ACLJ Appears in Federal Appeals Court To Defend FBI Whistleblower O'Boyle

This coming Tuesday the ACLJ will be appearing in federal appeals court on behalf of FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, who bravely blew the whistle on Deep State corruption within the agency that was targeting pro-lifers. Earlier this year the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that O’Boyle’s case should proceed to the merits of his appeal. We are now appearing before that court to urge it to rule in O’Boyle’s favor and recognize the necessity of protecting his statutory and First Amendment rights.

The Biden Administration has made Agent O’Boyle’s life a nightmare, bringing down the full force of malicious Deep State retribution against him for standing up for the truth and exposing corruption and political bias. Because he followed the law to expose the FBI’s corruption to Congress, the FBI suspended O’Boyle’s security clearance. And because his security clearance was suspended, he was suspended without pay, barred from taking any other employment, and shuttled into administrative limbo. He was still an employee but unable to work or receive pay. This is what the Deep State FBI does. The FBI finds a way to take away whistleblowers’ security clearances so they can’t do their jobs and then suspends them without pay for no longer having a security clearance. And they’re not allowed to take outside employment.

Security clearances should not be able to be suspended in an act of retaliation against whistleblowers without any external review. Such a rule renders the FBI free to target its employees for any reason at all, however discriminatory. The FBI’s position is that it can suspend a security clearance in an act of whistleblower retaliation, and there is nothing a reviewing agency or court can do about it. As one judge pointed out, under the position of the FBI:

[T]he FBI agency is both defendant and judge of the employee’s whistleblower claim of unfair treatment. Some observers might argue that, even if well intentioned in order to limit public disclosure of FBI methods, such a system is an offense to basic principles of due process and governmental authority toward people whose only sin may be that they have chosen to work for the Government.

In our oral argument before the federal appeals court, we will renew the argument made in our briefs, namely that whistleblowers like O’Boyle must not be denied the chance to remedy the wrongdoing they experience. Under the current system, the FBI is allowed to indefinitely suspend the security clearance of a whistleblower, then suspend them without pay for lacking a clearance, with no real judicial review of anything – circumventing the whistleblower protection laws enacted by Congress and the whistleblower’s Due Process and First Amendment rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. The D.C. Circuit Court should recognize the importance of our client’s constitutional rights and recognize the need for O’Boyle to be given a chance to get his life back.