Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Whistleblower

While I’ve been watching the Peter Strzok hearing, I’ve also been reading David Dayen’s long piece at HuffPost about Mike Picarella, a Wall Street banker who took a high-ranking sales job in 2011 with HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks. As it happens, HSBC is also one of the most corrupt banks in the world: “In 2012,” Dayen writes, “the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, admitted that if the government pressed charges, HSBC would have ‘almost certainly’ lost its banking license in the U.S.”

But that’s not all. HSBC was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a hotbed of sexual harassment. For example, here’s an internal message between Eileen Hedges and another manager about an attractive junior colleague:

Ha ha ha. That’s hilarious.

This is the start of Dayen’s story. It ends a few thousand words later with Picarella reporting various cases of sexual harassment to HR and then going to court when he got fired shortly thereafter. If you want to know how it ends, just click the link.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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