Chairman, United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary · President pro tempore of the United States Senate
Dear Senator Grassley,
My name is Arthur Brent Porter. I am 61 years old, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, and I am in my twentieth year with Lyme disease. Before I tell you what happened, I want to tell you where I come from, because I think it is ground we share.
My father's grandfather was a sharecropper in Oklahoma who farmed corn. The Porters came over from Ireland, landed on the East Coast, and worked their way west until they reached Oklahoma, and eventually Texas. My father's mother's people came up through Mississippi. Baptists. On my mother's side, my great-grandfather was raised in a Masonic orphanage in Tennessee. At sixteen he ran away from it and took his little sister with him, to take care of her himself. Evidently conditions there were not good.
You have farmed in New Hartford, Iowa your entire adult life. You still do. That is why I am writing to you and not to someone else.
You know how this works better than I do. A load comes into the elevator and two things happen. It gets weighed. And it gets graded. The grade sets the price — No. 1 and No. 2 corn off the same field are worth different money. Cheating a man on weight is crude. Cheating him on grade is the quiet version: you take the load, write it into the book one grade down, and by the time anyone could check, the corn is in the pile.
In December 2024 I underwent a $15,000 psychiatric evaluation at Dell Medical School, The University of Texas at Austin, in the department chaired by Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff. My family paid for it. Access came through a member of Dell Medical School's own behavioral health advisory board — a personal friend of the family that issued the ultimatum and wrote the check. Dell's own signed report acknowledges, in its intake notes, that I was there under financial coercion — that my parents had given me an ultimatum, and I acquiesced. Under APA Ethical Standards 3.10 and 9.03 that voids informed consent. They proceeded anyway.
I had told them in writing before I traveled that I had active, documented tick-borne infection, and that psychiatric diagnosis requires medical causes be ruled out first. That is a prerequisite, not a courtesy. They told me to come regardless.
People assume a family paying $15,000 is acting out of concern. I want to be exact about what actually happened, because it was something else.
I spent most of my life not speaking up in my family, and I want to be precise about what I mean, because it is not that they ignored me.
They listened. They funded a great deal of treatment over many years and I am not ungrateful for it. But every request had to be argued like a case. I would build the pitch — research, costs, logistics, contingencies — and present it, and if they disagreed, their plan was what happened. Not because they had better information. Because it was their money and their judgment, and mine did not carry.
An example, since it is documented.
In November 2020 I was living in a Studio 6 in Dallas, facing a six-month lease I did not want. I stayed up all night writing my parents a fully researched proposal: twenty days in Costa Rica first, priced under $1,500 — flights on my own miles, two vetted rentals, less than they were already spending on a month of lodging for me — with the treatment delayed a few weeks rather than canceled. I had even found a surf camp that needed a volunteer photographer, so I would be useful to someone. I closed by writing: "I'm open and not set on anything, I'm just brainstorming and wanting to share for your feedback." (Full costing and logistics in the appendix.)
My mother's reply, in its entirety:
"NOT NOW Brent! We are purchasing your Hbot at the moment & have you in queue finally @ SW Med School for evaluation! Please let's stick with the plan!"
I stuck with the plan. I signed the Dallas lease. The apartment next door had a dog that barked constantly. Then the February 2021 storm took down the Texas power grid, and I spent nights sleeping in my car with the heater running. I eventually had to find a subleaser and get out.
That is what I mean by not being heard. Not silence — a standing arrangement in which my reasoning never outweighed their preference, regardless of the reasoning. I did not know then that I would later test in the 97th percentile on nonverbal perceptual reasoning. Neither did they. It would not have mattered. The rule was not about the quality of the argument.
So at some point I stopped making them. By college I was already trained out of it — which is how I ended up in a career I did not enjoy. Nobody asked what I wanted, and I had stopped volunteering it.
In the fall of 2024, after seventeen years of illness, I started speaking up again and refused to go quiet.
And I want you to understand exactly what "speaking up" meant, because it is why everything after it happened. My father is the man who taught me that truth is not negotiable. When I was twelve, I told a neighbor boy that we had killed a mouse in our garage, when my father had killed it. He overheard, corrected me on the spot, and drove me to that boy's house and made me knock on the door and say it right. That lesson took. So at fifty-seven I finally applied it to its author: I told my father the truth — that my illness had more than one author, that his part in it was real, and that I would not carry the whole of the blame so that he would never have to look at his share.
He did not like it. And men who cannot be told the truth have a method for the people who tell it — you watch the President run it weekly: fire them, sue them, or discredit them. My family chose discredit, and the $15,000 evaluation was the instrument. That is the "why" beneath every document in this letter: the report exists because I spoke, and its job was to establish that the speaking was the sickness.
After Dell, I wrote my father and reminded him of the mouse. His written reply, June 21, 2025, word for word: "Indeed, there are times, from my life experience, when not telling the truth is better. Facts often prove what was said truthfully to be wrong." The man who taught me truth-telling renounced it in writing rather than hear one truth about himself. Senator — that sentence is the family edition of the doctrine you are watching in your own committee this month: when the written record becomes inconvenient, dissolve the standard. My father's party is now protecting a President on exactly those terms. I voted for that party my whole life. What I did to my father at fifty-seven, I am doing to it now, whether it likes it or not.
What happened next was not new. It was the 2020 exchange again, with more money on the table.
Both times, a treatment was already planned. Both times, I said the same thing: I need to pause this, my body is telling me something, and here is a specific, cheaper alternative I have researched. Both times my mother's answer was to override it and instruct me to comply.
