He also wasn’t a whistleblower he was just downloading scholarly articles from a service he had legal access to use.

The theory that he would be murdered over this is pretty wild as any college student or person with a JSTOR account has access to these same articles, so what necessitates murder in Aaron’s situation? He wasn’t exposing anyone or anything. It was just some douche of a federal employee trying to advance his career by “making an example” out of some kid who arguably didn’t even do anything illegal.