MacLean said he suspects the timing of the firing was based on the fact that the Merit Systems Protection Board lacks a quorum and hence is inactive. MacLean has made substantive disclosures forcing review and corrective action on security lapses.” Devine cited MacLean’s design of a new aircraft cockpit barrier, which he offered to TSA but has not patented. Immediately upon his reinstatement and steadily since, Mr. His 2003 disclosures may have prevented a more ambitious rerun of the 9/11 tragedy. MacLean has made more of a difference correcting aviation security breakdowns than any other employee in agency history. In a long April 1 letter to Special Counsel Henry Kerner, he said, “Mr. It deserves decisive action by the Special Counsel.”ĭevine has pressed for OSC intervention. “It will be a weathervane whether even a Supreme Court victory can save a whistleblower’s career. They wanted to defeat the whistleblower who defeated them in the Supreme Court.”ĭevine ranks MacLean among one of the nation’s top whistleblowers. “This is a case where an agency has relentlessly, crudely defied the Whistleblower Protection Act,” Devine wrote to the Office of Special Counsel. MacLean’s attorney, Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project, said “the agency has been trying to fire Mr. TSA spokesman Thomas Kelly on Tuesday told Government Executive, “While TSA cannot comment on specific personnel actions, TSA treats all employees in a fair and lawful manner, and does not engage in retaliation of any kind.” “They flat-out rejected my proposal, for no reason, with no counterproposal.” “I didn’t want to go back to TSA,” he noted, saying he would have preferred to return to his previous job at Border Patrol. “The baseline is that I begged for a transfer as soon as the Supreme Court appeal was decided. In an interview with Government Executive, MacLean, now unemployed, characterized the events as part of a long-term retaliation against him by managers. “Supervisors in your management chain have questioned your judgment and reliability, and characterized your actions as negatively impacting the work environment,” Porter wrote. It recapped years of the charges and rebuttals on whether MacLean posted crude, sexual and disrespectful comments on comments about other staff in a secretive online forum for federal air marshals called “Flying Pigs.” It said he had viewed a pornographic website while driving on duty (a charge MacLean denies) and that he lied about how he copied a visitors log to a TSA Dulles Airport facility to learn the names of witnesses while under investigation. He took his case through the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Supreme Court, which in January 2015 ordered his reinstatement with back pay.īut on March 21, MacLean received a “notice of decision-removal,” a 20-page letter from Clyde Porter, supervising air marshal in charge of TSA’s Washington Field Office. MacLean had been fired before, in 2006, after he went to the news media with disclosures that TSA might be risking air passenger safety by reducing the placement of air marshals on long flights. MacLean’s multi-pronged case also loops in the past record of Kirstjen Nielsen, the embattled Homeland Security secretary whom President Trump fired on Sunday. It came after years spent in limbo in what he viewed as make-work jobs while awaiting resolution of his complaints to the Office of Special Counsel. MacLean on Tuesday confirmed to Government Executive-in the midst of higher-level drama of President Trump’s shakeup of leaders of the Homeland Security Department-that he was informed on March 21 of his termination.
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