November 13, 2020: "NOT NOW Brent! We are purchasing your Hbot at the moment & have you in queue finally @ SW Med School for evaluation! Please let's stick with the plan!"
November 18, 2024: "Brent, you are either going to be here for this appointment or not — I'm really disappointed in this back tracking... It is not for you to decide how we should spend our money... Brent if you can not make this work, then your Dad & I can no longer support you in what we feel has been a failed attempt to help you regain your health. We have no choice but let you go on your own to figure out your way forward. I'm afraid that disability check is not going to go very far."
Same structure. Stick with the plan in 2020. Comply or lose support in 2024. Four years, and the escalation is the only difference.
And look at what I had actually written to them on November 18, hours before that reply. It was not a demand. I opened by thanking them. I acknowledged my sister's effort in arranging Dell. I wrote: "I want to be clear that I'm not ruling out going to Dell... However, I need to be persuaded, logically, that this is the best decision for my recovery." I laid out that Stanford or UCLA could do the same evaluation with Medicare covering most of the cost, saving $10,000 or more that could go toward family counseling and toward things that actually regulated my nervous system.
I used an analogy to explain what I could not get across any other way. I described my brain and body as a company, myself as the CEO, and my family as the board of directors. I said the company runs on energy, chemicals, and steam — and that the steam gauge measures my emotional state, and that only I can read that gauge. I wrote that when I report the gauge is off the charts and the board overrides the report, it does damage.
Senator, I did not know when I wrote that email that I would one day be writing to you about a board of directors and a chief executive who reports falsely. I reached for the same analogy four years ago to describe my own family, because it was the only way I knew to say: I am the one holding the instrument. You cannot read it from where you are sitting. When you override my reading, you are not being careful — you are guessing, with my body.
I also wrote this, which I think explains the entire arc: "In the past, I have just gone along with the flow and if I object and it's overruled, I give up and don't object anymore to conserve my energy."
That was the pattern I was finally breaking. And the response to breaking it was a financial ultimatum.
What I said was this: I needed a break from physical treatment. Seventeen years of protocols had not gotten me well. And I need to be precise about what I was actually asking for, because it was smaller than people assume. I was not proposing an athletic program. What I was asking for was something to look forward to — the thought that I could wake up, get out to the Pacific, sit on a board in the water, and maybe catch one small wave. Nothing hard. Just something that would make the next morning feel worth arriving at. After seventeen years of illness, that is what I had run out of. Not treatment options. The thing that makes a person willing to keep undergoing them.
There is real research behind the idea — surf therapy with veterans carrying PTSD, and beneath it Self-Determination Theory, fifty years of replicated findings that human functioning requires autonomy, competence, and connection. Costa Rica was all three; Hawaii, four years later, was the same three. I laid it out in writing on November 4, 2024, with the reasoning, the cost, and the logistics.
They said no. They knew best.
I asked again. And after several attempts I did the thing I had never done in fifty-nine years: I told them plainly that they were not hearing me, and that not being heard was itself part of why I was not getting well.
That is the moment everything changed. Not the request. The moment I named the pattern.
They did not respond to the substance. They responded by arranging a psychiatric evaluation of me — and when I proposed Stanford instead, my mother wrote that if I did not go to Dell, she and my father had determined they could no longer support me financially.
So: I asked for something specific and cheaper. I was refused. I said out loud that I was not being heard. And the answer was $15,000 to have a medical school examine whether something was wrong with me.
The money bought a professional document establishing that the one who had spoken up was the problem.
What it cost to say no to a $1,411 trip in 2020: a six-month lease I did not want, a barking dog, a week of nights in my car during a grid failure. What it cost to say no in 2024: $15,000, a psychiatric record I did not consent to, infections still untreated, and nineteen months of my life spent on paperwork instead of recovery.
It has always cost more to keep me sick than it would have cost to listen to me. I told them that too. It did not change the answer, because the answer was never about cost.
Here is the part I cannot get past.
I told them all of this while it was happening. On December 16, 2024, during the evaluation, I wrote to Dr. Nemeroff's office: "my parents are screwing me by paying big money for me to get my prostate checked... whereas that money could've been spent instead to give me two months of recovery in Hawaii, even after I first suggested it, before being overruled and threatened with withdrawal of all financial support, if I did not come to Dell Med."
In the same message I asked whether my last two appointments could be used to meet with my family instead, since the family was the actual subject. I also told them I had just located lab work confirming ongoing Bartonella and Borrelia infection.
The reply came the next morning from the Chair's executive assistant, after she had spoken with Dr. Nemeroff:
"The Comprehensive Diagnostic and Treatment Evaluation Program is an individual evaluation process and not intended for family units. We need you to complete the last two appointments with Drs. Berg and Brumback in order for us to provide a full and accurate report with correct diagnoses and recommended treatments."
A patient tells them he is present under financial threat, that the family dynamic is the real problem, and that he has just confirmed active infection. The answer is: finish the appointments so we can produce the report. "Correct diagnoses" — before the testing was even complete. The conclusion existed; the appointments were for the paperwork.
The program was structurally incapable of examining the family. They said so themselves. It could only produce findings about one person — which is precisely what it was purchased to do.
And Dr. Nemeroff, of all people, knew what that would do to me. His own published research established how chronic uncontrollable stress elevates corticotropin-releasing factor and drives inflammation. It is his field. He has built a career on it. He was looking at a patient with documented tick-borne infection, telling him in writing that he was there under coercion by his own family — and he proceeded, dismissed the infections, and produced findings that validated the people applying the pressure.
