Whistleblower News From The Inside -- November 6, 2017
By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team
Ex-Akin Gump Partner to Plead Guilty to Trying to Sell Whistleblower Cases – A former Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld partner has agreed to plead guilty after being arrested wearing a wig as a disguise while trying to sell a copy of a sealed whistleblower lawsuit against a California company for $310,000. Jeffrey Wertkin, a former U.S. Justice Department trial attorney who joined the law firm’s Washington office last year, was arrested in January. He plans to enter a guilty plea later this month, his lawyer said late on Thursday. Reuters
Daniel Ellsberg: Why There Aren’t More Whistleblowers – In this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” Robert Scheer interviews activist and former United States military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, delves into his reasons for becoming a whistleblower and explains why Richard Nixon didn’t use nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. The conversation is a timely one, as Ellsberg’s newest book, “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” is a revelatory first-person account of the U.S. nuclear program in the 1960s. Ellsberg tells Scheer very little has changed since that era. “We were being lied into a hopeless, desperate, aggressive war,” Ellsberg says of Vietnam, “as happened in 2002, [with] our attack on Iraq.” Huffington Post
Red Cross: $6 million for Ebola Fight Stolen Through Fraud – Fraud by Red Cross workers and others wasted at least $6 million meant to fight the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the organization confirmed Saturday. The revelations follow an internal investigation of how the organization handled more than $124 million during the 2014-2016 epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. The disease erupted in Guinea and quickly spread to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The international aid response was initially slow, and money once it arrived was often disbursed quickly in the rush to purchase supplies and get aid workers into the field. As much as $2.13 million disappeared as the result of “likely collusion” between Red Cross staff and employees at a Sierra Leonean bank, the investigation found. It is believed that the money was lost when they improperly fixed the exchange rate at the height of the epidemic. ABC News