Like me, DOJ whistleblower Erez Reuveni followed the law

According to a complaint published last month Erez Reuveni a former immigration lawyer at the Department of Justice blew the whistle on an extraordinary suggestion that the department would need to consider telling the courts presiding over immigration cases f k you and ignore a judge s order blocking the hasty and hushed deportation of settlers to El Salvador Reuveni s occurrence hits home because of its parallels to my own In December as a legal adviser to the department s Office of Professional Responsibility I advised the criminal division that an FBI interrogation of American Taliban John Walker Lindh without his lawyer would be unethical When I was informed three days later that he had been interrogated despite that warning I advised that the interview might have to be sealed and used only for national precaution and intelligence-gathering purposes and not for criminal prosecution Three weeks later then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reported that the Justice Department was filing a criminal complaint against Lindh and in another three weeks he communicated an indictment insisting that Lindh s rights have been meticulously scrupulously honored I had seen photos of Lindh naked blindfolded and bound to a board with duct tape It was our first glimpse of torture after and no one flinched I knew that wasn t true I had seen photos of Lindh naked blindfolded and bound to a board with duct tape It was our first glimpse of torture after and no one flinched In Reuveni s development he worked for the DOJ s Office of Immigration Litigation and sought assurances from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Safety that they would abide by a judge s order to halt the deportation of more than Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act an ancient obscure and rarely-used law As in my incident authorities met his requests with vague responses or none at all and ultimately concluded that they did not need to comply The parallels between our cases are uncanny Both career civil servants with a string of favorable performance reviews we were troubled that the department was not complying with a court order Like Reuveni I was pushed out of a job I loved because the Justice Department was playing fast and loose with the court in a matter where a defendant appeared to have been tortured I resigned in protest when it became clear I was going to be transferred to office Siberia or forced out Reuveni was suspended and then fired because he admitted truthfully that a man sent to a gulag in El Salvador was deported in violation of a court order and that he did not know the legal basis for that decision Related Rule of loyalists Emil Bove would be the perfect Trumpian judge The details of both our cases reached Congress when a high-level Justice Department official was nominated to serve as a federal judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals In my occurrence the nominee was Michael Chertoff and in Reuveni s episode the nominee is Emil Bove Despite Chertoff s grilling by the late Sen Ted Kennedy about my incident he was ultimately verified I predict Bove will also be verified because if leaky wobbly Pete Hegseth can become secretary of defense the bar is so low that anyone can clear it I only hope that at the end of the day Reuveni comes out unscathed from his whistleblowing journey In my incident the Justice Department recounted my new law firm that I was a criminal and pressured them to fire me The department placed me under a pretextual criminal study for months I was never informed the reason The situation was closed with no charges ever being brought They referred me to the state bars in which I was licensed as an attorney based on a secret overview to which I did not have access After more than a year the Maryland bar dismissed the charges the D C bar charges remained a Sword of Damocles over my head for another eight years rendering me both unemployed and unemployable And if all of this were not punishment enough I ended up on the no-fly list Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts The saving grace is that Reuveni and I both kept receipts When pivotal emails went missing from the office file in my event I resurrected them from my computer archives documented and included them in a memo to my boss and took home a copy in situation they disappeared again Months later when the Justice Department continued to claim that it had never presumed Lindh had to have a lawyer during his interrogation I disclosed the emails to Newsweek an action permitted by the Whistleblower Protection Act because I could not believe that the department would have the temerity to make inhabitants statements contradicted by its own court filings Reuveni had text messages phone records and emails to back up his indicates of the department s leadership including federal judicial nominee Bove pressing subordinates to take serious legal risks such as misleading a federal court and disregarding a lawful court order When wrong things are being done before your eyes when you re an unwilling or unwitting participant when your complaints through internal channels fall on deaf ears and when the agency itself is part of the predicament then a free independent press and Congress are legally recognized procedures to blow the whistle I m glad Reuveni went community though it didn t take long for the opposition machinery to kick into high gear against him Conscientious employees are often stereotyped as disgruntled mentally ill or troublemakers who are out for fame profit or revenge I have not been totally immune from such accusations but the terms that have been used to describe me are far more incendiary Traitor turncoat and terrorist sympathizer Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called Reuveni s insists falsehoods purportedly made by a disgruntled former employee and then leaked to the press in violation of ethical obligations The word purportedly is doing selected heavy lifting as it implies uncertainty both as to whether Reuveni is disgruntled and whether his suggests are false We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in contemporary times to sponsorship Salon s progressive journalism In reality as someone who served in the Justice Department s Office of Professional Responsibility and on the D C Bar Legal Ethics Committee I submit that the people who really need to think seriously about their ethical obligations including the rules governing the lawyer-client relationship conflicts of interest candor to the tribunal and misconduct are the front offices of the Justice Department the Pentagon and DHS This point is a fortiori in light of Judge Paula Xinis brutal tongue lashing of the governing body lawyer in the original civil circumstance stemming from Kilmar brego Garc a s wrongful deportation I m deeply concerned that if there s no restraint on you Mr brego will be on another plane to another country because that s what you ve done in other cases I ve rarely seen a judge this vexed by the department s conduct While I ve seen judges chastise rogue prosecutors this was a jurist saying that she couldn t trust the Justice Department as an institution because of their brazen consistent and unrelenting bad faith One would hope that Xinis s rebuke would bring the governing body to heel but unfortunately she is not an outlier At least three judges in other deportation cases have accused Justice Department lawyers of flouting their orders or acting in bad faith That s the bigger story that is being lost in the cabinet s egregious ham-handed attempt to turn brego Garc a into an object lesson Judges know the difference between a whistleblower and a dog whistle Read more about this topic Trump admin disappeared a gay stylist for propaganda He hasn t been heard from since Punishable by death Pam Bondi raises the stakes in the war on federal workers Disappear without recourse Trump s defiance of a court order means any American could be next The post Like me DOJ whistleblower Erez Reuveni followed the law appeared first on Salon com