On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. Additionally, Berulis claimed that mere minutes after DOGE members had accessed the agency’s data, there appeared to be login attempts from an IP address in Russia.
At the time, DOGE teams, orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk, were sweeping across government, firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data and technical systems with no oversight and little transparency.
The following day, Berulis went public in an NPR article with his name and claims. In it, he claimed that in the lead-up to his Congressional disclosure, a threatening note had been taped to his door, including photos of him walking his dog that appeared to have been taken by a drone. Berulis was already scared that speaking out had made him a target.
In a new defamation lawsuit, filed by Berulis in a DC court on April 17 and made public this week, Berulis alleges that Musk himself made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berulis’ whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. The complaint was initially filed under seal because Berulis maintains a security clearance that requires prepublication review of anything related to his work with the government.
Five days after the NPR story went live, on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, Berulis got in his car to drive to Maryland to make a last-minute visit to his uncle, opting to take local roads instead of the major highway nearby. Within about five minutes of leaving his house, Berulis realized something was wrong. As he approached a stop sign at an intersection, his car wouldn’t slow down. He ran off the road and into the sign. When he examined his car, he found something that terrified him: His brake lines had been cut.
Unbeknownst to Berulis at the time, the night before, on April 19, at 8:06 pm, Musk had reshared an X post from right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, claiming that DOGE had been “cleared” and that people were asking the Department of Justice to investigate Berulis. Musk shared Nawfal’s post, writing, “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The story had originally been circulated by @amuse, an account that has regularly shared misleading claims and misinformation and is followed by influential people like Musk and Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The @amuse post included Berulis’ name and photograph.
According to a police report viewed by WIRED, when a police officer from Prince William County arrived at the scene, Berulis’ lawyer from Whistleblower Aid, Andrew Bakaj, who had helped Berulis file his Congressional complaint about DOGE, was also on the scene.
Berulis, who found out about Musk’s tweet after the accident, thought back to the threatening note that had been posted on his door earlier that month.
According to the suit, Musk’s “readers drew the implication” that Berulis had committed a serious crime, “as reflected in replies demanding prosecution, jail, harm, or arrest,” and this put him at “increased risk of physical harm.” In the replies to the post, which remains online, several users called for Berulis to be prosecuted. One user wrote, “Snitches get stitches.”
“The correlation was obvious to me, with the timing,” he says. Berulis also began to worry about how exactly whoever had been threatening him knew where he lived.