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So we have about an hour of her time; she's going to give a talk to her and questions. And we'll end the little bit after one. So thanks for coming on.
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Thank you so much. It's great to be here. It's my first time on the UCLA campus. It's absolutely gorgeous. I had no idea. I thought it was like NYU all chopped up; I didn't realize it was really this beautiful campus. So you should be very grateful that you live here. I even liked to come in. It was terribly cold this morning. But it's good to be here. So what I thought I'd do is, it's interesting, I really was just talking to the washington post about the impeachment inquiry, and it gave me some interesting ideas to add into the mix. So I'll talk about my book, which I think provides an excellent context for understanding what's going on right now. Which is something we're sorely lacking in some sort of historical context about the challenges facing the country. Can you hear me okay, everybody can hear me? I'm pretty loud. So just say it louder if I'm not loud enough. Wanted To begin, I just came from Dallas, where it was important to do this. I don't know if it's important to do it in Los Angeles. But let's do it because I'm going to be talking about liberal democracy. In my remarks today, and, and I want to make it really clear what I mean by that when I'm talking about liberal democracy, I am talking about the rule of law. I am talking about the system of governance concei ved by our founders, which involves the separation of powers, impartial, justice, let facts be submitted to a candidate world, all those sorts of good things. It doesn't mean leftists were liberal, I think we have very confused discourses and just this very simple point. So liberal democracy is something that refers to the system itself. It has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. In fact, I would just tell you that Charles Koch, she had the opportunity Charles Koch, he will describe himself as a classical liberal. And you can see this on his website sort of surprising people read, it's not what people think. So let's keep that term in mind those definitions in place what's at stake in the drama unfolding before us in Washington. And what I want to submit to you is that this might seem like a partisan issue, but actually is not a partisan issue. It's an American issue. And the stakes are nothing less than the system itself, which is the rule of law and liberal democracy, which I just described to you. So that sounds really partisan, but it's an American, it's American, it's important to understand that. I say that having studied whistleblowing for seven years, this book was seven years in the making. And I think it really provides a nice context for understanding the unprecedented moment we're in on a number of dimensions. Basically, this whistleblower complaint, the intelligence community committee, What's up Burkle like that last investigation is just the tip of the iceberg because if you look closely and you understand how the intelligence community operates, the intelligence to me has been blowing the whistle on Donald Trump since his election, for failing to uphold his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So this, if you wonder how this book happen to come out when it did, I can't stress enough that when you really been studying this in historical context, you were almost expecting something like this to happen. Because whistleblowing in the United States is a long standing tradition. That's why both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, you know, honestly agree to turn the whistleblower complaint over to Congress. And the reason I did this, and the reason I got super excited, the moment I heard there was a whistleblower is that nobody wants to be against a whistleblower. And the reason they don't want to be against whistleblowers because it's really American, the United States passed the first Whistleblower Protection Law in the world in 1778. It goes all the way back to before the Constitution. And in fact, if you look at the circumstances surrounding that law, which is a story I tell in the book, it's very fascinating, because the law comes about because of the first commander in chief of US Navy, a man by the name of Eric Hopkins. Anybody heard of Eric Hopkins before? You've heard of Esther Hopkins, you're gonna like this. I just got asked to write you know, I'm gonna ask me the Journal of military history soon, rather than off the bucket list. Right. So he was from Rhode Island, and Rhode Island. If you visit this is the Museum of African American History in Washington DC, which I recommend you do, you will learn that 60 to 90% of the slave trade went through Rhode Island port ports. So the livelihood of Rhode Island elites was very much bound up with this corrupt business of trafficking in human beings. They passed laws. It didn't matter. It was so lucrative the whole economy dependent on it that things continue, even though there were laws saying
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it should be taking place.
