Ten FBI whistleblowers punished by the Biden administration for reporting instances of “political weaponization” within the bureau will receive lump sum payments for damages as part of settlement agreements made with the Justice Department, officials announced Tuesday.
“These 10 whistleblowers’ brave actions were met with intense bureaucratic blowback that caused severe financial and emotional hardship,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement announcing the settlements. “Their lives were upended for years, but I never stopped fighting until things were made right.”
“I appreciate Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, Deputy Attorney General [Todd] Blanche, Director [Kash] Patel and Deputy Director [Dan] Bongino’s unyielding efforts to prioritize accountability and bring closure to these whistleblowers’ cases.”
Under the Biden administration, the whistleblowers were wrongly subjected to demotions, security clearance revocation and indefinite unpaid administrative leave – collectively amounting to “over 12 years’ worth of inappropriate suspension time,” according to Grassley’s office.
The 10 whistleblowers were represented by legal nonprofit Empower Oversight, which detailed the “reprisal” and “improper targeting” they faced from Biden’s FBI in a March 5 letter to the bureau’s general counsel expressing a desire to “amicably resolve and remedy the harms the FBI has inflicted on our clients.”
The whistleblowers who reached settlements include:
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