The FBI‘s internal whistleblower protocols provide little to no recourse for bureau employees who flag wrongdoing and then suffer retaliation, according to a prominent lawyer for whistleblowers who said they typically end up battling an arduous administrative process that rarely results in their favor.
That harsh assessment of the process is backed up by Justice Department data tracking the outcomes of whistleblower cases.
“The FBI [whistleblower] program is like every program which the agency self-selects for employees who keep their mouth shut,” whistleblower lawyer Dan Meyer said in an interview with The Washington Times.
Whistleblowers recently have been in the spotlight in Washington as a flood of FBI workers has alerted Congress to politically motivated investigations, biased leadership and misconduct by senior officials at America’s premier law enforcement agency.
But the FBI‘s whistleblower program has been under scrutiny for decades. Critics of every political stripe say the agency begrudgingly or outright refuses to investigate allegations from its rank-and-file agents about the leadership’s lousy behavior.
It is a mindset, they say, dating back to the days when J. Edgar Hoover ran the bureau.
According to Justice Department data going back 10 years, complaints of retaliation against FBI whistleblowers were almost never substantiated when investigated by the DOJ.
For example, the DOJ received 122 FBI whistleblower reprisal cases in 2022, including 28 cases...
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