SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
June, 07 2011, 11:11am EDT
Contact:
Dylan Blaylock
Email: dylanb@whistleblower.org
Phone: 202.236.3733
Over 4,100 Citizens Stand Up for Tom Drake
Petition Delivered to Judiciary Heads, Eric Holder Growing Chorus, including Washington Post, Voices Concern Over Charges
WASHINGTON
This past Friday, June 3, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) delivered a petition to the heads of both the Senate and House of Representatives Judiciary Committees, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, regarding the selective and unjust prosecution of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake.
Over 4,100 people lent their voices to demand that the Department of Justice drop its case against Drake, who exposed gross waste and wrongdoing at the agency. Specifically, the petition (which can be viewed at https://bit.ly/mU1iVZ) states:
I find it shocking that the Department of Justice is prosecuting National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake for exposing gross waste and wrongdoing at his agency.
And continues:
Why is the Department of Justice prosecuting Tom Drake for acting to protect our rights? And why is he being charged as a spy for his role in fighting gross waste and wrongdoing at the NSA? I urge you to conduct proper oversight and demand that the Justice Department drop the retaliatory prosecution of Tom Drake.
"The widespread support for Tom Drake has accumulated in the past few weeks, and the message is clear. The public is behind Tom Drake, and is against the federal government's selective and retaliatory prosecution of this hero," stated GAP Homeland Security & Human Rights Counsel Kathleen McClellan.
Drake has been charged under the Espionage Act with retaining, not leaking, allegedly classified information. His trial is slated to begin next Monday, June 13. GAP represents Drake on whistleblower issues. He has a separate criminal defense team.
Specifically, the petition was sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), and House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI).
Holder heads the Justice Department and has the power to drop the prosecution and, the Judiciary Committees can provide desperately needed oversight to the Justice Department's handling of this case.
Growing Chorus of Support
In today's edition of the Washington Post, the paper's editorial board criticized the federal government for its charges of Drake, stating that the action taken against him "smacks of overkill and could scare others with legitimate concerns about government programs from coming forward." Furthermore, despite being charged under the Espionage Act, the Post states that most individuals "would not confuse him for a spy."
For the full Washington Post masthead editorial, click here.
This viewpoint is the latest of several articles and reports focusing on the federal government's mistreatment and retaliation of Drake for having integrity and acting nobly -- in the country's best interest. More stories about Drake can be read here.
Background
Drake discovered the NSA's use of a data collection program that was costly, threatening to Americans' privacy rights, and wholly undeveloped, despite the availability of a cost-effective, functional alternative that respected Americans' privacy. He did everything by the book, raising concerns through official channels first -- including senior NSA management, the Defense Department's inspector general, and Congress. His concerns were ignored. Drake started, legally, communicating with a reporter -- never sharing any classified information whatsoever. A series of articles exposed this billion-dollar affront to privacy rights. Now, Drake is being prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Espionage Act for retaining -- not leaking -- classified information. More on the Drake case can be read at: https://bit.ly/czaFwZ
In April 2011, Drake was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling - a prominent annual whistleblower award given by the Fertel Foundation and the Nation Institute. It is recognized as the most prestigious honor a whistleblower can receive in America.
Drake's Ridenhour acceptance speech can be viewed here: https://bit.ly/m3JC5D
The introduction of Drake by Jesselyn Radack can be viewed here: https://bit.ly/msOyTx
The Government Accountability Project (GAP) is a 30-year-old nonprofit public interest group that promotes government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers, and empowering citizen activists. We pursue this mission through our Nuclear Safety, International Reform, Corporate Accountability, Food & Drug Safety, and Federal Employee/National Security programs. GAP is the nation's leading whistleblower protection organization.
LATEST NEWS
Apologist for Pinochet Dictatorship Will Be Next President of Chile
José Antonio Kast has described the dictator who ended democracy for nearly two decades and presided over the persecution of tens of thousands of dissidents as someone who brought "order" to Chile.
Dec 15, 2025
José Antonio Kast, a far-right former lawmaker, won over 58% of the vote in Chile's runoff elections on Sunday over Jeannette Jara, the labor minister under outgoing left-wing President Gabriel Boric, to become the nation's next president.
The win came despite Kast's open admiration for General Augusto Pinochet, who ended civilian rule in Chile after taking power through a coup d'etat in 1973, overthrowing its democratically elected socialist leader in a US Central Intelligence Agency-backed plot and implementing a radical program of economic austerity.
Until he was ousted by a democratic referendum in 1990, Pinochet governed Chile as a military dictatorship rife with human rights abuses, resulting in his indictment by a Spanish court in 1996 for crimes against humanity. His regime assassinated or "disappeared" nearly 3,200 people, while tens of thousands were tortured and more forced into exile.
