From history, be skeptical of claims by senators/officials they can protect whistleblowers if you email them. This method simple and safer.

I have interacted (Twitter) with the people who operate the @SecureDrop systems at major journalistic outfits. This is the new gold standard

Normal citizen cannot be expected to properly clean file metadata when leaking, which is why sending to a journalist with experience is good

Send a document from an anonymous gmail account to a government official, high possibility it gets forwarded around, sometimes to accused.

Now that computers are so much faster and storage increased, there is a lot of logging that can be used to pinpoint who saw a file and when.

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/825191219168948224