Dan Meyer, a Partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC’s Washington, D.C. office, has dedicated more than 25 years of service to the field of Federal Employment and National Security law as both a practicing attorney and federal investigator and senior executive. He is a lead in advocating for service members, Federal civilian employees, and contractors as they fight to retain their credentialing, suitability and security clearances.
Dan’s publicly available victories include successful security adjudications of tax payment failures, alcohol consumption, prior drug use and criminal conduct. Wins also include initial security reviews on recent university graduates resolving changes in lifestyle as they enter the national security and defense communities.
Dan’s accomplishments have earned him several awards such as the 2023 & 2025 Lawdragon 500 Leading Civil Rights & Plaintiff Employment Lawyers, the 2025 Lawdragon 500 Leading Global Plaintiff Lawyers, and the 2026 Lawdragon 500 Leading Litigators in America.
Dan also has strong gains for clients employed by, or contracting for, intelligence community agencies still remaining unidentified, as well as those, such as NRO, which openly adjudicate. In representing client interests before the Merit Systems Protection Board, Dan leads an interdisciplinary litigation team focused on prohibited personnel practices and agency due process failures leading to harmful error. Significant wins include victories for, among others, law enforcement and defense personnel, to include reversal of Army and Air Force employee removals as well as defense of Federal whistleblowing.
Throughout three Presidential administrations, Dan promoted the federal whistleblowing mission and its related policies and statutes, including personnel security. His first major case was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit protecting Rhode Island State employees suspended and terminated in an act of retaliation. Later, as the Intelligence Community’s (IC) foremost whistleblowing subject-matter advisor from 2013 to 2017, he served as the Executive Director for Intelligence Community Whistleblowing & Source Protection and was instrumental in establishing the IC’s first program of its kind. He worked with IC employees disclosing allegations ranging from the compromise of intelligence operations, to intelligence analysis failures, to reprisal against Congressional and inspector general witnesses.
In addition to his primary role, Dan served as the Executive Director for the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community External Review Panel established by Presidential Policy Directive 19: Protecting Whistleblowers With Access to Classified Information, and Intelligence Community Directive 120: Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection. In this capacity, he advised on and oversaw the processing of appeals of local inspectors general findings regarding whistleblower reprisal.
From 2004 to 2013, Dan served the U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General first as Director of Civilian Reprisal Investigations and then as Director of Whistleblowing and Transparency. In these positions, he investigated or provided oversight to numerous high-profile cases, among them disclosures involving the 9/11 attacks, the abuse of polygraph procedures in counterintelligence cases, the use of the security-clearance decision-making process to reprise and discriminate, and the treatment of soldiers and their remains after injury or death.
Prior to 2004, Dan was General Counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility where he appeared before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as well as the Merit Systems Protection Board’s regional offices. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1987 to 1991. He is a survivor of the 1989 explosion onboard the battleship IOWA (BB- 61), which took the lives of 47 of his shipmates. Then a Lieutenant, Dan also conned the Flagship of the Middle East Force in 1991 when it repelled pirates off the coast of Iran. He and his IOWA gunners still hold the world’s record for naval offshore gunnery, breaking the previous record in 1989.
Dan earned his bachelor of arts degree from Cornell University (Government & Naval Science), his juris doctorate from the Maurer School of Law: Indiana University Bloomington, and holds professional certificates as a National Security Studies Fellow from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He authored “Introduction to the Merit Systems Protection Board” and “Board Affirmative Defenses and Burden of Persuasion” in Merit Systems Protection Board: Practice and Procedure (Matthew Bender, 2026 (forthcoming)) and co-authored “Whistleblower Support in Practice: Toward an Integrated Research Model” in International Handbook on Whistleblowing Research (Elgar, 2014). With respect to law review articles, Dan has authored or co-authored, among other articles: Dan Meyer & David Berenbaum, The Wasp’s Nest: Intelligence Community Whistleblowing & Source Protection, 8 J. of Nat. Sec. Law & Policy 1 (2015); Dan Meyer & Everett E. Volk, “W” For War and Wedge? Environmental Enforcement and the Sacrifice of American Security—National and Environmental—to Complete the Emergence of a New “Beltway” Governing Elite, 25 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 41 (2003).
Dan was also a subject-matter advisor, either serving as a source or sourced, for, or in, Pedro Israel Orta, The Broken Whistle: A Deep State Run Amok, Memoir of a CIA Whistleblower (PIOP, 2024); Antonio Giangrande, Anno 2022 L’accoglienza Prima Parte GLI Americani (Lulu, 2022); Allison Stanger, Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale Univ. Press, 2021); Geoffrey R. Stone & Lee P. Bollinger, National Security, Leaks, and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021); Chris Whipple, The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future (Scribners, 2021); Dr. David A. Tenenbaum, Accused of Treason: The U.S. Army’s Witch Hunt for a Jewish Spy (Post Hill, 2020); Tom Mueller, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (Riverhead, 2019); Mark Hertsgaard, Bravehearts: Whistle-Blowing in the Age of Snowden (Hot Books, 2016); James William Gibson, A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature (Metropolitan Books, 2009); Gary Ferguson, Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone (National Geographic, 2003).
Dan’s naval service onboard battleship IOWA (BB-61) was featured in FX’s A Glimpse of Hell (2001), the made-for-cable TV’s feature presentation with the highest cable television rating prior to 9/11.
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