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And Hopkins was a person who was very much interested in keeping himself at the top of Rhode Island society. He set the appointment from Congress to be commander in chief of the US Navy, and offensively 10 sailors on a ship blew the whistle on Hopkins. And the charge was this was the first charge always begins with the first track that other people come forward that he tortured British prisoners of war, which is interesting in itself because it's the Revolutionary War. That's the enemy. Why should you care if in wartime, you're torturing British prisoners, but they thought this was wrong. Because they the founders were very much upset, obsessed with not next year. American politics you can chime in Tell me if I'm wrong, Russell Peterson, they were very obsessed with not falling into the corruption that they saw the British as having been bound up in that corruption that allowed them to talk to one talk through what was going on in Britain and treat the the colonies hypocritically. They didn't treat them as equals. And so when we found a new republic, the founders were very much concerned with being sure that this new enterprise would not succumb to that sort of corruption. So they blow the whistle on Hopkins tortured readers for prisoners of war. That was the story until I started doing this research, which was made possible by digitize documents. So my editor said, you know, there's more to the story, dig deeper, and I said, I can't read the handwriting. It's horrible. You know, it's really hard to find it, find it. I actually did it by searching on keywords. And what I found was that the real source of the stress whistleblower law was that Hopkins had was using his public office for private gain. In other words, George Washington would tell him engaged a major backup with the Navy engage the British and Chesapeake Bay and Hopkins would instead take the fleet to the Bahamas. And the reason he would take the fleet to the Bahamas is he had some commercial interests that were served by doing that he wanted to divvy the spoils up to his cronies. He was naturally the new to United States he was serving himself and Rhode Island. Come on in. So whistleblowing is a long standing American tradition. If you look at what Congress did with with the whistleblowers there were 10 of them signed the complaint. They keep them sailors on the ship to have the misfortune of resigning and Rhode Island. Guess what happened. he sued them for libel and got thrown in jail. And in Congress not only passed this law said you have an obligation to report wrongdoing in the States when you when you see it if you're a public servant, but it also paid the bail of Marvin and Charlie's to go down and sailor. It paid their legal fees. And Congress also legislated all the documents related to this affair be made available to the public, which is the reason we can tell this story today. So whistleblowing is, is a long standing American tradition. I'm going to say a little bit about in the world, Burkle Center, and we're going to talk about, you know, the larger world beyond the United States. But basically, it's an American tradition until 1998, when the British pass was a protection legislation, so then it becomes according to Europeans and Anglo American invention.
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Interestingly enough, just last month, the European Union passed the most sweeping Whistleblower Protection legislation of anywhere in the world. And they now have two years to transpose and it's a national law to Member States. And I want to say a little bit more about why that's happening because it actually relates to what's going on in United States, believe it or not. So whistleblowing is a is a long standing American tradition. in researching this book. It was a terrible book to write. Let me see a bit about why I wrote it. And then present some more of the findings. I wrote the book because the last book I wrote was called one nation under contract. And that was a study of the privatization of American national security. That's increased use of contractors in all walks of government service, where you typically see soldiers civil servants, they're faced with basically a trend ever since Republic ever since Ronald Reagan, embraced by both Democrats and Republicans alike, that market solutions are always better. And if you ask listening to the private sector, you should, and this is will be in everybody's interest. This is a flawed assumption as my talk show, but it's part of the reason why you get someone like an Snowden, who is a contractor, when he's doing systems administration work, arguably, you could say that that should be an inherently governmental function. You should have a private contractor doing that. But this trend continues. And what it did was it blurred the line between business and government, that mind became very porous. So before to illustrate before, if somebody was serving in government, and they left government for the private sector, we have some older, wiser people in the room. couple decades ago, if you did that, that was called selling out. Right? You were selling out you were no longer going to serve the public, you're going to make money for yourself. Now that same movement is called Think about it, what is it call, cashing in? Your cashing in, it's seen as something good, but what it does is blur the line between business and government. And that's problematic because the private sector is great. We love the private sector. A lot of American dynamism comes from the private sector. But if you trust the private sector to uphold the public interest it's a really stupid thing to do, because they're interested in making money and arguably, government, to quote Barney Frank, because I'm in Massachusetts this year, is just another word for the things we do together. So even someone like Milton Friedman, who is you know, the proponent of neoclassical economics, monetary, conservative, celebration of free markets, himself would say that government exists to provide things public goods, our schools, our infrastructure, you can name all the things that Medicare, you know, we, we arguably need to stay together as a community and look out for one another.
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So that word,
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I said okay, people call public private partnerships. And this is why I wrote the book. But I thought this is really bad because we can't turn the clock back. But we should be trusting our leads behind closed doors to act in our interest. We need some form of oversight. Where do you get that front? And that's where I came to whistleblowers. Because what whistleblowers do is they keep our elites honest, and they've done so throughout American history. They speak truth to power, and they often pay very dearly for what they do. So in researching this book, which was a terrible book to write, but ultimately fortuitous. I say it was terrible because it went through five full manuscript iterations. Terrible, terrible, terrible, you should not polish and carefully source your prose until you're sure you have the structure, right? Yeah, don't you know drive the car don't polish. It is a good rule of thumb. book right? Writing Yeah, I got a full manuscript finished. And then the Snowden controversy broke. I've been working on it for about seven years. And I thought, wow, that, that that seems important to whistle blowing, right? So I started getting to them. And it's like holy cow that's horribly complicated. That particle got bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not going to be part of my next book.
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And I had to really go back to square one.
