Government Agency Reopens Case Against Trump-Sympathetic Whistleblower

A whistleblower who was forced to resign after he brought attention to waste, fraud, and abuse at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is getting a second chance to prove his case.

As The Daily Wire previously reported, whistleblower Mark Moyar spent months reporting several instances of waste, fraud, and abuse at USAID but was forced to resign after the USAID inspector general (IG) – appointed by President Barack Obama in 2015 – allegedly denied his due process rights after he was accused of disclosing classified information in a book he wrote two years earlier. Moyar contends the allegations are “spurious and unsubstantiated” and are retaliation for his whistleblower complaints.

My former colleague Susan Crabtree previously reported on Moyar’s case, noting a letter the whistleblower sent to congress asking for urgent assistance. Moyar said that if congress waits to help him – and Trump loses re-election – he will have no chance to get his career back. Moyar alleged in his letter that he has been unable to find full-time employment due to the “abrupt termination” from USAID and that USAID officials told the White House Office of Presidential Personnel that Moyar could not hold a security clearance. Moyar’s clearance was suspended and USAID threatened to revoke it, Crabtree previously reported.

“The USAID administrator has the authority to reverse wrongful decisions and to seek investigative assistance from outside the agency, which is clearly necessary in light of the bias demonstrated by USAID [Office of Inspector General] and [the USAID Security Office],” Moyar wrote in his letter.

“If this precedent is allowed to stand, then in the future the Deep State can remove any political appointee by simply having their friends in one agency send an unsubstantiated allegation of security clearance infraction to another agency,” he added.

As Crabtree explained, Moyar should have received due process rights while defending himself from the allegations.

Crabtree now reports that the IG who previously denied Moyar his due process rights, Anna Calvaresi Barr, would re-open Moyar’s case and is expected to finalize a report on the re-opened probe soon, possibly this week. Moyar’s attorney, Kel McClanahan, the executive director of public-interest law firm National Security Counselors, told Crabtree the IG had completed its investigation and simply needed to finalize the report.

“We are happy they chose to reopen this, and we believe [the way Moyar was treated] was a grave error,” McClanahan said. “We’re optimistic that this new, more thorough Report of Investigation will vindicate everything he said.”

More from Crabtree:

Several current and former USAID employees spoke to RCP on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. They described [USAID’s Office of Civilian-military Cooperation] CMC as toxic and dysfunctional before Moyar arrived. Many staffers who were part of an internal clique only showed up for a few hours a day, if at all, while others were often on questionable travel. In addition, personnel decisions were regularly made without the usually required higher USAID authorization, the sources said.

Before Moyar was tapped to lead the CMC it had some of the lowest Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey scores in all of USAID, a public sign of the office’s weak morale. After Moyar’s forced resignation, these same sources said that the CMC returned to a state of dysfunction, with at least three officials on their way out and their jobs advertised on USAjobs.gov, an online clearinghouse for open federal government positions.