Business Insider: The Age of the Work-From-Home Whistleblower
This article features Government Accountability Project whistleblower client, Dawn Wooten, and was originally published here.
When Simon Edelman blew the whistle on his former employer, the US Department of Energy, he couldn’t have known that his act of defiance was at the forefront of a growing national trend.
In 2017, Edelman was a photographer for the DOE. As the department was moving forward with a series of new rules that would have boosted the coal industry, he decided to anonymously leak photographs to the progressive news site In These Times of a meeting between the Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the CEO of one of the country’s largest coal companies. The photos showed the executive presenting DOE officials with a pro-coal regulatory plan and giving Perry, a former governor of Texas, a hug. The day after the photos were published, Edelman was escorted out of the DOE offices, prohibited from taking his personal laptop, and, he says, had his photo equipment taken away.
The department fired Edelman, despite, he says, never investigating or confirming that he was the whistleblower. (Edelman took the photos, but they were uploaded on a shared drive that other employees had access to). Edelman eventually did come forward publicly in a New York Times article in January 2018 and admitted to leaking the photos, saying he wanted to “expose the close relationship between the two men.” He also filed a complaint...
Welcome to Reality Check, NewsGuard’s nonpartisan newsletter that tracks the false claims and conspiracy theories that shape our world — and who’s behind them. Please support us by becoming a premi...