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I realized that you're interviewing all these whistleblowers, that the problem with books on whistleblowers is that you never get the other side of the story. Because the whistleblowers talk to you and the people they're accusing don't talk. And I was really scratching my head about this because they talked to all the NSA whistleblowers and thought, you know, this is really interesting, but there are always two sides to every story. I really need to talk to the NSA.
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But how do you talk to them to say,
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You're not going to believe this, you're going to know this person mark.
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I was scratching my head after a visit to Washington. Reagan airport. And, and somebody, I heard this voice behind me house and how are you? And it was one of my colleagues from graduate school. Karen Skinner, remember? Okay, wait, I said, What are you doing to start telling me and she said, I just came back from the NSA. This is a week after the Snowden stuff. And I said, What are you doing there? So they have a terrible public relations problem. You know, there's all this information out there about what they do, but they don't they don't have a tradition of correcting it. Because they trade in being ambiguous, right? They never reveal secrets. And the thing that what they should do is they should have a couple family members come into the NSA for pulled a briefing.
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But I don't know where I'm going to find those.
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Sign me up. So I went, I got all the information I needed. I wanted to quote them on the record, because you don't want to say an anonymous senior official said who's gonna believe that guess what the NSA said, You're not allowed to do that. We held us under the Chatham House rule. And you can't do that anymore. What if, look, this is helping you, why would you let me do this? They said, No, you can't do that. So you know what they suggested I should do, which is what work? Do you wait for them to retire from the NFL. So I want to interview the entire senior leadership at the time. And then I say they basically said the same thing they said in that briefing, but in the book, I have them on the record. And what you'll find is two stories that have nothing in common in my job as a tenured professor, because no one can fire me for anything I say, I think this is a real obligation to speak the truth was to sort through those counter narratives and try to determine what's true, and what I concluded about Snowden after doing that, and I let both sides speak for themselves, so you can judge for yourself with RB to the right conclusion, and I could be wrong. But my conclusion about Snowden is that he may one day be America's first trader, Patriot, in the sense that what Snowden revealed was a dramatic change in operating procedures of national security. agency after 911 we had been attacked on US soil, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the plane then went down to Pennsylvania. It was arguably, you can make a pretty serious argument that that was justified to keep a nation safe. But what happened? What happened is over time, those emergency procedures became standard operating procedures, fleet one at flip in how the NSA collected information without any public conversation about whether that was desirable about whether that was even necessary, right. or sleep. This is the interesting thing. That's why, you know, I wrote a piece along the way saying why Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower yet. And the reason for that is because if you don't ground your definition of whistleblowing in the law and the rule of law is whistleblowers have to reveal some that feel legal or violation norms. that most people would agree on is a violation. Part of the problem we're having now is people are confused about what the norms actually are, which we need history to refer to. But otherwise whistleblowing is just the way Trump Trump defines it, which is whatever helps me. Right. But that's not the case because all leaders are all whistleblowers are leakers. But all leaders are not whistleblowers. People leak or all sorts of reasons, they need to get the upper hand and policy they lead to advance themselves. But a whistleblower is distinguished by the content of the complaint which has to be investigated. And there are formal legal channels through which says supposed to rise, which this intelligence community whistleblower complaint that. So where does that leave us as far as
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whistle blowing in America? Well,
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we have something that I would call the paradox of whistleblowing in America, because I told you was in a long standing American tradition. The fact the matter is if you examine the history, were great in the realm of theory and celebrating whistleblowers and seeing them linked to our revolutionary ideals. But in practice, we are very lousy at protecting them. The standard case, and this is true time and time, again, is that whistleblowers at great personal risk, come forward and speak truth to power and incidentally, maybe only 15% of whistleblower complaints actually rise to being evaluated. Most of them are dismissed out of hand and in the intelligence community in particular. That's, that's, that's an enterprise that's entirely bias against or whistleblowing. Why because you have to leak to blow the whistle. And intelligence community is obsessed with keeping secrets. If you talk to them they are. Well just keep that example from my own circumstance. They don't even let me quote things that's going that are going to help them, they really in this situation where they believe that some innocuous piece of information just might be that missing jigsaw puzzle piece that the enemy needs to bring us down. So, you know, that is permeates the entire community and they're not inclined to be doing what they've been doing the last two and a half years with James callme is doing really should make you stand up and take notice. This is not how they behave. So this idea that is a deep state, there's been all sorts of abuses, and I discussed them in the books, what you see is a cycle of behavior over American history where, you know, the touchscreen, pushing the envelope of what's acceptable and then gets smashed back by Congress. And hopefully, we're going to we're going to have to have a reckoning with the behavior we've seen recently because we don't want a leaking intelligence committee for law. But arguably, it's justified when the system itself is at stake. And that's what so many, many former Members of the House 3dr speaking out, if anybody tells you that person to say one thing to them, you know, you see all these letters from former members of the Department of Justice, FBI. They're all speaking out against Donald Trump. Have you seen one letter or petition signed by members of the intelligence community backing up?