He did not merely fail to protect me from what my family was doing. He completed it.
Senator, this is the part that has kept me up for nineteen months, and I want to state it as plainly as I can.
They did not miss it. I told them.
In writing, during the evaluation, I said: I do not need this neurology appointment. The problem is my family. Use these last two sessions to meet with them instead. I have just confirmed active Bartonella and Borrelia infection. That is what needs attention.
Every one of those statements was correct. The infections were real — the labs confirm it. The family was the operative problem — their own intake notes confirm it, because they wrote the coercion down themselves. And the neurology appointment produced the cognitive scores they then recorded below their own manual's classification.
A patient with no medical training told seven physicians what the correct course was, in writing, before they took it. They read it. They did the other thing.
That is the difference between an error and a decision. An error is what happens when you do not have the information. They had the information — I sent it to them, and their office acknowledged receiving it. What they did next was not a failure of perception. It was a choice made with full knowledge.
I do not know what was in Dr. Nemeroff's mind. But I know what his conduct communicated, because conduct is the only evidence of intent any of us ever gets: the infection is not my concern, the coercion is not my concern, the report is what was paid for and the report is what will be produced.
A man who does that to one patient will do it to others. He is Chair of Psychiatry at a public university, and the program is still operating.
Two things follow, and I state them as my own view.
Dr. Nemeroff should not hold a medical license. Not suspended pending review — he evaluated a patient he was told in writing was there under financial coercion, dismissed documented infection, and produced findings for the party paying the bill. If that does not reach the threshold, I do not know what the threshold is for.
And every patient who went through that program should be contacted. Not the records — the people. Someone should ask them how they are, and who paid, and whether they wanted to be there. I was the one with the documentation and the capacity to fight, and it still took federal intervention to see part of my own file. The ones without that are not going to raise their hands on their own.
Then they graded me. The WAIS-IV manual publishes fixed bands: 120 through 129 is Superior. My Perceptual Reasoning score was 129. My Working Memory was 122. Both were written into the report as "above average" — which is not a classification in the manual at all. It is no more a grade than "pretty good corn" is a grade. Two further scores their own report calls "exceptionally high" had their numbers left off the page entirely.
Every adjustment moved the same direction. Opinions scatter. A thumb on the scale never does.
The final report states plainly: "no evidence of any mania." Bipolar disorder appears nowhere in the diagnoses.
Yet a laboratory order dated December 12, 2024 carries ICD-10 code F31.9 — Bipolar Disorder, unspecified. Never disclosed to me. I learned of it only after the federal Office for Civil Rights compelled partial production of my own records.
And there is a document that both exists and does not exist. During the evaluation, one of the clinicians asked my sister to send a letter about me. On April 23, 2025 she confirmed in writing that she had — describing it in her own words as "meant to be confidential between Dr. Logue and me" and containing content that "could be hurtful if read by someone other than Dr. Logue." On November 12, 2025, UT Health Austin's records department informed me that no such document exists in my file. Both statements cannot be true. Either a clinician received a letter about a patient and it was never filed, or it was filed and later removed — and I have never been permitted to read what a member of my family told my evaluators about me.
And the record moved again after I challenged it. On February 4, 2025 I formally contested the findings. Afterward, Narcissistic Personality Disorder was removed and an Adjustment Disorder was inserted — backdated to January 15, 2025. If that diagnosis had existed on January 15, the February 3 report signed by seven faculty would have reflected it. It did not. I have both versions. A grade book that changes after the farmer complains is not a grade book. It is a ledger being managed.
There is one more contradiction I would ask you to hold against their own paper. They diagnosed me with Somatic Symptom Disorder — a finding that my physical complaints exceed any physical cause. My labs from September 2024, in their possession, show CD57 immune suppression at 35 against a reference range of 60 to 360; Complement C4a at nearly two and a half times normal; and Aspergillus mycotoxins at roughly eight times the reference range. Documented infection and documented toxicity, recorded as a disorder of imagining illness.
Somebody brought in a bad crop and recorded it under my name. And a grade book does not forget. Every physician I see from here forward reads it.
On February 2 and again March 2, 2026, I received invitations to a bipolar research study at UT Austin, addressed to me by name, stating I might be eligible because I had been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder. Annual blood draws and MRI scans. I am on Medicare.
You wrote the 1986 amendments to the False Claims Act. A record created with no finding behind it, which then generates federal billing, is the shape of the thing that statute exists to catch. I am not a lawyer and I will not tell you what to call it. I am telling you what is in the file.
You exposed Dr. Nemeroff at Emory in 2008 over roughly $1.2 million in undisclosed pharmaceutical payments. It cost him the chairmanship. In 2012 you wrote to the National Institutes of Health asking why federal money was still flowing to a man under unresolved investigation by the HHS Inspector General and the Department of Justice.
You went after this doctor twice. He has now done it to me. Why are you not going after him now?
There is an HHS Office of Inspector General complaint against him, filed by me on February 10, 2026, sitting unanswered — at the same agency you cited in 2012. The Texas Medical Board declined to investigate. The Office for Civil Rights closed my second complaint with no reason given. The UT Austin Ethics Office never substantively responded.
