Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee · President pro tempore of the United States Senate
Dear Senator Grassley,
My name is Arthur Brent Porter. I am 61, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, in my twentieth year with Lyme disease, and a lifelong Republican voter. I am not going to open by asking you to like me or to trust me. I am going to put a record in front of you, because the record is not a matter of opinion and it does not require you to take my word for anything.
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 — the physician you investigated in 2008 and again in 2012. My family paid for it. Access came through a member of Dell's own behavioral health advisory board, a personal friend of the family that paid.
Their own signed report, in its own Chief Complaint section, states:
"The patient indicated that his parents had provided him with an ultimatum of either completing the evaluation or having him cut off of financial support. He acquiesced to their request."
That is the institution's own account of financial coercion, recorded before a single diagnosis was made. Under APA Ethical Standards 3.10 and 9.03, coercion voids informed consent — the evaluation was invalid before it began. They proceeded anyway. What follows is what the same institution's own paper says:
You have spent a career reading records like this one, Senator, so you already know what the pattern means. Honest errors scatter in both directions. Every one of these moved the same way.
I did what a citizen is supposed to do. The Texas Medical Board declined to investigate. The UT Austin Ethics Office never substantively responded to my May 30, 2025 complaint. The UT System General Counsel has not replied. SACSCOC, the accreditor, has not replied. The HHS Inspector General has not answered my complaint of February 10, 2026 — filed at the same agency you cited in your 2012 letter. And the federal Office for Civil Rights, which had been helping me, reversed itself in December 2025 and closed my complaint with no reason given.
Six institutions. One apology — and it came from my mother, the person with the least institutional power in this entire story.
You exposed Dr. Nemeroff at Emory in 2008 over roughly $1.2 million in undisclosed pharmaceutical payments. It cost him a 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 Justice Department. You did not get the answer you wanted, and you said so publicly.
I am now the man asking that question about the same doctor. The senator who asked it the first time has not asked it this time. I am not going to characterize why. I am putting the two on the page side by side, because they are both on the public record and I cannot reconcile them.
Nobody in the Senate has known about this physician longer or better. Nobody has less standing to say they did not know.
And this is not a closed file for me. Dr. Nemeroff's own life's work established that chronic, uncontrollable stress raises corticotropin-releasing factor, drives inflammation, and produces disease. A false record I cannot correct, with every avenue of appeal shut, is that stressor precisely — uncontrollable by design, because every mechanism built to make it controllable has declined to act. The injury is not confined to 2024. It is occurring today, and I cannot begin the treatment my infections require while I am still fighting the record.
They call you the Godfather of Whistleblowers, and you earned it. The False Claims Act amendments you wrote in 1986 have recovered more than $27 billion for the taxpayer. You founded the Whistleblower Protection Caucus. Nobody in American government has done more for the person inside an institution who sees wrongdoing and reports it at cost to himself.
So 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 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 considering this nominee, and the war-powers notifications arrive addressed to you by name. And speaking would cost you something real.
That is not a trap I am setting. 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.
For fifty years you protected the people who spoke. Now the roles have rotated, and you are not speaking — you are presiding. Tomorrow morning at nine, your committee votes to send the President's personal criminal defense attorney to run the Department of Justice — cleared by a Monday deal in which the audit immunity was "narrowed" by an interpretation memo while the underlying order still reads "FOREVER BARRED." 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 out of a fund Congress never votes on, and quietly wrote his family permanent immunity from tax enforcement, in a case a federal judge found was pursued by parties who "worked in tandem and were never actually adverse."
The Godfather of Whistleblowers is presiding over the confirmation of the man every whistleblower in that building would have to report to.
Ironic, isn't it, Senator. You once protected whistleblowers. You are now protecting those whom the whistleblowers are trying to expose.
You should know what I did to earn a $15,000 psychiatric evaluation, because nobody arrives at one by accident.
When I was twelve, my father killed a mouse in our garage. Later I told a neighbor boy that we killed it. My father overheard, corrected me — "No, we didn't kill it. I did" — and drove me to that boy's house and made me knock on the door and say it right. That is the man who taught me the truth is not negotiable.
At fifty-seven, after seventeen years of illness, I finally used the lesson on the man who taught it: that my illness had more than one author, that his part in it was real, and that I could not keep carrying the whole blame so he would never have to look at his share. Gently, in writing, with the research attached.
He could not say it. What I got instead was the ultimatum. Afterward I reminded him about the mouse, and his written reply of June 21, 2025 was this: "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."
Senator, that sentence is the family version of the doctrine now sitting in your own committee — when the written record becomes inconvenient, dissolve the standard. I voted for your party my whole life. What I did to my father at fifty-seven, I am doing to it now.
My father could not hear a truth about himself; his answer was an evaluation of me. The President cannot hear one — ask the seventeen inspectors general removed in a single night, more than every previous president combined, or the career prosecutors fired for saying an order was unlawful. Every instrument that read him accurately has been covered or replaced.
So here is the only question left: can you?
I do not think you like being bypassed on a war, or watching advice and consent turned into a scheduling problem. If you do not like it, and your chamber holds the power to end it, then the truth about yourself is this: the inaction has become the operative cause. He closed those offices; they stay closed because the Senate permits it. The stressor Dr. Nemeroff spent a career describing, and then inflicted on me, is sustained today by the men who could end it and have not. That includes you.
My father received that truth with no warning and failed it. The President fails it daily. You are the first man in this chain to receive it in advance, in writing, with time to answer differently. That is not an accusation. It is an opportunity neither of them ever gave me.
One story, and then the requests.
When I was twelve my father coached my Little League team. I bat left-handed, and I had worked out what felt like clever analysis: if I did not swing, I might draw a walk; if I swung, I might miss and be criticized for failing. So I stood there and watched hittable pitches go by, waiting for a walk that stopped coming as the pitchers got better. My father watched me strike out that way enough times and then said something I have never forgotten: "I would rather you strike out swinging than not swinging at all. From now on, if you strike out, it had better be swinging."
Babe Ruth held the record for home runs and the record for strikeouts at the same time. Never a contradiction — the same number counted twice. A man who never swings finishes with fewer strikeouts and zero home runs.
Senator, your conference is standing in the box with the bat on its shoulder. The war was a strike. The $1.776 billion was a strike. The pardons were a strike — roughly 1,500 for the attack on the Capitol, including 169 who pled guilty to assaulting police officers, which is precisely what George Mason warned of at the Virginia Ratifying Convention: a President who might "pardon crimes which were advised by himself." James Madison answered him — then the House can impeach him. Not one option among several; the reason the design was safe. The articles are filed in this Congress: H.Res. 353 and H.Res. 939. They sit.
And the party waits for a walk — for the courts, for the term to run out, for the man to moderate. A walk requires the pitcher to throw balls. This one throws only what he wants.
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.
Same doctor. Different decade. The country needs the version of you that saw it the first time.
I will close where I might have opened, since I would rather be believed for the record than for the resemblance: my father's grandfather was a sharecropper in Oklahoma who farmed corn, and my grandfather repaired shoes in Irving, Texas, and started that town's first Little League. You have farmed in New Hartford, Iowa your whole adult life. You know how a load gets graded — that cheating a man on weight is crude, and cheating him on grade is the quiet version: you write it into the book one grade down, and by the time anybody checks, the corn is in the pile.
That is what was done to me, and the paper proves it. Hillel — whose version of the Golden Rule my Baptist grandmother taught me before I could read — closed his most famous saying with a question, so I will make it my last one to you: If not now, when?
From one farmer's grandson to another —
Respectfully,
Arthur "Brent" Porter
B.A. Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 1987
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