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Donald Trump's arguments?
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There isn't one. I mean, you have a few random people may be saying things on Fox News. They probably feel deep, deeply uncomfortable. It's not like people would band together and put their names to it. So that's something that's very important to realize. So we don't treat our whistleblower as well, which is why we need to be concerned about this effort, get out the whistleblower. The most important thing to keep in mind with the current situation is that whistleblowers are protected by law. And we need to focus on the content of the complaint, which has been substantiated by multiple Lucifer really isn't even all that relevant anymore. Although I guess you read it. Did anybody see Donald Trump Jr. Speak on campus the other day? Did you hear about Donald Trump Jr. On the UCLA campus? I'm going to take questions. By the way, I will be taking questions at this talk. So you can push back on any of that. But um, this idea that somehow there's this deep state conspiracy is entirely odds with everything I understand about the intelligence community and write about in my book, this idea that the motives of the whistleblower are important, is entirely at odds with the way Whistleblower Protection works because the modems are irrelevant. It's the content of the complaint, its facts on the ground. It's the evidence. And just to cite one example, who's the whistleblower and Watergate Do you know his name? He was dethrone even though his real name is Mark bell. That's right. Mark felt okay. Mark. Felt Just before his death, his identity, this Vanity Fair article, what were his motives and revealing, you know, the material that led to Nixon's downfall. Not pure not pure in movies, he was gunning for the number one position, he wanted to be FBI director, and by leaking that information damaged his rivals prospects. All right, but that's irrelevant, because it was the information he brought to life. That is what we should focus on. because trust me, I tell all the stories in my book of these whistleblowers, they are really interesting characters. And I'm very sad about stuff I had to cut out of the book to make it focus and make it move really quickly and focus on government because I interviewed all these corporate whistleblowers too, but decided that's another universe.
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But they're, they're interesting people
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who often start out in a kind of naive way thinking they're going to reveal something, some wrongdoing and at the leadership summit. They go to Thank you so much for telling me that this is not, you know, up to our ideals or our standards. And what they find is they get accused of not being a team player. Their lives are often ruined, not often always room always ruined, etc. Some of these cases, you know, the with the with the Dodd Frank whistleblower protections where you get these big payouts if you're if you're vindicated get monetary payouts. And that's good because that means that when you lose your career, you still can support your family. But they always suffer for what they do. So it's very important, I think that we, as Americans stand up for which one is a tradition and insist that the Muslim world be protected because that identity is
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irrelevant.
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So finally, what can we What did I tell the Washington Post today? And I wanted to see a little bit about Europe to very quickly but I'll I'll conclude in five minutes. Well,
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just think about This this is what I was thinking about today. And I thought it was a really useful comparison. Maybe it'll appear in this Washington Post article. That deadline for 5pm Eastern time. If you look at the Ben Ghazi investigation in Gaza, it's really super fascinating because the lawyer for this current whistleblower marks It was also the lawyer for the godless bar, who was also a CIO associates directly comparable situations, which I think is a nice illustration of why it's not a partisan issue, but look at the difference in behavior here. And this is what I think is so important to realize. First of all, you can see CIA, Wrestling's nonpartisan. They blew the whistle on Hillary Clinton. They investigated they found nothing but did she complain? I mean, she complained she could use them a fat you know them a vast right wing conspiracy. So superficially there's this is similar in both sides saying there's a conspiracy, but there's intelligent administration administrative, responsive Benghazi
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Because Hillary Clinton testified endlessly remember the nine hour session.
