Ask a Whistleblower: How Much Trouble Is Donald Trump In?
This article features Government Accountability Project’s whistleblower client, Thomas Drake, and was originally published here.
There are a very few people on this Earth who can relate to having their home ransacked by the FBI in search of classified documents thought to be held in violation of the Espionage Act. One of those people is a former senior NSA official named Thomas Drake.
In November 2007, a swarm of armed FBI agents showed up to his house with a ram they never got to use, because Drake’s 12-year-old son simply answered the door. Drake was searched on suspicion of improperly taking classified material and later charged with “willful retention” of various documents under the Espionage Act. These charges are widely believed to have been retaliation for complaints and disclosures Drake made about illegal surveillance, intelligence failures, and massive waste, fraud, and abuse within the National Security Agency in the wake of September 11, 2001, which was, coincidentally, Drake’s very first day on the job.
Among the papers that Drake was accused of taking was one marked “unclassified” and posted on the NSA’s internal website, but the government would argue that it should have been classified and that Drake should have known this. After a lengthy and financially devastating legal battle, 11 of the 11 felony charges were dropped, and Drake pled out on “Exceeding Authorized Use of a Computer,” a misdemeanor....
A Senate Democrat has proposed a bill to repeal the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, which passed in President Donald Trump’s budget bill last year. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, made numerous ...