Jesselyn Radack (born December 12, 1970) is an American national security and human rights attorney known for her defense of whistleblowers, journalists, and hacktivists.

She graduated from Brown University and Yale Law School, and began her career as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.

[7] Radack resigned in protest, and her experience is chronicled in her memoir, Traitor: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban"[8] and in the Emmy-nominated[9] documentary Silenced.

She appears in the press, including on the major American television networks as well as NPR, PBS, CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera English.

[30] An attorney in the counterterrorism section of the Criminal Division inquired about the ethical propriety of interrogating John Walker Lindh, dubbed the "American Taliban".

With her director's approval, she advised that such an interrogation would violate the Justice Department's ethics rule governing contact with a represented person and was not authorized by law.

[40] In late 2003, the Supreme Court confirmed Radack's position that U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants" have a right to counsel in the case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

In early 2005 Radack recalled her reaction to a different Ashcroft statement—that Lindh's rights had been "carefully, scrupulously guarded"—more starkly : "I knew that wasn't true".

[7] She had written more than a dozen emails on the subject, and neither of the ones Bellows had received copies of reflected her fear that the FBI's actions had been unethical and that Lindh's confession, which was the basis for the criminal case, might have to be sealed.

[44] In March 2003 investigative journalist Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that "[a]n official list compiled by the prosecution confirms that the Justice Department did not hand over Radack's most critical e-mail in which she questioned the viability of Lindh's confession until after her confrontation with Flynn".

She reasoned that "disclosure of my e-mails would advance compliance with the Lindh court's discovery order while also exposing gross mismanagement and abuse of authority by my superiors at the Justice Department.

[42] He then wrote an article about the Lindh case emails, quoting Radack but not naming her as the source of what he called "internal e-mails obtained by Newsweek".

[54] Radack has said she did not turn the documents over to the court or prosecutors at the time she recovered them because she felt intimidated by Flynn, who had told her to drop the matter.

[57] The plea deal was reached on July 15, 2002, a month after the Newsweek article on the emails appeared online and just hours before the hearing to consider the motions to suppress the Lindh interviews was set to begin.

[44] Radack says an agent of the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) told her new employer and coworkers that she was under criminal investigation[63] and would steal client files.

A partner in the firm, which represented mainly government bond issuers, told her they could not be perceived to have an ex-government lawyer who broke confidence when she thought the client was wrong.

On October 31, 2003, the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) sent letters to the bar associations of the two jurisdictions in which she was licensed to practice law referring her for a possible ethics violation.

[42] Radack bypassed that issue by invoking the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA), which she argues provides the legal basis for an exception to attorney-client privilege, i.e., for disclosure when permitted or authorized by law.

[70] Radack has said that one or more anonymous Justice Department officials "smeared" her in the media as a "traitor", "turncoat", and "terrorist sympathizer"[64][70][72] "to alienate me from all my neighbors, all my friends",[73] sometimes specifying it was in The New York Times.

[73][74][75] In May 2003, Eric Lichtblau reported at The New York Times that "Government officials suspect she is a turncoat who leaked documents on one of their most important investigations, the John Walker Lindh case.

"[76] For a time beginning in 2003, Bruce Fein, a noted constitutional scholar and former associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, represented Radack pro bono.

[78] On May 22, Kennedy issued a statement saying, "Mr. Chertoff has told me that [he] has no knowledge of the facts surrounding Ms. Radack's employment, performance, or departure from the Department, and I take him at his word.

Radack was in effect fired for providing legal advice on a matter involving ethical duties and civil liberties that higher-level officials at the Department disagreed with.

[78] In the mid-2000s, Radack served on the D.C. Bar Legal Ethics Committee and worked with the ABA Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants.

[103] Journalist Pratap Chatterjee and political cartoonist Khalil Bendib tell her story in the graphic novel Verax: The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance.