“I think he’s doing a pretty poor job,” continued Manley, a former spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “I don’t think his Q&A [Monday with The Guardian] made him any more sympathetic than he had been in the past. I think he is coming off as — leaving aside some of the issues he’s raising, which are fascinating — he’s coming across as petulant and arrogant and more than a little bit full of himself.”

Crisis management expert Eric Dezenhall quipped, “It’s almost as if he’s writing a screenplay at the same time he’s blowing the whistle.”

“I’ve noticed this trend of people generally saying out of one side of their mouth, ‘it’s not about me,’ but using ‘it’s not about me’ as a device for further making it about them,” added Dezenhall, of D.C.-based Dezenhall Resources. “Well, if it’s not about you, why the hell are you doing interviews? To me, there’s something very packaged about him. I think that that’s intentional. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have points to make, but a lot of what I’m seeing at this stage in my career, 30 years, there’s a more cinematic quality to whistleblowers than there used to be.”