Once Again, The Administration Vindictively Charges A Whistleblower As Being A Spy

by Mike Masnick

This is getting ridiculous. When President Obama was campaigning and even when he first took office, he claimed that it was a priority to support whistleblowing activities. And yet, as President, he has been ridiculously aggressive in pushing vindictive criminal lawsuits against whistleblowers -- often by abusing the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is supposed to be used against spies. But the Obama Justice Department has used it over and over again against whistleblowers in a purely vindictive manner. In fact, he's used it to bring charges against whistleblowers more often than every other President combined. This strategy turned out to be a disaster in the Thomas Drake case (which was initiated by President Bush, but continued with strong support by President Obama), where the case completely collapsed, once it became clear that the charges were nothing but a vindictive attack on a whistleblower.

Apparently the Obama administration has not learned its lesson. It has now used the Espionage Act to go after a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA's waterboarding torture regime. This now makes it the sixth Espionage Act prosecution of a whistleblower brought by the Obama administration. All other presidents before him used it a total of 3 times. As the Government Accountability Project notes, the really stunning thing in all of this is that Kiriakou will be the only person prosecuted in relation to the use of waterboarding -- and simply for blowing the whistle on it.

if you torture a prisoner, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on torture, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.

Something seems very, very wrong about this.

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IRS Stingy With Whistleblower Payouts, Slow to Follow Up on Tip

By Andrew Zajac and David Voreacos

The IRS took more than four years to reward a whistleblower through a new program to encourage tipsters and has drawn criticism from the Government Accountability Office for failing to move faster.

A recent GAO study found that the program, which has attracted tips from more than 1,300 whistleblowers, doesn?t collect data that could speed up evaluation of information that started to pour in after Congress authorized the Internal Revenue Service to establish the office in late 2006.

?Five years later, they have to start paying rewards,? Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, a Washington-based non-profit group that advocates for government informants, told Bloomberg Government.

The 2006 law was designed to help the IRS narrow the tax gap, which is the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid. The gross amount of the gap is estimated to be $345 billion.

Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who pushed for the law, noted that by comparison the U.S. Justice Department has collected more than $27 billion under the False Claims Act, the law upon which the IRS whistleblower statute is modeled. The figure cited by Grassley reflects recoveries since 1986 changes to the law and includes at least $7.8 billion collected since 2009, according to Justice Department figures.

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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
About Us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill

View the original article here