Human rights groups have accused Kast and his family—the patriarch of which was a member of the Nazi Party who fled to Chile in 1950—of collaboration with the Pinochet regime's detention of opponents. The president-elect's brother was a minister for Pinochet during the dictatorship.
Kast will be the first president of Chile since its return to democracy to have campaigned for and voted “Yes” in the 1988 plebiscite for the dictator to stay in power for another eight years despite his reign of terror.
But rather than distance himself from Pinochet's legacy, Kast has described himself as his spiritual successor.
In 2017, during his first of three presidential campaigns, Kast told a local newspaper that “if he were alive,” Pinochet “would vote for me.” Kast later described Pinochet as someone who brought “order” to Chile, comments that the Buenos Aires Times wrote in 2021, “railed many who are still scarred by this dark period in the country’s history.”
But Kast's nostalgia for that period of repression was not enough to hobble him this time around. At a time when the right is making gains across Latin America, Kast's policy agenda sits at the nexus point between the free market fundamentalism of Argentina's Javier Milei and the police state ambitions of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele.
He has pledged an economic program in the same vein as Pinochet's and, later, Milei's "shock therapy," proposing an unprecedented cut of $21 billion in public spending over his term, paired with a reduction in taxes on the wealthy.
Kast has pledged that these cuts would only affect "waste" and "political" spending, but not impact social programs that benefit Chileans. But economic analysts, including Javiera Toro, Chile's social development minister, have argued that a cut of that size would inevitably cut into the social safety net, including its popular state pension program and others related to health, housing, and education.
Kast successfully martialed fear of high crime (even though it actually fell under Boric's tenure) into outrage toward the nation's undocumented migrants—mainly from Venezuela—whom he has pledged to deport en masse. As in the US, where President Donald Trump is also spearheading a mass deportation operation, immigrants in Chile commit crimes at lower rates than those born in the country.
Last year, Kast visited the sprawling prison complex where Bukele has used emergency powers to detain tens of thousands of people as part of his sweeping war on gangs, often in punishing conditions where they've faced torture. Amnesty International described it as a "state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty." Kast said he'd like to implement a similar policy in Chile.
Kast immediately raised fears for the future of Chile's democracy in his victory speech, vowing to form an "emergency government" when he takes power in 2026. However, he will not command a majority in Chile's legislature, which may make the delivery of his agenda more challenging.
Jenny Pribble, professor of political science and global studies at the University of Richmond, told Al Jazeera: “It remains to be seen if Kast could or would pursue such an approach, but if Chile follows the Salvadoran model, it would constitute significant democratic backsliding.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Petition Signers Want Elon Musk to Be ‘The Richest Man in Town’ This Christmas
... by giving nearly half of his $500 billion fortune to the children of the world.
Dec 15, 2025
"Let's make the world's richest man the richest man in town!" urges a new campaign launched Friday by the economic advocacy group Tax Justice Network, borrowing a memorable line from the classic film "It's a Wonderful Life."
The group's global petition emphasizes that SpaceX owner Elon Musk is already the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $508.4 billion—more than double the assets of the planet's next-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page.
Tax Justice Network's (TJN) petition invites Musk to give 44% of his wealth—$223.6 billion—to the children of the world. That amount of money would allow the purchase of a $90 gift card for all 2.4 billion of the planet's children under the age of 18, and could stop more than 100 million children from going hungry this holiday season.
And Musk would still be the richest person alive, emphasized the group.
Let’s make the world’s richest man feel like the richest man in town this Christmas! Sign our Christmas card inviting Elon Musk to gift 44% of his wealth to the children of the world to create 2 billion smiles and still be the world’s richest man alive! #WealthTax #TaxTheSuperRichc.org/jnnZhmp6J4
[image or embed]
— Tax Justice Network (@taxjustice.net) December 12, 2025 at 10:40 AM
The campaign quotes Harry Bailey's famous line declaring his brother George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, "the richest man in town" in "It's a Wonderful Life," after George's neighbors donate money to save him from financial ruin.
“We’re obviously poking a little fun here but the point is to show how extreme the concentration of wealth has become," said Alex Cobham, chief executive at TJN. "Depending on where you are in the world, if you earn the average wage, you’d need to work anywhere from 20 times to a thousand times longer than humans have existed to earn as much wealth as Elon Musk has collected."
The petition notes that TJN and the world's children "would also settle for a 2% wealth tax on the superrich," which would allow countries around the world to raise $2 trillion per year if it was applied to the richest 0.5% of people on the planet.
