Robert Michael Miller v. Merit Systems Protection Board

Whether, in a whistleblower reprisal appeal, the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) lacks jurisdiction when a complainant omits protected disclosures or alleged retaliatory acts in a complaint to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), or if the complaint is a condition precedent that is subject to waiver, estoppel, or other equitable considerations. Whether the MSPB's requirement that Petitioner plead all the elements of a prima facie case to prove jurisdiction conflicts with this Court's unanimous decision in Swierkiewicz v. Sorema, 534 U.S. 506 (2002). Whether the USC has an affirmative duty to investigate complaints of whistleblower reprisal as unambiguously stated in 5 U.S.0 § 1214, and whether the MSPB must consider OSC's failure to investigate as a factor for waiving the exhaustion requirement. Whether the MSPB's conduct of proceedings has so far departed from the accepted and usual course of proceedings as to call for an exercise of this Court's supervisory power. Whether. the Fourth Circuit's one-paragraph opinion discerning no errors, when errors by the MSPB were numerous and obvious, has so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings, or sanctioned such a departure by a lower court, as to call for an exercise of this Court's supervisory power.