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Were in contrast, the Trump administration is stonewalling and refusing to have never seen administration testify. Similarly, you would even think of Benghazi is a whistleblower issue, do you? That's because the democrats never tried to out the whistleblower or insight their followers to retaliate against the whistleblower. They were much more respectful of the institutions, the idea of impartial justice. Sure, there was plenty of spin. But I really think this is a case where we're seeing here of the republicans choosing the nuclear option. That is, you know, they're willing to sacrifice impartial justice. They're willing to sacrifice the notion of the national interest. They're willing to sacrifice the notion of public service to win. And I just think if they do and it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Because they'll be destroying the system itself, which is a problem why it's a problem for Republicans. Because American economic strength is based on the rule of law. In other words, our idea of liberal economic order requires rules that investors and small business can dependent on that are going to be changed to serve the powerful, you know that you have some sort of appeal if you're being treated unfairly. And that's how you get entrepreneurship. This is simplified greatly, but I think you can have to back me up. That's how you get small business. Now, what's the contrast the counterpoint to rule of law, capitalism? Not chaos. For me, capitalism. What is crony capitalism? It's the oligarchy. That means that the powerful get to define what the truth is, that means the powerful get to decide what is lawful and unlawful, because there's no independent judiciary. And crony capitalism is deeply appealing to someone like Donald Trump. I'm going to speak really honestly here because I don't think this is hyperbole. I think this is fact. And if you disagree with me, please feel free to tell me how I'm biased. We'll have a conversation about it. Because I could be wrong. This is just how I see it after looking at it for a long time. But crony capitalism is very much what you have in Russia, what you have in Turkey, and guess what? These guys are allied together. There is an international corruption network that is supported by certain authoritarian regimes around the world. And that weirdly enough, the president united states has all sorts of Bizarro connections to this case through the Whistleblower Protection Law. I'll punch it out there and then we'll we'll stop for questions. Why do your opinion pass this law? Just This year in 2015, France and Germany are both against this law. In fact, if you look at the post communist States of Europe, and you look the word for whistleblower, most of the the words for whistleblower and foreign languages in Europe have negative connotations. That's because it's a kind of it only makes sense in a democracy. Where you have you can appeal to law
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in a dictatorship, like the communist dictatorships, totalitarian dictatorships of the Cold War era.
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It's whatever the leadership says it is. And someone who is, in a sense, paddling or snitching on their neighbor is the frowned upon because the regime is bad. Why would you trying to keep that regime in place? So it has negative connotations of snitching. And that's something that in Germany, especially, you know, it reminds them of the Stasi it reminds them of Nazis. And so they, they were adamantly against what happened to change that. Two things happen. Journalists started getting murdered for investigating corruption. They were journalists, a journalist was blown up by a car bomb in Malta. And that crime has not been prosecuted. What was she invested in? She was investigating Russian corruption and money laundering going through banks in Malta. politesse bank being one example. This is why anticorruption laws are so important because the only way that pain could get shut down was when the United States inside of anti corruption. United States doesn't stand on the side of anti corruption. Guess what? crony capitalism just horrific. So definitely feels murder by a car bomb for exploring what Russians were doing. Through Maltese things. it's legal to buy passports in Russia. Assume illegals buy more Maltese citizenship. Guess who's buying all the Maltese passports? The Russians? Guess what that allows them to do? free travel throughout the European Union and she was investigating that she thought this is really weird. Why do they all want Maltese passports and she gets blown up Slovakia similar investigations of corruption networks and Slovakia a very different outcome there because the public was outraged. They demonstrated they took to the streets if you followed it, they brought down the government because of the murder of young cook Seok and his fiance. And the reaction to it was the election of the first female president of Slovakia and environmentalist agreed. And those events, the Panama leaks that release the Panama leaks and electric scandals if you follow that, those scandals we can talk about them if you're interested in literature. Please change your public opinion in Europe, spearheaded by civil society organizations in partnership with organized with trade unions unusual Alliance. And that led to a complete reversal on you passing this anti corruption law, which raises the very real possibility that you could get relevant information from a European whistleblower that would be germane to the impeachment, Greg, because who is holding tax returns?
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Georgia.
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Right. So let's add this, this really interesting things to the mix. But I would just leave you with this, that this is a global struggle. It's really there's a siege on local democracy around the world. And you see this interesting Alliance forming amongst people who believe that Whistleblower Protection might be one way to stem the tide of corruption and get democracy back on track, both in the night States and in the world. So my last thing I would leave you with is that, you know, whistleblowers are not a partisan issue. They're an American issue. And we need to in the days ahead, just stay focused on the facts and the evidence and ignore all the spin. Maybe you just have to stop watching TV. When I when I speak on TV around the radio, and they put that little thing in your ears to hear what's going on, I just my blood pressure to start shooting through the roof. Because it's all just inside baseball. It's really not. You made the matter at hand, which is quite simple is do we want a president behaving in this way? You know, and that's that's the question and what's at stake if we say, yes, the President will behave in this way. So I'll conclude with that. Thank you so much for listening, and I'm happy to take questions on anything I've talked about
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The names of American undercover agents who may have been killed as a result of this was this morning. My comment was coming in this morning, I was listening to the radio and they were interviewing a fox news reporter who just wrote a book on whistleblowers who claims that
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the law does not protect everyone who was it was as a whistleblower. Is that true? I mean,
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not be protected by the whistleblower law.
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Okay, these are great questions.