"That’s enough public money to meet most countries’ climate finance needs, and leave billions to spare for local public services," the group said.
The group pointed to a recent G20 report declaring a global "inequality emergency" and last week's World Inequality Report, which found that fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires—just 0.001% of the world's population—own three times more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of humanity.
"Within almost every region, the top 1% alone hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined," noted TJN.
The petition emphasizes the difference between collected wealth—the kind enjoyed by Musk and other superrich people—and earned wealth. The vast majority of people earn money for what they do, notes TJN. Musk and other billionaires "get paid for what [they] own, so dividends for owning stocks and rent money for owning real estate."
Billionaires including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle executive Larry Ellison famously take salaries of just $1, but the money that's made them part of the world's superrich is their collected wealth, emphasized TJN.
"Earned wealth cannot create billionaires," said TJN. "Only collected wealth grows fast enough to do so. It’s impossible to earn a billion dollars."
A ProPublica report in 2021 detailed how billionaires like Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid a collective "true tax rate" of just 3.4% while the median American household made $70,000 and paid a tax rate of 14%.
"This special tax treatment has helped the superrich quadruple their wealth since the 1980s to extreme levels," said TJN. "Studies directly link this rise in extreme wealth to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt and to people living shorter lives."
Musk in the past has pledged to use his extreme wealth to help people around the world—only to renege on his promises. In 2022, he challenged then-World Food Program chief David Beasley to prove, as Beasley had stated, that a small fraction of Musk's wealth could help address world hunger. He pledged to donate $6 billion by selling his Tesla stock if the WFP could prove the contribution would "solve world hunger."
The WFP responded with a report detailing how $6 billion could feed 42 million at-risk people and prevent them from going hungry for a year. But Musk didn't follow through with his pledge, instead donating $5.7 billion of his Tesla shares to his own foundation.
This year, Musk spearheaded a push to slash government spending on foreign aid, with the US Agency for International Development a key target. The cuts have already proven deadly for children in impoverished nations.
Cobham on Monday pointed to research showing that the skyrocketing wealth of the richest 1% of Americans over the past 40 years has not led "to more investments, and instead resulted in dissaving among non-rich households."
“We now have plenty of evidence showing that extreme wealth shrinks economies, makes people poorer, and threatens democracy," said Cobham. "The best way to protect people, economies, and planet from the harms of extreme wealth is to end the special tax treatment that collected wealth gets over earned wealth. We must tax extreme wealth more effectively to protect the earner way of life we all rely on. Whether you’re a wealth collector or a wealth earner, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
'A Monstrosity': Trump Blames Killing of Rob Reiner and Wife on Director's Anti-Trump Views
One critic called Trump's social media post following the murders "the most disturbing, deranged, and demented post you'll ever see from a US president."
Dec 15, 2025
"Fucking grotesque." "A monstrosity." "A real post by the president of the United States, who has the nuclear codes." "DESPICABLE."
This is but a sampling of the reaction to President Donald Trump's Monday morning response to the apparent double murder of iconic film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner—who were among Hollywood's most vocal critics of the president and the threat he posed to US democracy.
Trump took to his Truth Social network to make the deaths about himself:
A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!
"Nobody celebrates the murder of perceived enemies quite like Trump—whose celebration of the murder of Rob Reiner is the most disturbing, deranged, and demented post you'll ever see from a US president," singer-songwriter and activist Bill Madden said on social media.
If the New York Times was waiting for a news hook to write a long-overdue story about how Trump is mentally unfit to be president, Trump has provided one today with his post saying Rob Reiner got murdered because he was mean to Trump.Write it, NYT. End the normalization. @nytimes.com
[image or embed]
— Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) December 15, 2025 at 7:26 AM
Even Trump's supporters could not believe the president actually posted the message, with some seeking confirmation from Grok, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot on Elon Musk's social media site X, that the post was "fake." Grok obliged, replying falsely that "the statement attributed to Trump is not real" and "appears fabricated."
Invoking the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk—the far-right firebrand known for purveying racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric from behind a shield of "free speech"—Democratic strategist Max Burns said, "I don't want to hear another sanctimonious word from the Republicans who accused Democrats of not showing enough sadness when Charlie Kirk died."
"Trump is dancing on Reiner's body and blaming Reiner for his own murder—but remember, they demanded people be FIRED for not dropping down in tears to praise Charlie Kirk after his death," Burns added. "It's all an act. These people only have compassion for their own."
Some also pointed out that in contrast to Trump's comments, after Kirk's killing, Reiner called the assassination an "absolute horror" and condemned political violence.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular