Daniel Meyer

Guest Author

Dan Meyer, Managing Partner of Tully Rinckey PLLC’s Washington, D.C. office, has dedicated more than 25 years of service to the field of Federal Employment and National Security law as both a practicing attorney and federal investigator and senior executive. He is a leader in advocating for service members, Federal civilian employees, and contractors as they fight to retain their credentialing, suitability and security clearances. Dan’s publicly-available victories include security adjudications of tax payment failures, alcohol consumption, prior drug use and criminal conduct. Before the Merit Systems Protection Board, he has successfully represented special agents and law enforcement personnel.

Through three Presidential administrations, Dan promoted federal whistleblowing and its related policies and statutes, including personnel security. His first major case was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, protecting Rhode Island State employees suspended and terminated in an act of retaliation. Later, as the Intelligence Community’s (IC) foremost whistleblowing subject-matter expert from 2013 to 2017, he served as the Executive Director for Intelligence Community Whistleblowing & Source Protection and was instrumental in establishing the IC’s first program of its kind. He worked with IC employees disclosing allegations ranging from the compromise of intelligence operations, to intelligence analysis failures, to reprisal against Congressional and inspector general witnesses.

In addition to his primary role, Dan served as the Executive Director for the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community External Review Panel established by Presidential Policy Directive 19: Protecting Whistleblowers With Access to Classified Information, and Intelligence Community Directive 120: Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection. In this capacity, he advised on and oversaw the processing of appeals of local inspectors general findings regarding whistleblower reprisal.

From 2004 to 2013, Dan served the U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General, first as Director of Civilian Reprisal Investigations and then as Director of Whistleblowing and Transparency. In these positions, he investigated or provided oversight to numerous high-profile cases, among them disclosures involving the 9/11 attacks, the abuse of polygraph procedures in counterintelligence cases, the use of the security-clearance decision-making process to reprise and discriminate, and the treatment of soldiers and their remains after injury or death.

Prior to 2004, Dan was General Counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, where he appeared before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as well as the Merit Systems Protection Board’s regional offices. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1987 to 1991. He is a survivor of the 1989 explosion on board the battleship IOWA (BB- 61), which took the lives of 47 of his shipmates. Then a Lieutenant, Dan also conned the Flagship of the Middle East Force in 1991, when it repelled pirates off the coast of Iran. He and his IOWA gunners still hold the world’s record for naval offshore gunnery, breaking the previous record in 1989.

Dan earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, his juris doctorate from Indiana University School of Law – Bloomington, and holds professional certificates as a National Security Studies Fellow from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. His media appearances include interviews on the BBC, CNN and MSNBC. He co-authored Whistleblower support in practice: Toward an integrated research model in the International Handbook on Whistleblowing Research, and The Wasp’s Nest: Intelligence Community Whistleblowing & Source Protection in Georgetown Law School’s Journal of National Security Law & Policy. He was also a subject-matter expert sourced for Allison Stanger’s Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Leaks: The Story of Whistleblowing in America (Yale University Press, under contract for publication in 2019).