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Here, again, elements of truth and what you said,
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reign of truth in it, but it really misrepresents the facts. So Snowden revealing the names of agents, that's just not true. I mean, he bedded those documents very carefully, with journalists precisely to avoid that. And I go into that in some detail in my book, The most interesting thing with fat with respect to some that I would leave you with this as I, you know, the thing the NSA will say to you is, it's true. They're right about this, the Russia.
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And that when I was when I would interview them, they would not tell me anything, it would be almost like Socratic crap method. They don't think about this and why don't you think about?
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That's not true about Snowden. As to your second point.
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The truth of that is that intelligence whistleblowing is a very rickety apparatus. Precisely because this is problem that one person was born the intelligence community is another insider threat. There's a very strong bias against whistleblower intelligence. Some people said to go back to Snowden, why did you complain to the NSA inspector general? Well, have you done this? It's pretty clear. You never would have heard anything he released because a man in charge the time that's nowhere to complain. His name is Georgia Walker. He's no longer that positions. You know why he was removed from his post in 2016. For one for retaliating against the whistleblower and other attorneys in the office. He has to be removed because he retaliated against somebody who said something he didn't, didn't want to hear. So that's something to keep in mind. The other thing that makes it really is there's a statute called the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. And that explicitly excludes intelligence community employees from protection. It says that there's an exception. Now Obama tries to address that with an executive order presidential policy directive 19, which helps to set up this, this apparatus in the director of national intelligence to which this complaint grows. And there's some other laws that fit into this. But the whole point is that if that statute says, you know, they're exempt statute Trump's executive order. And there's a couple of other statutes that seems to suggest Yes. We have intelligence committee with, you can make legal arguments about it. Naturally, I would argue that we have to address with this current current crisis is past because if we can legislate on all these gray areas, we can make it clear, you know, that we need to have national security whistleblowers and democracy, especially with the large national security state, we can legislate, what does the monument clause mean, in the 21st century, you're so confused about it. But let's just say what it means to use your use your public office for private game. So there's things we can do. But again, most important thing you can do is read my book.
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But also
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be very careful about headlines. They don't correspond to the content of the article oftentimes. So you can't forget the headline is being referenced What's in the article and this is true Fox News. It just happened to me. I wrote an op ed for the Dallas Morning News, lovely op ed that had a title that I wanted to be the pursuit of truth and polarized side. That sounds like a normal thing, right?
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The headline they put out of us
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American universities are choking, economic freedom. Know and I, I can play they're gonna change
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it. We're dealing with setting up our establishing a fraud, waste and abuse hotline at the city level. Oh, yeah. Yeah, at that level. I was wondering, have you ever seen a system designed where the most potential perps are the ones everyone is encouraged to report to? In other words, it's set up to fail. They break the reports and go into the trash can. And then the city will report we've had no complaints we must be perfect. And where the lie is no one really trust the system.
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Yeah. That's always a problem, right. It's sort of human nature because When you when you present these complaints, somebody's got to be responsible. Usually, if somebody is responsible, that means that somebody has to lose their job, and that has all kinds of dynamics. So you just have to believe in some of these ideals that are worth fighting for. And yeah, and they seem to be that they are. So we don't we don't want people leaking information because they have a policy disagreement. And we don't want intelligence community that's constantly you know, speaking out against the president united states, except in extraordinary circumstances. So my book I end with an analogy to Michael walls or injustice, unjust wars, where he talks about the the fate of the dishonoring of Arthur Harris. Do you remember this suggesting that just
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just very briefly, you know, who are the Harris was
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military history back on The
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head of the bomber squadrons in the UK during World War Two, not the fighter pilots, okay. And so if you go to assist your editor, you'll see all the names of fallen fighter pilots are on the wall of Westminster Abbey been on it, but not, not the members of the bomber Squadron. And Walter said that was because Churchill needed to save the system itself. cheerful needed Harrison Harris do these things are unacceptable in normal times.
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But that once the war was over to restore the moral universe and restore normality, he had to dishonor Arthur Harris
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to just uphold the moral universe on which democracy depends. And so we might need something similar like that with the people who break the law
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question Our next question share
40:02
answered whichever ones you want. I
40:03
wondered if you could expand a little bit more on the European, the EU and a corruption law around with any elements that they have that we should have. And the second question, I don't know if you deal with this in your book, but the impact of the 1986
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amendments to False
40:18
Claims Act in the development of a false claims that bar
40:23
as a as a means of
40:26
allowing
40:27
fraud coined by whistleblowers, yeah,
40:29
yeah.
40:32
Yeah, that's good. So,
40:35
okay.
40:37
So you
40:40
think that's really amazing about the EU is sort of like airports, right? The oldest airports are the ones that make no sense today. Like le x is old, right? So is Dallas Fort Worth, I mean, seriously.
