From Bryan Bender's 5-26-21 POLITICO article entitled "Ex-official Who Revealed UFO Project Accuses Pentagon of 'Disinformation' Campaign":
The former Pentagon official who went public about reports of UFOs has filed a complaint with the agency’s inspector general claiming a coordinated campaign to discredit him for speaking out — including accusing a top official of threatening to tell people he was "crazy," according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.
Lue Elizondo, a career counterintelligence specialist who was assigned in 2008 to work for a Pentagon program that investigated reports of "unmanned aerial phenomena," filed the 64-page complaint to the independent watchdog on May 3 and has met several times with investigators, according to his legal team.
The claim that the government is trying to discredit him comes weeks before the director of national intelligence and the Pentagon are expected to deliver an unclassified report to Congress about UFOs and the government’s strategy for investigating such encounters. The report is expected to include a detailed accounting of the agencies, personnel and surveillance systems that gather and analyze the data.
“What he is saying is there are certain individuals in the Defense Department who in fact were attacking him and lying about him publicly, using the color of authority of their offices to disparage him and discredit him and were interfering in his ability to seek and obtain gainful employment out in the world,” said Daniel Sheehan, Elizondo’s attorney. “And also threatening his security clearance.”
Sheehan, a public interest lawyer and activist, has a long history of taking on the federal government on behalf of high-profile clients, including defending The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case as well as one of the Watergate burglars.
He is also widely viewed as a provocateur who has an abiding interest in UFOs and has spoken publicly about alien visitations. He also served as counsel for the Disclosure Project, led by ufologist Steven Greer, that has sought to force more government transparency on UFOs.
When asked for comment, Elizondo referred questions to Sheehan.
Sheehan maintains the goal of Elizondo’s IG complaint is much bigger than clearing his name: He wants to compel the Pentagon to clear up all the ambiguity about what it knows about UFOs.
“Nobody seemed to be taking this thing seriously,” Sheehan said of Elizondo’s concerns when he left the Pentagon in 2017. “The different units and different groups that are responsible for responding to this particular phenomenon … they're not briefing each other on this.”
“The old dodge,” Sheehan says, “is ‘oh well, the real problem was that one shop wasn't communicating with the other shop.’ That’s the classic bureaucratic dodge. I’m trying to get the Defense Department to clarify for the public and media what exactly is the cartography inside the Defense Department for dealing with this particular phenomenon.”
To read Bender's entire article, click HERE.
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