In 2012 you asked, under a Democratic administration, why federal money was still moving to Dr. Nemeroff while an Inspector General and Justice Department investigation remained unresolved. You did not get the answer you wanted, and you said so. I am now the man asking that question about the same doctor — and the senator who asked it the first time has not asked it this time. I am not going to characterize why. I am simply putting the two side by side, because they are both on the public record and I do not know how to reconcile them.
Senator, I am not writing to you about a doctor you have never heard of. I am writing about the doctor you personally pursued, twice. Nobody in the Senate has known longer or better, and nobody has less standing to say they did not know.
You pursued Dr. Nemeroff over roughly $1.2 million in undisclosed payments. It took years and it cost him a chairmanship.
In my case, a diagnosis code with no clinical finding behind it — contradicted by the treating institution's own report — has already generated two federal research recruitment invitations to a Medicare beneficiary. Whatever the eventual dollar figure, the structure is the one your statute was written for: a false record producing a federal claim.
And there is a third number. In May the Justice Department settled a lawsuit the President had filed against agencies he oversees, in which the government's own lawyers never entered an appearance. The judge was stripped of jurisdiction before she could examine it. The settlement created a fund of $1,776,000,000 — a figure Reason, a libertarian magazine that opposes federal spending on principle, called "plainly arbitrary." It comes out of the Judgment Fund, a permanent appropriation Congress never votes on. The board that decides who receives it is appointed by the Acting Attorney General, who is the President's own former defense lawyer. The day after the announcement, the Department quietly added language barring the IRS "forever" from pursuing its existing tax claims against the President and his family.
That is roughly 1,480 times the amount you pursued Dr. Nemeroff over. Thirty-five retired federal judges, including the Reagan appointee Michael Luttig, called the Department's justification "laughable" and asked for an investigation into whether a fraud had been perpetrated on the court.
Senators Cornyn and Tillis are asking only that the termination of that fund be put in writing, signed by the President as plaintiff. It has not been. You are not asking.
I want to say the plainest thing in this letter.
Buried in that settlement is language barring the IRS forever from pursuing its existing tax claims against the President, his sons, and his business. It was added the day after the announcement, quietly.
Senator, a man who has nothing to answer for does not need permanent immunity from being asked. The clause is the confession. Requesting it is itself the reason it should not be granted. You do not build a wall around a room that is empty.
And consider how it was obtained. He sued agencies he controls. The Justice Department lawyers assigned to defend the government never entered an appearance. The judge was removed from jurisdiction before she could examine whether the case was real. Then the department run by his own former defense lawyer wrote him permanent protection from tax enforcement, paid for out of a fund Congress never votes on.
That is not evading an accusation. That is using the machinery of the Justice Department to make the accusation impossible to bring.
And notice the word that does the work: forever. A settlement resolves a dispute. This one resolves a dispute and then reaches forward to prevent future ones from being brought at all. Whatever the intent behind it, the effect is fixed: one man and his family are placed permanently beyond the reach of an enforcement agency, by the department that exists to enforce.
Accountability that expires when a term expires is not accountability. It is a delay. And a provision that removes the delay's endpoint is not a legal settlement — it is the construction of permanent exemption, built with public money, by the office that was supposed to prevent exactly that.
You have spent a career on the principle that no one is too large to be asked. This is the first arrangement I am aware of that answers the question in advance, for one family, in perpetuity.
You have spent a career on fraud. Contractors overbilling the Pentagon. Pharmaceutical companies hiding payments to doctors. The False Claims Act amendments you wrote in 1986 have recovered more than $27 billion for the American taxpayer. That is a real legacy and I am not diminishing it.
But measure this against it honestly.
Every case you have ever brought involved someone taking money from the government while trying not to be caught. This one is a man taking $1.776 billion from the government and writing himself permanent immunity from being caught — using the department that would have done the catching.
And notice whose money each wrongdoer in my story used. My parents used their own — $15,000 of it, to produce a document establishing that the person raising the objection was the problem. It was wrong, and it cost me a great deal. But it was theirs to spend. The President is using ours: public funds, from an appropriation Congress never votes on, to finance the argument that the public's checks on him were themselves the wrongdoing. My family bought an institution and turned it against one man. He is taking the resources of the United States and turning them against the United States Congress.
If that stands, then every recovery of your career becomes a rounding error next to the precedent it sets. You spent forty years teaching this country that a false claim on the Treasury is theft no matter who files it. If this one passes, the lesson taught in its place is that the rule holds for contractors and doctors and hospitals, and does not hold for a President who can arrange for no one to be on the other side of the table.
You know grades, Senator. You have looked at fraud your entire adult life, and you can tell number one from number ten across a room.
This is grade number one. You are marking it grade ten.
A board exists to hold a chief executive accountable on behalf of the people whose futures depend on the enterprise. It can survive a bad quarter. It cannot survive an executive who reports falsely to it, because a board cannot govern what it cannot accurately see.
In March the President reported that Iran's Navy was gone and its Air Force was no longer. In May the Congressional Research Service — your own institution's audit function — documented dozens of American aircraft lost since February, including at least five fighter jets and seven refueling aircraft. In June an Iranian drone brought down an Apache, which the President confirmed himself. Congress moved to require authorization for further action. The measure did not carry. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since March — roughly a fifth of the world's oil and gas moves through it in peacetime, around 1,550 vessels are stranded in the Gulf with an estimated 22,500 mariners aboard, and Brent crude sits above $90. At the G7 in June, arriving late to a meeting with the other heads of state, he joked: "I'm the boss."
He is not the boss. That is the entire premise of the office. He is a chief executive in a system where the legislature declares war, holds the purse, confirms officers, and removes him when necessary.
