(NewsNation) — One of the leading members of Congress trying to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery is unfazed by a recent report about the mental health of one of the biggest whistleblowers on the subject.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said of the story. “What matters is the fact that this man served his country and is suffering for it. And now, we’re stigmatizing this further,” Burchett said.
The story, which details how whistleblower David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and intelligence official, was committed to a mental health facility after making a suicidal statement, was published Wednesday. Ken Klippenstein, the reporter who wrote the article, said the records he received about Grusch were not confidential or medical.
“The UFO whistleblower is accusing me of using confidential medical records leaked to me by the intelligence community,” Klippenstein said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Every part of that is false. I used publicly available police records I obtained under FOIA.”
But investigative journalist Ross Coulthart said Grusch believes someone in the government may have been responsible for releasing his health records to The Intercept in an effort to smear his credibility.
“Somebody told him where to look,” Coulthart says.
Grusch’s claims that the U.S. government has secretly been in possession of nonhuman spacecraft has sparked international attention. On Tuesday, Grusch said in a statement to NewsNation that he learned The Intercept intended to publish an article highlighting struggles he has faced in the past with post-traumatic stress disorder, grief and depression.
Even with Klippenstein’s post, Coulthart says his concerns still stand.
“Frankly, it’s quite obvious he got a tip. Somebody wanted to try and discredit Grusch. They leaked information that allowed the journalist to ask for a specific amount of information that (they) knew existed,” Coulthart told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night.
Coulthart is now questioning why the records were released and their relevance, since he says they did not impact Grusch’s security clearance.
“Why stigmatize somebody for a PTSD diagnosis that was fixed? That was no issue at all to the Defense Department. It’s just a pretty lame and quite frankly, dopey effort to try and discredit a good human being,” Coulthart said.
Burchett told Cuomo he is sickened by it.
“This man served his country,” Burchett said. “Dadgummit, we’ve got to do better than this. I’m so disgusted about this. When I knew about it last night, I woke up at 3 o’clock this morning. Hell, I couldn’t get back to sleep.”
In his statement to NewsNation, Grusch said he struggled after coming home from service in Afghanistan and with the loss of a friend.
“I was personally affected again … when a close friend of mine, an intelligence officer who was serving in Air Force Special Operations Command at the time, took his own life shortly after we last spoke,” Grusch said. “I am proud to be transparent on this matter and am glad I got the help I needed to continue my intelligence career.”
Grusch, a former Air Force officer and intelligence official, recently testified before Congress that the U.S. has a secret UFO retrieval program and that people have been harmed in government cover-ups of UFO technology. Grusch previously told Coulthart his mental health has not had an impact on the information he came forward with about UFOs.
If you or someone you know needs help, resources or someone to talk to, you can find it at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline website or by calling 988. People are available to talk to 24×7.