Whistleblower News From The Inside -- December 11, 2017
By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team
Saints coach Sean Payton calls NFL hire of former whistleblower ‘unbelievable’ – New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton expressed his astonishment on Twitter after Fox Sports reported Sunday that former Saints whistleblower Mike Cerullo now works for the NFL office. Cerullo, a former defensive assistant for the Saints, provided key evidence to the NFL to kick-start its bounty investigation against the team in 2011, and the Saints dismissed him as a “liar” with a grudge against them for being fired. Cerullo spent the past several years as Princeton’s director of football operations before being hired by the league as a director of football administration this past summer. ESPN
5 years and $350K later, city forced to rehire whistleblower – Nearly five years after Assistant City Attorney John McGovern was fired from Orange’s law department, he is back to work. The rehiring of McGovern — a whistleblower who has spent the better part of the last several years in court over his wrongful firing — was a victory, appellate court judges ruled this year, not only over his termination, but also over a “tortured” court process, elongated and confused by the city’s inept and missing responses to court orders in the case. “They were a disaster,” McGovern’s attorney, Ron Ricci, said in a phone interview of Orange’s response to McGovern’s lawsuit. In Ricci’s 21 years as an attorney, he said he’d “never seen anything like it.” NJ.com
Australia Seeks New Gag Laws That Could Potentially See Journalists And Whistleblowers Caught in Violation of Secrecy Laws – Australian government and intelligence whistleblowers – and potentially even journalists – may face up to 20 years in jail for disclosing classified information, under the most sweeping changes to the country’s secrecy laws since they were introduced. The Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced a broad package of reforms aimed at curbing foreign interference from countries including China and Russia. The legislation was introduced by Turnbull in the House of Representatives immediately after marriage equality passed on Thursday evening, and the otherwise full House of Representatives was emptied as celebrations were underway. While the reforms have been flagged for many months, they were only introduced on the last sitting day of parliament this year, and go much further than previously believed. Unexpectedly, the reforms include sweeping changes to longstanding secrecy laws, which are modelled on Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Buzzfeed News