Prosecutor Mark McConnell, had a long career at the U.S. Department of Justice investigating fraud, corruption, national security, and drug trafficking. Out of respect for the integrity legal system he served, he blew the whistle on law-breaking by DOJ itself.
McConnell was on an interagency task force operating in Florida when he discovered that the source of over 100 information files on a database for tracking drug smugglers in this country was not the DOJ’s FBI, but a secret Central Intelligence Agency surveillance program.
The CIA is not supposed to operate within the United States, though it often has. McConnell’s concern was that CIA-sourced evidence was being used in US courts to convict US citizens of crimes. “Intelligence laundering” meant that judges, jurors, and attorneys weren’t told how evidence against defendants had been obtained.
McConnell knew that the law and DOJ’s own guidelines don’t allow this. He reported the problem to his superiors and was basically told that it served the DOJ well to take and disguise the CIA’s evidence; bad guys were going to prison. If the subterfuge were known, dozens of convictions would be overturned and future convictions would be harder to get.
A meticulous adherence to the law kept McConnell going. The collaboration and the laundering were illegal, and no matter what the eventual consequences, it all had to stop. The CIA demanded he sign a nondisclosure agreement; he refused. They told him to delete the evidence from his computer; he said no and copied it all before security officers got to his office and deleted the files. He knew he’d need it all to keep making his case against the secret operations.
His DOJ boss suspended him, the director of the CIA insisted that there should be “repercussions” for him, and there was a threat of prison if he didn’t shut up.
Still working within the system, McConnell appealed his suspension—several CIA officials supported him—but he was not only not re-instated to the task force, he was given no onward assignments. A DOJ official told him that he would be reinstated if he apologized to the CIA and stopped talking about what he’d found.
When McConnell again observed agency regulations and requested permission to talk to reporter, he was told that the reinstatement offer would be off the table if he talked to any press. The director of a whistle-blower program for intelligence agencies said that the offer was illegal, breaking federal laws that protect whistleblowers and prevent such efforts to silence them.
McConnell is in professional limbo, offered assignments that don’t materialize. He knows his career is over but wouldn’t change his actions if he could. A sworn servant of the law, McConnell misses the work he’d been doing for decades, but is sure he couldn’t have lived with himself if he hadn’t spoken out against his agency’s malfeasance.