Whistleblower Aid Files Amicus Brief in Support of Co-Founder Mark Zaid as he Challenges Presidential Retaliation

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 13, 2025 – Whistleblower Aid has filed an amicus brief in support of its co-founder, Mark Zaid, as he challenges President Trump’s retaliatory revocation of his security clearance.

Zaid’s security clearance was revoked on March 22, 2025 along with the clearances of President Biden, former Vice President Harris and other former top officials. 

Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid, a legal non-profit, with the purpose of providing federal employees, particularly those working in national security, affordable legal representation.

Whistleblower Aid’s Chief Legal Officer Andrew P. Bakaj argues in the brief, filed on Thursday, that the retaliatory revocation of Zaid’s security clearance “is much larger than Mr. Zaid. It goes to the heart of undoing the post-Watergate reforms created to ensure an accountable and transparent federal government, which includes the mechanisms for national security whistleblowers to come forward.”

Bakaj further writes, 

If the President of the United States can summarily revoke an individual’s security clearance and access to classified information without due process simply because the president, whoever it may be, does not agree with or is somehow personally offended by the positions taken – that is to hold our government accountable – then the likelihood of prospective would-be whistleblowers mishandling classified information by leaking it increases exponentially. 

In the amicus, Bakaj warns that by targeting Zaid, the Administration is indirectly attacking national security whistleblowers through their attorneys. 

Today that same system of checks and balances, of government oversight, of accountability is once again under assault not only directly, but asymmetrically by attacking those who support whistleblowers – their attorneys. The Administration’s actions in this case are not designed to merely chill future whistleblowers from coming forward, but are part of a key authoritarian tactic to shut down accountability more broadly. By attacking attorneys – the helpers – the Administration will further cut off the ability for investigations to take place, for Congress to conduct their Article I oversight, and for accountability to be had.

By undermining national security whistleblowers’ access to cleared counsel, the likelihood that well-intentioned whistleblowers may turn from lawful disclosure channels – potentially putting classified information, and with it our nation’s security, at risk.

“The baseless revocation of Mark’s security clearance doesn’t only harm him personally, but it also sends a chilling message to the whistleblowers he has spent his career representing,” Bakaj said. “This is not just about Mark, who has represented whistleblowers, both Democrat and Republican, in every presidential administration since Bill Clinton. This is about safeguarding the accountability mechanisms for whistleblowers to report waste, fraud, abuse, and violations of law safely and lawfully.”

Bakaj concludes the amicus imploring the court not to allow authoritarianism to become the law of the land, writing,

This Honorable Court must not allow authoritarianism to become the law of the land where proclamations by fiat, stripping the nation of due process, and silencing whistleblowers who come forward in good conscience rules the day. In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch says, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” Today, we write, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by authoritarian rule is a person of conscience.”

Along with Bakaj, Zaid represented the Intelligence Community whistleblower whose disclosure led to President Trump’s first impeachment.

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Whistleblower Aid provides pro bono legal, advocacy, and communications support to government and private sector whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The organization’s lawyers have represented some of the most consequential national security and Big Tech whistleblowers in history, including the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the anonymous intelligence community whistleblower whose disclosures led to the first impeachment of President Trump, and others.