And look at the sequence of this year the way a board would, and tell me if I have any of it wrong. He pardoned roughly 1,500 people prosecuted over the attack on the Capitol — including 169 who pled guilty to assaulting police officers — and commuted the sentences of men convicted of seditious conspiracy. He did not ask you. He conducted military action against Iran; the notification letters were addressed to you after the fact. He did not ask you. He settled a lawsuit against himself for $1.776 billion out of a fund you never vote on. He did not ask you. His nominee told your body the fund was dead; he has now said publicly he will push for it if that nominee is not confirmed — and that he will withdraw the name and keep his man in the job until the senators asking questions are out of office. He did not ask you. He threatened you.
A bully does not have an enemies list. He has a method. It was never going to stay pointed at the other party, because it was never about the other party. It is about what happens when someone will not be told no — and this year, it is pointed at the United States Senate. I know how this pattern runs, because my family ran it on me in 2020 and again in 2024, and the second time was more expensive than the first. Escalation only ends when backing down becomes less costly than continuing. For someone who has never had to back down, that point never arrives. Someone else pays instead. In 2024 that was me. Right now it is servicemen and women, and it is every country recalculating what American commitments are worth.
Any board in this country would act on documented misrepresentation. Not out of anger — because it could no longer rely on what it was being told. A board that keeps an executive after documented misrepresentation is not being loyal. It is in breach.
In 2021 you said January 6 was "an assault on democracy itself" and that your vote "does not excuse President Trump's conduct." Your stated reason for acquitting was jurisdictional — that the Senate lacked authority over a former officeholder.
That obstacle is gone. He is a sitting President. You chair the committee with oversight of the Justice Department. The nomination before you is his own former personal criminal defense attorney. The war powers notifications arrive addressed to you by name.
Everything you said you lacked, you have.
Only my mother has apologized. Not Dell. Not the University. Not the Texas Medical Board, not the Office for Civil Rights, not the Inspector General. Six institutions, and one apology, and it came from the person with the least institutional power in the entire chain. That is what an accountability system looks like when it stops working. Not dramatic. Just quiet, one closed file at a time, until a citizen discovers there is no door left that opens.
And here is the part I would ask you to sit with. A constitutional check is a practice — it stops existing not by repeal but by disuse. What you decide not to do now becomes what is permitted later, to a President you would never have chosen. Precedents always do hold.
You are eligible to be the person who stopped this. That eligibility does not last.
I have thought a long time about why they said no the second time, and this is the only answer that fits.
If they had funded it and I had gotten better, that would have meant they were wrong in 2020. Wrong about Costa Rica, wrong to override the gauge, wrong for four years. Every dollar spent on treatments that did not work would have been theirs to account for.
So the safer thing was for me to stay sick and be the problem. If I am the problem, no one has to revisit anything. They paid $15,000 for a document saying so. I am not claiming they thought it through that way. I doubt anyone said it out loud. But that is the shape of it, and I would put it this way: they would rather be right and cause harm than be wrong and help.
Senator, the same arithmetic is now running in your chamber. In 2021 the Senate declined to convict, and every year since has made the admission larger and the declining easier. Articles of impeachment are filed in the 119th Congress right now — H.Res. 353 and H.Res. 939. They sit in the House, where Madison said the remedy begins, and if the House moves them, your chamber's own rules require it to take them up the next day, with Leader Thune shaping the trial. They sit for the same reason my family stuck with the plan: to move them now is to admit 2021 was wrong. That is not strategy. It is the three hardest words in the language, stuck in the same throat, at the scale of a republic.
I laid all of this out for the Office for Civil Rights. Every document, the timeline, the contradictions in Dell's own report. The response was that they would not investigate. No reason given.
I assumed at first it was ordinary institutional avoidance. I no longer think that is what happened. An Office for Civil Rights that declines to enforce is not an office that got tired. It is an office that has been given a different assignment. The pattern is not hidden: the campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government; guidance discouraging federal health researchers from using terms like transgender and nonbinary in scientific work. Instructing scientists which words they may use does not change who exists. It changes what can be measured, and therefore what can be shown, and therefore what can ever be addressed.
So when my complaint arrived at an office operating under that direction, the answer of we will not investigate was not a resource decision. It was consistent with the posture of the office. Civil rights enforcement is not a permanent feature of American government. It is an activity. It happens when someone in authority wants it to happen, and it stops when they do not.
And the man whose administration those offices answer to fired seventeen inspectors general in a single night — more than every previous president combined. An inspector general exists for one purpose: to find corruption inside an agency. Removing seventeen of them at once does not stop corruption from happening. It stops it from being found.
That is how your inaction reaches my mailbox. Not as a theory. As a letter from the Office for Civil Rights saying they will not investigate. So while you are on your farm in New Hartford, I am at a keyboard writing to you instead of getting treatment. I am 61. I have been sick for twenty years. And I am spending what capacity I have left explaining to a United States Senator why the doctor he already caught twice should be looked at a third time.
My father's mother was a Baptist and her people came up through Mississippi. What she taught me was the Golden Rule, and I have come to think it is the most rigorous ethical standard there is — not because it is scripture, but because it is testable. The way I treat someone establishes the standard by which I may be treated. Confucius, Hillel, Matthew 7, and Kant all arrive at it separately. Ethics, at bottom, is the willingness to be measured by a standard outside yourself — and this is the oldest one there is.