40:54
Back to an old era, not not efficient, and it might be the same is true somewhere protection laws, because if you can have addition dating back to 1778, you really need this patchwork quilt that develops to uphold the concept of that means you need a lawyer to understand how to navigate that library. The EU Whistleblower Protection Directive is distinctive because it's putting it all in one place. Now, different national governments may make it hugely complicated. And it's got both more common private sector and the public sector in one directive season is connected. And so in that sense, it could be a vast improvement on Whistleblower Protection Law anywhere else in the world could become a real example. But they've got say that we don't have which is they don't have this enormous national security state and they are still going to have some problems in navigating the security concerns. There always already a certain European countries that are being excluded From information sharing, because they had ties that are close to the Russians, there's lots to be sorted out. But it is a really dazzling accomplishment. And I hope one sort of standing up for ideals and it had time when idealism kind of been trampled upon all around the world. With respect to your second question, which I wrote, oh, yeah, the false claims that, that originates with that, to keep private companies from building the government. It originates in wartime. Notice the Lincoln law, because you have a firm like Brooks Brothers selling uniforms to the Union army that disintegrate in two days. Because they're made of a fabric they came up with this kind of mix of paper and other things. That the newest shoes to it was called shoddy. That's the truth. Shadi comes from they need the uniforms added this material and they got this huge profit margin. So look at your podcaster lot is to ensure that when this happened, companies would pay and the person who reported it would get a percentage of the settlement. So that's the qui tam, which is for those who've gone through all sorts of things, I spent a lot of time down that rabbit hole with qui tam and it really, you see it in the Civil War. And then it kind of falls into misuse, but it's resurrected in the Reagan years because of Pentagon contracts. Maybe the $600 toilet see things like that. Yeah. So you see, it's still there today. Dodd Frank added to it. So it's not not added on to it. But Dodd Frank also provided additional
43:50
protection. So
43:52
it's interesting. It's interesting.
43:55
prospect besides the idea of getting payments, I'm not too sure. That's a great thing. for public servants, but it sure sure works in the corporate sector.
44:05
Want to get back to the question?
44:13
For you? This is Alan. Alan.
44:20
It's a little vague to me at least a person is a member of the national security apparatus.
44:27
And he sees something and he quote unquote, blows the whistle.
44:31
Is he protected at all? I wasn't sure whether he is or isn't
44:36
that funny gave my opinion. Two versions? Same answer. No, no. They're definitely protective evidence I would give from your bad is that the you know, Intel's to the Inspector General. Michael Atkinson, who is a Trump appointee, has said that this was our complaint, follow the letter, you know, follow the proper and that's very distinctive, right? Because he could have easily said otherwise. And even Atkinson who first tried to squelch it, the acting director, National Intelligence, everybody's asking this administration is really useful if you're trying to get your way because you know, they want to be competitive, become permanent, more pliable,
45:17
will follow the procedures that he must go through the Inspector General.
45:23
Outside of that violates the law. Well, keep in mind Oh,
45:27
no, it's not a violation of the law because this community, the intelligence community shook his head of the House Intelligence Community. And normally, they're doing these things in in secret like it seems to be better without
45:40
being in the public eye. That's what happens typically says communications between Congress we have an expert on Congress you can add to this and and, and inspector general that would take place but it's Yeah, it's not
45:56
only a zone in the the Serve the
46:02
senior director general who is going back and forth between Congress talking about what may be coming and preparing, preparing Congress to see things and there's that kind of communication is not uncommon.
46:20
Following up on
46:21
this line of questioning, it shows
46:24
with all these protections in place what happens in a world of social media where you have people who have no journalistic professional training or ethics who decided they want to out and put put names up and whistleblowers live to the completely mentally ruin will be threatened. Yeah. Are there any legal consequences for people who release them and they may not have been an accurate name but just throw names out there and say this is what football?
46:53
Yeah, no, no, this is this is right for Supreme Court. intervention because these these are important. First Amendment issues. But I don't think the First Amendment doesn't protect someone who's inciting violence. Right. And a lot of this comes very close to that I would like to see discussion of incitement. Because if you were encouraging people to outer whistle or retaliate against the whistleblower, and in the internet age, you can dock someone from social media, which completely ruins their life. So these, these are the things that the law has an address. So I think this is very much part of a general trajectory where technology has advanced so rapidly, it's outstripped our laws. And this is true in a variety of areas, areas that's do with social media, and the ad, the ad driven business model that Facebook uses, which doesn't distinguish about us buying ads on Facebook. So that's how you get Russians really intervening, or, you know, elections, putting out political views on Facebook, political views to and they got the secret of Agilent, where you don't know why he rises to the top of the newsfeed and why does it and the other thing people don't realize is that you can pay money To promote something on social media. So this is increases the ROI of money in politics. All these are things that I think Supreme Court will have to examine at some point to determine just what this virtual space is and how to interact with our public square. So that's important question. Yes.
