It would be a leap if publicly available evidence thus far did not consistently
show that he does:
Grusch's DOSPR-cleared statement dated 4 April 2023:
Once I started digging, interviewing witnesses, asking senior government mentors of mine what was really going on here, unexpected doors started to open and others were brutally shut in my face, Many powerful officials were unhappy I was asking these questions. . .
Grusch interview with le Parisien, 7 June 2023:
Int.: You state in your complaint that you suffered reprisals after alerting the Department of Defense Inspector General in 2021. What is this about?
D.G.: They tried to attack my security clearance, they made allegations of misconduct against me, things of that nature. To protect the ongoing investigation on my behalf, I can't give too many details. I think in a few months I'll be able to.
Int.: Do you fear for your life?
D.G: At one time, there were threats of this nature.
Grusch's opening statement at the congressional hearing on 26 July 2023:
I made the decision based on the data I collected, to report this information to my superiors and multiple Inspectors General, and in effect become a whistleblower.
As you know, I have suffered retaliation for my decision. But I am hopeful that my actions will ultimately lead to a positive outcome of increased transparency.
Grusch's words during the congressional hearing on 26 July 2023:
The whistleblower former intelligence official David Grusch says he faced “very brutal and very unfortunate” retaliation after he went public with his allegations.
In light of the above pattern of experiencing reprisals (whether subjective or objectively true), Grusch's statement to NewNation on 9 August 2023
summarized by newcaster (at 0.29), and since shown to be inaccurate, would be consistent with it and demonstrates misplaced suspicion:
I see this kind of thing a lot in the jail I work in. Some individuals perceive a lot of actions by the guards towards them as targeted, retaliatory, and purposefully cruel.
Sometimes interpreting behaviors directed at oneself as hostile is a sign of disordered thinking (paranoid personality disorder for instance).
Sometimes interpreting behaviors directed at oneself as hostile are justified because the behaviors
are hostile (which unfortunately is commonplace in jails and prisons, many guards
are cruel and
do torture inmates in various ways).
Sometimes interpreting behaviors directed at oneself as hostile is not a sign of disordered thinking but a justifiable lens by which to interpret certain behaviors and events given
a past history of hostile behaviors and actions being directed towards oneself. Even if the
current action is not actually hostile but you interpret it as such, you're doing so because of a history you've had with law enforcement that has taught you to reasonably expect this kind of behavior by them towards you. Homeless individuals are one example of this group. There are countless homeless folks I talk to who consistently relay to me how often they are harassed by police everywhere they go. There are some homeless folks who actually have a standing order from the police to be arrested on sight, no matter if they're actually committing a crime or not, because of their past history of being considered a "public nuisance". They are literally arrested in public any time they're seen by an officer and brought in for bullshit charges like "trespassing" or for being a public nuisance in general. This happens, I
know this happens because the police officers
themselves tell me that's what they do. So individuals like these, with this kind of history, are justifiably going to interpret most of what officers do as hostile in some manner, even if in specific circumstances the behavior was not actually hostile and was simply interpreted as such.
Grusch does have a history of making claims about receiving retaliation from his higher ups. He's made extremely strong claims like "administrative terrorism".
We have no idea what the details of this alleged retaliation are. They certainly have been taken extremely seriously by the inspector general, something I doubt would have happened if he's just alleging retaliation when there's nothing really there.
But at any rate. We have this latest instance where an allegation has been made that his medical records have been leaked. He and Coulthart were wrong. As Deirdre pointed out, he may have been justified in reaching that conclusion based on what the Sheriff told him even if it happened to be ultimately wrong.
We can interpret his behavior as someone prone to making false positive assessments about nefarious intent and behavior towards him.
Or
Someone who
has suffered from nefarious and retaliatory behavior against him and is therefore justifiably interpreting non-nefarious behavior as retaliatory because of a
history of being on the receiving end of such things, and he just happens to have gotten
this one wrong because of the lens by which he's viewing the world now.
Because we don't know what has actually happened between him and the intelligence community regarding the alleged retaliation claims, we can't just use this one specific case of him getting things wrong to retroactively color all previous claims of retaliation against him as probably also being false positives.
There have been far too many cases of people making all sorts of paranoid sounding claims and me interpreting them as possible delusional and disordered thoughts that have eventually turned out to actually have been completely correct, even when some of those claims ended up being misinterpretations of perfectly normal and benign behaviors. Some people accurately perceive patterns of ill intent towards them (homeless folks ,people of color) , and some people inaccurately perceive those same patterns despite no history of any such behavior ever actually taking place.
Without sitting down with the person one on one it's notoriously difficult to accurately assess which of the two camps a person falls into. If I could sit with Grusch for an hour one-on-one I could fairly accurately tell you if he's one or the other. But I absolutely cannot do so based on the basis of so little publicly available information.
As someone who
is properly qualified to diagnose and assess people I've learned the critical importance of restraint and of hastily rushing to judgment on the basis of very little information, let alone without ever even speaking to the person myself. I've been wrong enough times to have learned that lesson and it's a worthwhile one to keep in mind for mental health professionals and non-clinicians alike.