Jesus was asked which commandment was greatest. He answered, and then volunteered a second nobody had asked for: love your neighbor as yourself. When a lawyer tried to narrow the term — and who is my neighbor? — the answer was the Samaritan. The neighbor is the man of the wrong tribe. The people who walked past were the religious professionals.
Redistricting is the practice of sorting people into tribes to determine whose voice will count.
Senator, you are a Baptist. Texas and Tennessee both call themselves Christian states, and both are redrawing maps to reduce the voting power of their own citizens at the President's request. And I want to say something about Texas as a Texan, because it is personal to me. Those are my neighbors. I grew up in that state. I played high school football against kids whose grandfathers had to fight for the right to vote at all. A President from New York picked up the phone and asked our governor to reduce their voices — and our governor did it. He has no standing to ask my state to oppress my own people. And Texas had no business agreeing.
No one drawing those lines would accept them drawn against him. That is the whole test, and it is the one my grandmother taught me before I could read. And it is not only a moral test — it is a medical one. A vote is a voice, and a voice is self-determination, and self-determination is the load-bearing requirement of human functioning. A government that reduces it at scale is doing to its citizens what my family did to me — and the health consequences are not rhetorical. They are the subject of Dr. Nemeroff's own research. I am what they look like at the scale of one man.
How does a man hold "love your neighbor as yourself" in one hand and a redrawn district map in the other?
And I would ask the same question about the rest of it. Diversity, equity, inclusion. Strip the initials off and read the words.
Diversity. Senator, of everyone in Washington, you should need the least convincing on this one. Continuous corn does not outperform rotation. It never has. The agronomy is settled and Iowa State has been publishing on it for decades — diversified rotations produce higher yields, better soil, fewer pest cycles, and lower input costs. A study out of South Dakota found corn yields up 27 to 88 percent in diversified systems compared to continuous corn. Research across eleven long-term sites in North America found that diversified rotations held their yields better than monoculture in the worst years — the hard years, the drought years. That is the whole argument. Monoculture looks fine right up until conditions turn, and then it fails all at once, because there is nothing else in the field. You know this in your hands, not from a paper. Every farmer does. So I am asking honestly: why would the principle stop working when the subject is people instead of seed?
Equity means justice — the second half of the Pledge — and inclusion means the last two words of it: for all. So the three words so many have been taught to treat as an enemy are difference, justice, and everyone — and I said that Pledge every morning of my Texas childhood, hand over heart, with nobody telling me there was an asterisk.
Jesus said you will know them by their fruits. Not by their statements. Not by their affiliation. By what they actually produce. Senator, I do not question your faith. I am not in a position to and it would be presumptuous. What I am telling you is that from where I sit — a man raised Baptist, seminary-trained, who left the church over this exact distance between what people say and what they do — your conduct and your stated convictions do not currently line up, and I cannot make them line up no matter how I look at it. I am not asking to be agreed with. I am asking to be answered. I would like to be wrong. You are the one who can show me I am.
Senator, before I close I want to put two things side by side, because I think they are the same thing.
First, what I told Dell before they did it. I said in writing: I have active infections, this is not the right course, and the last two appointments should be spent with my family, because the family is the actual problem. Every part of that was correct. They were not lacking information. They had it, from me, in writing, before they acted. That is what makes them without excuse.
Second, what I am telling you now. And I want to be clear about the spirit in which I am saying it. I am not writing to condemn you. I think you have given your life to this country and I think you want to do right by it. I would not have written this many words to a man I had given up on.
But I am telling you, in writing, before the fact, the same way I told them:
George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that party spirit becomes the instrument by which "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" subvert the power of the people. He warned how it is done — "in the forms of the Constitution": the offices all remain standing while the energy is drained out of them, which is a precise description of an Office for Civil Rights that exists and will not investigate. He warned what it becomes — "whatever the form of government, a real despotism": the name of the system is not the test; whether power is actually divided is the test. And he warned whose job the checks are — each branch "the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others," and "to preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them." They were instituted in 1787. Preserving them is this week's work, and it is yours.
George Mason objected at the Virginia Ratifying Convention that a President should not hold an unreviewable pardon power, because he might "pardon crimes which were advised by himself." James Madison answered him: the House can impeach him. Madison did not phrase that as one option among several. It was his answer to the objection — the reason the design was safe. The check exists because someone uses it.
Roughly 1,500 pardons went to people prosecuted for the attack on the Capitol, including 169 who pled guilty to assaulting police officers, plus commutations for men convicted of seditious conspiracy — the federal crime of conspiring to oppose by force the authority of the United States. That is the scenario Mason described. That is the case Madison said impeachment answers.
I will not tell you that declining to impeach is treason; treason has a narrow constitutional definition and I will not misuse it. But I will use the framework Professor Amos Guiora has spent a career building — the same one Mr. Sharphorn brought to The University of Texas to explain to his colleagues. Guiora's definition of an enabler is a person who knows harm is occurring and does nothing. His conclusion is not softened: "Clearly the perpetrator benefitted from the complicity of the enabler. From the survivor's perspective, both bear responsibility for their plight and must be held accountable." And: "predators can only perpetrate their crimes through their individual and institutional enablers." Only. Not assisted by. The harm requires them. Seven physicians at Dell were the enablers of what my family wanted. They did not conceive of it. They executed it, and it could not have happened without them. I am telling you, in writing, that harm is occurring. You now know.
