Sharyl Attkinsson: (WATCH) Protecting Whistleblowers

This video features Government Accountability Project’s Legal Director, Tom Devine, and was originally published here.

Last week we brought you the interview with FBI whistleblower Stephen Friend. He claims things are so broken at high levels inside the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency that he had to blow the whistle. It stalled and may have effectively ended his career at the FBI. Whistleblowers, and their efforts to expose wrongdoing in industry or the government, expose waste and fraud, help change the world in countless ways. But, behind the headlines, the fate of the whistleblower is too often doomed. Now, there are new efforts in Congress to help.

John Dodson, a sitting federal agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, is one of our time’s most important whistleblowers.

He went public in a report with me for CBS News in 2011, blowing the whistle on the Obama administration’s secret strategy to allow thousands of U.S. weapons to be sold to Mexican drug cartels, which the government denied. One of the operations was called “Fast and Furious.” This was an excerpt from my 2011 report:

(2011 report) An Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms senior agent assigned to this Phoenix office since 2010, Dodson’s job is to stop gun-trafficking across the border. Instead, he says he was ordered to sit by and watch it happen. Now, he’s risking his job to go public.

Dodson: I have boots on the ground here in...

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