Oh, and this one is just such a special case it's worth highlighting. In response to questions about Waco and Ruby Ridge:
I worked for the government for 25 years and I understand how trust in government has been harmed. Please remember, however, that it was agents on the ground who let the public know the truth about these incidents when some sought to cover-up inconvenient truths. Don't throw all government employees in the same bucket. Most of us are patriots, perhaps just like you.
The problem here being that this isn't true.
Ruby Ridge is 'only' appalling. The murder of Mrs. Weaver was not disclosed by well-meaning federal agents. It was only as a trial against Weaver himself unfolded that the bad actions of the FBI came to light -- despite agents destroying evidence as they 'investigated' a shooting they had partial responsibility for. At the same time federal prosecutors were arguing for the death penalty. They only got caught because the DoJ promised paperwork without realizing the FBI was destroying it. To successfully allow Weaver to surrender, they had to bring in the paranoid conspiracy theorists Bo Gritz, because the FBI's team was too damned bloodthirsty. And that's the 'light-hearted' only a couple people died one!
Waco was nightmarish. I won't go through the full laundry list from this post, simply because at some point in the middle I'll get AOE'd, but the part where the FBI spent six years maintaining that their HRT had never used incendiary or pyrotechnic gas rounds, up to and including testifying before Congress that this was the case, and holding control of the evidence demonstrating otherwise is rather on point. There was no whistleblower or honorable agent, not from the feds or even from the Texas Rangers. There was a wrongful death lawsuit that finally managed to get permission to look at the evidence sitting in a locker nice and catalogued, and then the week afterward suddenly an FBI's deputy director suddenly found out about a major component of a raid he'd been a major player during.
This 'whoops, we told Congress a fat fucking fib for hours on end' isn't unusual. I'll point again to the Jewell testimony, where everyone from the FBI insisted that the conveniently unavailable Director Freeh had produced a specific memo warning against playing games with Miranda rights, and then it turned out this memo didn't exist. But seventy-plus people didn't die in a horrible fire filled with poisonous cyanide gas in that case.
The biggest ATF whistleblower in the last thirty years was Dodson. Which, major props to him for doing it! But a very awkward example for a guy who's joining the admin touting its ties to the one that made leaks trying to implicate that whistleblower for the gunwalking, and also tried to muzzle said whistleblower from writing on the topic.