Everything Dell did is now public. Their own report contradicts itself in writing. The coercion is in their intake notes. The scores are recorded below the classification their own manual specifies. And it is on a website that anyone can read, permanently, with their names on it. I do not think a single person who signed that report is glad they did. I think if they could go back to December 2024 and simply read the email I sent them, they would. They cannot. The record is fixed.
Senator, that is the only warning I have to give, and I am giving it plainly and without pleasure: the record of this is being written right now, and it will not be revisable either. What will be in it is not complicated. That the President pardoned the people prosecuted for attacking the Capitol. That he settled a lawsuit against himself with no opposing party, for $1.776 billion of public money, and wrote his family permanent immunity into it. That he conducted a war reported to Congress in letters addressed to you by name. That he said out loud he would withdraw a nomination to keep his man in the job until two senators are gone. And that the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — the man called the Godfather of Whistleblowers, who wrote the False Claims Act amendments, who caught this very doctor twice — was in the chair the entire time.
I do not want that to be your record. I mean that sincerely. It would be a bitter ending to a serious career, and you have had a serious career.
Senator, they call you the Godfather of Whistleblowers, and you earned it. The False Claims Act amendments. The Whistleblower Protection Caucus you founded. The yellow shirt you put on every July for the appreciation day you created. Nobody in American government has done more for the person inside an institution who sees wrongdoing and reports it at cost to himself.
So let us apply your own definition. A whistleblower is not an outsider with a grievance. He is an insider — someone whose own institution is doing the wrong thing, who has the standing to see it, and who speaks while speaking costs him something. Senator: the institution is your party and your chamber. The wrongdoing is documented, much of it in your own committee's record. No one alive has more standing to see it — you caught this doctor twice, you chair the committee confirming this nominee, the war letters arrive addressed to you by name. And speaking would cost you something real. The President has shown everyone what he does to Republicans who ask questions.
That is not a trap I am springing on you. It is the exact position of every whistleblower you have ever protected. The nurse who reported the billing fraud did not want to be the one who saw it either. She spoke because she was the one standing where it could be seen.
For fifty years you protected the people who spoke. Now the roles have rotated, the way they eventually rotate for everyone, and it is your turn to be the one who speaks. And Senator — you are not speaking. You are presiding. This week you are shepherding the confirmation of the President's personal criminal defense attorney to run the Department of Justice. You have called him "well-qualified." You have said the Department has "thrived under his leadership" — the same Department that settled with its own client for $1.776 billion and wrote his family permanent immunity from tax enforcement. The Godfather of Whistleblowers is presiding over the confirmation of the man every whistleblower in that building would have to report to.
I have to tell you what watching that does to me, and I am not speaking figuratively. Under the science Dr. Nemeroff himself published, an open injustice with every door closed is a disease-producing condition — chronic, unresolvable stress, elevated CRF, inflammation a body cannot shut off. I have the lab work showing that mechanism running in me. Watching the man who exposed my doctor praise the nominee whose department will never look at him is part of the stressor. I may be the only constituent writing to you who can attach medical records to a constitutional argument.
You told the country in 2021 that his conduct was inexcusable and that your vote did not excuse it. You said, in effect, you are not hearing me. He answered the way my family answered — by proceeding, by pardoning, by settling with himself, by threatening your chamber. You are being treated the way I was treated. And so far, with respect, you are answering me the way my family answered: by receiving a documented case from a man who has never voted against your party in his life, and managing him with silence.
Ironic, isn't it, Senator. You once protected whistleblowers. You are now protecting those whom the whistleblowers are trying to expose.
Senator, by now the pattern should be recognizable, because you have watched it at every scale. My father could not hear a truth about himself — when I finally told one, his answer was an evaluation of me, and later a written renunciation of truth itself. The President cannot hear a truth about himself — ask the seventeen inspectors general, the National Science Board members he removed, the career prosecutors he fired, or John Bolton and James Comey, who learned what happens to men who put truths about him on the record: prosecutors at the door. Every instrument that read him accurately has been covered, replaced, or indicted.
So here is the question this letter has actually been asking all along, and I want to put it to you directly, because it is the only question left: can you?
I do not think you like being bypassed on a war. I do not think you like being threatened over a nomination, or watching advice and consent turned into a scheduling problem. So if you do not like it, and you hold the constitutional power to end it — and you do — then the truth about yourself is this: your inaction is now the operative cause. Not his. He is what he is; Washington told you such men would come. The offices that would hear my complaint are closed because he closed them — but they stay closed because your chamber lets him. Which means the stressor Dr. Nemeroff spent his career describing, and then inflicted on me, is sustained today by the party protecting him. I am in my twentieth year of illness, Senator, and I am still having spasms — and part of the reason now, the part that is left, is yours. And it is not only me: it is every citizen whose file sits closed under this administration, and it is the servicemen over the Strait, and the people of Iran, all of them downstream of a man your chamber declines to check.
My father failed this test with no warning — the truth arrived and he reached for the evaluation. The President fails it daily, reflexively, with indictments. You are the first man in this chain to receive the question in advance, in writing, with time to answer it differently. That is not an accusation. It is an opportunity neither of them ever gave me.
Let me name the chain, because it is one chain, and you proved one of its links yourself.
My family had a conflict of interest: they paid Dell $15,000, through a friend on Dell's advisory board, to evaluate the man whose dissent they wanted managed — and the report ruled for the payer. Dr. Nemeroff had a conflict of interest: $1.2 million in undisclosed drug-company income at Emory, which you exposed, and which cost him his chairmanship there. The President has a conflict of interest: he has nominated his own personal criminal defense attorney — from the very case his own settlement resolved — to run the department that would investigate him. And your party has a conflict of interest: it is protecting a President it should be measuring, because protecting him is how it keeps power.
