theintercept | On Tuesday evening, Ross Coulthart, an Australian independent journalist who covers UFOs and has interviewed Grusch, posted a statement attributed to Grusch on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“It has come to my attention that The Intercept intends to publish an article about two incidents in 2014 and 2018 that highlights previous personal struggles I had with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Grief and Depression,” the statement reads. “As I stated under oath in my congressional testimony, over 40 credentialed intelligence and military personnel provided myself and my colleagues the information I transmitted to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) and I took the leadership role to represent the concerns of these distinguished and patriotic individuals.”
Grusch’s wife, Jessica Grusch, did not respond to several requests for comment.
A former colleague of Grusch’s expressed shock that he retained his clearance after the 2014 incident, which was also documented in public records obtained by The Intercept.
“I think it’s like any insular group: Once you’re in, they generally protect their own,” said the former colleague, who asked not to be named because they feared professional reprisals.
The former colleague said that the 2014 incident was known to Grusch’s superiors, a claim that Coulthart appeared to confirm in an interview on NewsNation, a subscription television network owned by Nexstar Media.
“The intelligence community and the Defense Department clearly accepted there was no issue because he was allowed to keep his security clearance,” Coulthart told Chris Cuomo Tuesday night.
Two Republican members of the House Oversight Committee, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett, were tasked with organizing the July 26 hearing after Grusch’s whistleblower claims became public. Not all House Republicans are supportive of the effort. Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has taken a dim view of Grusch’s claims.
“Every decade there’s been individuals who’ve said the United States has such pieces of unidentified flying objects that are from outer space,” Turner said. “There’s no evidence of this and certainly it would be quite a conspiracy for this to be maintained, especially at this level.”
Grusch emerged as the hearing’s star witness, but his evidence was largely secondhand: When asked, Grusch said he hasn’t seen any of the recovered alien vehicles or bodies himself. While two former Navy fighter pilots alleged unidentified aerial phenomena, neither said anything about their provenance. Grusch was alone among the witnesses in attributing them to extraterrestrials.
“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy,” Grusch said in his opening statement.
Shortly after The Intercept reached out to Grusch for comment for this story, Coulthart went on Cuomo’s show and said that The Intercept was planning to publish “confidential medical records” about Grusch that had been leaked by the intelligence community. Coulthart, an ardent defender of Grusch, told NewsNation that “Grusch believes the government may now be behind an effort to release his medical records in an effort to smear his credibility.”
“This is a document that would be, if the media had done the right thing, it would be in his police department file, in the file in the county sheriff’s office,” Coulthart said in his interview with Cuomo. “But Dave has checked today, because he assumed that the journalist had done his homework and just asked the local sheriff for the files. The sheriff has confirmed it did not come from him. The only other place that had this information is the intelligence community, Dave’s personal files inside the intelligence community, where quite properly, when anybody is security assist, things like this have to be looked at, and somebody inside the intelligence community leaked it.”
Coulthart went on to compare the purported leak to Richard Nixon’s attempts to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who shared the Pentagon Papers with the New York Times.
“I think there should be an inquiry into the circumstances of how sensitive records pertaining to a decorated combat veteran’s file found their way to a journalist not through the proper channels,” Coulthart said. “This could’ve been requested under FOI, as is normal, but the county sheriff has confirmed that did not happen.”
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