48:18
Thank you for coming and speak to us today. Sure. You see me here. My name is Justin, I spent time with the great. I wanted to know what your thoughts are, and many words of encouragement for whistleblowers in the UC system, students, faculty, administration, etc.
48:36
And in this university and disruptor
48:41
do you have in mind
48:49
maybe general words that you have for whistleblowers?
48:55
Yeah, well, I don't know what the rules are at USC UCLA, but I do know About the US government. And one of the things that I've run into is, in fact,
49:06
before he died, Elijah Cummings sent me of a civil war.
49:12
And what you learn from talking about it, actually, since I've written this book, my inbox is flooded with people saying why don't you pay attention to my case? There's a lot of people who have legitimate claims. But this one is one an interesting in particular, because it's about discrimination in the armed forces, against homosexuals against people of color against women. And there are all kinds of discrimination laws on the books, but some of the old maybe there's I should I say, old boys network, but something was pointed out to me there's whether you are involved in this too. So the old network never is not treating people equally before these laws, and so I can see I think of a number of scenarios within the university community where there would be laws that were not being applied equally to all members of the community. And that could be a lot. And you probably would find within the university rules,
50:13
you know, good language to back you up. Not to give you any ideas, but
50:19
is from place to place and university handbooks are fascinating. They often are contradictory. Maybe UCLA, some unique and having the perfect University handbook. But I suspect now.
50:33
Yes. One of the questions that I have for you, to me, it seems the not only do we have a problem with the laws, but I have a problem with the implementation. It seems to me that won't doing in the executive branch. Yeah, is investigated by the executive branch, usually by the inspector general's wrongdoing in the Congress is investigating by Congress or unless somebody died at war crime, Congressman and they resigned yeah it's very much about forming an independent agency like jail. Okay, there are four know so they can hear secrets from the NSA and basically make the determination you know, you had mentioned the ones that make it into the press yeah how many do not make it that's right that's right don't get thrown away because you spent the general NSA or army or whatever besides no not gonna investigate this.
51:46
Yeah, so Yeah, that's
51:48
true. any thought to say sitting something like this up that you can you know, the whistleblower can go directly to the know that they will get there. Non political hearing.
52:03
Yeah, you know, in an idea, what you run into with all of these things is that
52:09
there's always a potential for abuse.
52:12
Because these are power resources, and some people can try to use these channels that are legitimately in place to protect rights and people to advance their own ends. There's always this delicate balance balancing act in an ideal system, you would want to have a leadership that would say, when they hear that wants to hear things that aren't going well in the organization, if you have a leader that when they hear about something that isn't quite right, wants to fix it. That's great. Ideally, you want a system in house where you fix things before they get out to the public. The reason there's no longer an Enron The reason there's no longer world com is because there was no such channel. People didn't want to hear things that were right before. them. So ideally you would want that. But absent that we're obviously in a moment where we need some institutional design changes, you know, new laws can easily follow that learn the lessons of the this particular abuse of power. So the whole intelligence community Inspector General, that whole system is a response to Watergate is Congress saying, here's what we learned President Nixon's abuse of power, and this is the system we gotta, we need to put in place and we can do something similar down the road here and put some really creative minds on it. But the problem is that
53:37
the problem is that, that this system is it's presently designed. This is where the real innovation has to come in is it's not designed to blow the whistle on the president.
53:48
We just assumed that presidents would behave this way. You know, and
53:54
that's worrisome, but that becomes a separation of, of powers. Question. That I am hopeful. I don't know what other people think. I am hopeful that people's, the American public's general sense that Supreme Court decisions are always political will be dispelled a bit
54:15
by the response to this current crisis. That's my my hope.
54:20
We'll see. But I think, I think Supreme Court Justice, have justice have lifelong appointments. And when it comes to certain issues, they answer posterity. And I'm hopeful that they will do the right thing say about the income taxes.
54:38
But I could be wrong. I could be wrong.
54:44
Yeah, okay. Well, look, look, look, you have to sort of have a more optimistic.
54:51
If we say that everything is lost, it will be right but if if Americans agree that this is something worth fighting in defending Well, we have our votes, we have the capacity to organize. Not just voting, also organizing, right? organizing. That's a whole other thing. But I just like to say to people we have to, it doesn't matter if we fail, because it doesn't change what we need to do to change it. You just gotta do it anyway.
55:19
Yeah, I think that's a great place to have
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