on partnering in high-value real estate developments across Texas. At first glance, it looked like a lucrative venture. But the deeper Barton got involved, the clearer the red flags became. Fu and Wall repeatedly failed to provide promised funding, while Barton was forced to keep the project afloat—personally.

Worse still, Barton discovered what he described as blatant financial fraud, including altered co-lender documents redirecting repayments straight to Fu. Convinced that the deal was a front for something far more dangerous—a CCP-backed scheme to influence and infiltrate American real estate — Barton did what any patriot would do: he reported the activity to Homeland Security.

But in Joe Biden’s America, doing the right thing gets you punished.

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