The story behind why Democrats are moving forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is simple.
The president repeatedly pressured a foreign government to meddle in the 2020 US election to help him win. It’s all there in the White House summary of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president. It’s corroborated by the subsequent whistleblower complaint. And Trump keeps telling other countries to do it, too, on live television.
The Republican strategy to respond to this is to create total confusion, namely by focusing on the arcane legal process of whistleblower law. Not only are their claims false, they are irrelevant to the facts of Trump’s abuse of power.
Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republican opposition in the House of Representatives, is out in front trying to lose people in the arcana of process and distract from what Trump did. He seized on a Wednesday New York Times report that Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff got advance word of the whistleblower’s report and falsely claimed that Schiff orchestrated the complaint.
“Democrats have rigged this process from the start,” McCarthy tweeted Wednesday, linking to the Times story.
What the story actually said was that the whistleblower initially approached an Intelligence Committee staffer with a vague accusation. The staffer told the whistleblower to file a formal complaint through proper channels, per protocol, and then shared some of what the whistleblower said with Schiff, who never even knew the whistleblower’s identity.
The whistleblower did exactly what they were supposed to do. The intelligence community whistleblower process lists the congressional intelligence committees as a venue where a whistleblower may take their complaint or approach about how to proceed with a complaint.
Republicans already know that whistleblowers are encouraged to go straight to committees with a complaint. The Republican party’s own page on the House Oversight and Reform website prominently features a link that literally says “blow the whistle” and offers a form for filing a complaint.
“In my experience, it’s more than common for potential whistleblowers to contact the congressional intelligence committees directly in order to obtain guidance on the proper way to disclose wrongdoing,” Irvin McCullough, an intelligence community whistleblower expert at the Government Accountability Project, told HuffPost.
“The process by which intelligence community employees and contractors can report wrongdoing is extremely complex and convoluted,” he added. “You need someone that can help usher you along that process, whether that is a congressional intelligence committee staff or an experienced attorney.”
Aides to Republican Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member, said on Wednesday that the whistleblower followed proper procedure by asking the House Intelligence Committee for guidance on how to file a complaint. That’s on top of the intelligence community inspector general and Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, both publicly stating that the whistleblower had done everything by the book.
Another glaring hole in McCarthy’s claim is that the White House, Trump’s personal attorney and Trump himself have all separately corroborated the whistleblower’s claims. Even before releasing the transcript, the president admitted that he brought up former US vice president and current political adversary Joe Biden with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has repeatedly said he was right to do so.
The president said his conversation with Zelensky was about corruption, too. “It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption [sic] already in the Ukraine,” Trump said on September 22.
Additionally, the call summary revealed Trump tying talks about US military aid to Ukraine to his request for investigations into his potential 2020 rival Biden and Biden’s son Hunter. At the time of the call, Trump had suspended the provision of all aid to Ukraine. Zelensky was not aware of the US suspension of aid until weeks after the call.
“It’s more than common for potential whistleblowers to contact the congressional intelligence committees directly in order to obtain guidance on the proper way to disclose wrongdoing.”
- Irvin McCullough, an intelligence community whistleblower expert
Republicans are trying to paper over these facts with confusion, conspiracies and flat-out lies about how Democrats are proceeding in their investigation.
“This is looking more & more like a deep state scheme,” House Republican Whip Steve Scalise tweeted Wednesday, invoking an insane conspiracy theory as an explanation for how Schiff got wind of a whistleblower complaint before it was filed.
“Schiff told the media on September 17: ‘We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to.’ He lied. The question is why?” McCarthy tweeted Wednesday, falsely claiming Schiff had spoken with the whistleblower when he had not.
Republican senators, meanwhile, have been spreading misinformation to try to smear the credibility of the whistleblower. They have argued that in order to be considered a “real” whistleblower, you have to have firsthand information of a situation, which is false.
“By definition, he’s not a whistleblower because he was reporting hearsay,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy incorrectly told reporters last week. “I think that we are giving too much credence, or at least credit, to someone who does not meet the definition of a whistleblower.”
“It’s not a whistleblower because he wasn’t in the room. He wasn’t on the phone call,” Republican Senator David Perdue said last week, also falsely.
They were publicly corrected on Tuesday by one of their own colleagues, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, a longtime advocate of whistleblower safeguards.
“The distinctions being drawn between first- and second-hand knowledge aren’t legal ones,” said Grassley. “It’s just not part of whistleblower protection law or any agency policy.”
He added, “This person appears to have followed the whistleblower protection laws and ought to be heard out and protected.”