The fourth conflict is the roof over all the others. The party shields the President; the President's administration closes the offices; the closed offices cannot touch the institution; the institution never has to correct the report; and the doctor you exposed in 2008 practices on, under the protection of the man you are working to confirm. If I have this wrong, tell me why. I have asked four institutions to engage my reasoning in six years. Not one has. You could be the first.
And here is why it is worth it — why one act resolves every conflict in this letter. Impeach him, and there is no President above measurement. No President above measurement, and there is no Attorney General selected for the ability to say yes. No such Attorney General, and the offices reopen — OCR, OIG, the ones that answer citizens like me. The offices reopen, and Dell Medical and Dr. Nemeroff are finally told what you first told him seventeen years ago: that they were wrong. And somewhere in Texas, a family that could not say three words hears an institution say them first — and a sick man gets to stop fighting his record and start treating his body.
The refusal to impeach is the last failure and the most grievous one — not because it is crueler than the others, but because it is the one that holds all the others in place.
One more story from my father, Senator — a good one this time, because the good ones are also true, and this one turns out to be about your chamber.
When I was twelve he coached my Little League team. I bat left-handed — a few inches closer to first base than the right-handers — and I had worked out what felt like a clever piece of analysis: if I did not swing, I might draw a walk. If I swung, I might miss, and strike out, and be criticized for failing. A kid who is not sure of his standing at home learns that arithmetic early: trying and failing costs more than never trying, so doing nothing starts to feel like the safe play. So I stood in the box and watched strikes go by — hittable pitches, right down the middle — waiting for a walk that stopped coming as the pitchers got better.
My father watched me strike out that way enough times, and then he told me something I have never forgotten: "Brent, I would rather you strike out swinging than not swinging at all. I never want to see you strike out again with the bat on your shoulder. From now on, if you strike out, it had better be swinging."
(It took me forty more years to learn the rule had a silent condition — he meant swing at the pitches he chose for my life, not at his own. When I finally swung at one of his, at fifty-seven, the answer was Dell. You know that part of the story already.)
And I should tell you where the rule came from, because it did not start with my father. It started with Papo — his father, the son of the Oklahoma sharecropper — who repaired shoes in Irving, Texas, in his own shop, sold jewelry on the road, and in between founded that town's first Little League, where he taught my father the game my father later taught me. In 1993 I drove out to his farm in East Texas, where he grew his own corn, and as I was leaving he gave me gold cufflinks from his closet — kept, he told me, from a man who owed him money and never paid. A mile down the dirt road the knot in my stomach beat my head, and I turned around and handed them back: they did not feel right. He grumbled and took them. He was eighty-four that year, and before I left he told me, in his way, that I was the most honest man he had ever seen. My father is eighty-four now, Senator. He is still acting like I am the one who is wrong.
But the rule itself was right, and everyone who has played the game knows it. For decades Babe Ruth held the record for home runs and the record for strikeouts at the same time — the two numbers were never a contradiction; they were the same number, counted twice. A man who never swings finishes with fewer strikeouts and zero home runs. Theodore Roosevelt said it without the baseball: the credit belongs to the man in the arena, not to the cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Senator, your conference is standing in the batter's box with the bat on its shoulder, watching called strikes go by. The war was a strike. The fund was a strike. The pardons were a strike. The plan to outwait two of your own colleagues was a strike, right down the middle. And the party is waiting for a walk — for the courts to fix it, for the term to run out, for the man to moderate on his own. But a walk requires the pitcher to throw balls, and this pitcher throws only what he wants. An unethical man does unethical things; that is the one pitch he knows how to throw. There is no walk coming.
I understand the fear in that box better than most, because I lived it. I know what it is to be intimidated by a man like this — and I will grant the whole human truth: his own niece, a clinical psychologist, has written publicly about the household that formed him. The origin explains him. It does not excuse him, and it changes nothing about the arithmetic — a man formed that way, holding that much power, runs the method at national scale until someone stops him. Perhaps what your colleagues feel in that box is what I felt for fifty-seven years. But I finally swung — sick, on disability, with nothing left to lose, which it turns out is another name for brave — and the worst they could do to me was Dell, and I am still standing, and I am still swinging.
Madison did not offer impeachment as one option among several. My father did not offer swinging as one option among several. Some instructions are mandatory. The articles are filed, the bat is in your hands, and the count does not favor waiting. If this republic strikes out, Senator — and the called strikes are piling up — then let the record show that your generation of the party went down swinging. Ruth's two records were the same record. Swing.
Same doctor. Different decade. The country needs the version of you that saw it the first time.
You have graded loads your whole life, Senator. You know that the man who weighs his own grain and calls the scale his enemy is not describing the scale. The remedy is filed. Your own rules are ready. Hold the line — and if holding it is not enough, and this week suggests it is not, then use the instrument the Framers put in your hands for exactly this.
One last word. Hillel — the same teacher whose version of the Golden Rule stands earlier in this letter — closed his most famous saying with a question, and it is the question my Papo's voice still asks in my lungs, so I will make it my last one to you: If not now — when?
From one farmer's grandson to another, with Baptist roots on both sides —
Respectfully,
Arthur "Brent" Porter
B.A. Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 1987
Great-grandson of an Oklahoma sharecropper who farmed corn
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