Your bag is empty.
The press does not know who the whistleblower is. Congress does not know who the whistleblower is. We’ve begun referring to the whistleblower as “him,” but it could be a woman. We don’t know what the whistleblower wants—did they come forward out of a hunger for Trump’s removal or was it that antiquity formally known as patriotism?
This story began on a stairwell—there were just under twenty reporters camped outside the red doors where the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence meets to discuss the nation’s secrets. After a few hours of the journalists sitting on the stairs and watching each other tweet, Chairman Adam Schiff emerged alone from behind the red doors and spoke to a bank of cameras.
Schiff explained that when a whistleblower comes forward through the official channels, the “inspector general has two weeks to investigate the complaint, to determine if it’s urgent and credible and to forward that complaint to the Director of National Intelligence…what then is supposed to happen is that the Director of National Intelligence has seven days to review the complaint and then they shall provide it to the Congress.”
But Schiff claimed that the Director of National Intelligence—currently a former Navy Admiral named Joseph Maguire—is stonewalling Congress.
The exact complaint that the whistleblower lodged became clear through reporting from the heavy papers. The Washington Post reported that the complaint was filed on August 12, when the president was at one of his golf courses. The Post’s sources claimed that the whistleblower came forward to report conversations that the president had with foreign leaders. There was the suggestion that Trump had promised something to a foreign leader at some point. On Thursday, the Post reported that the complaint involved Ukraine.
The attempt to keep this quiet could make this far worse than the actual substance of the complaint itself.
National security lawyer Bradley Moss explained to PLAYBOY that we are entering murky waters. When asked who he thinks the whistleblower may be, Moss told me “it’s a very small group of people who get to be in on these kinds of calls.” But while the whistleblower laws allow the president to protect himself, previous presidents have signed them with one eye over their shoulder. Moss said “because of the narrow jurisdictional defect in the scope of the statute—the extent to which the president can protect himself—there is a nontrivial chance that the government could beat back a subpoena.”
Schiff told reporters that he’s confident that they will win in court, saying, “I don’t think this is a problem of the law. I think the law is written very clearly. I think the law is just fine. The problem lies elsewhere.”
When Bill Clinton signed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998, he noted that the law “does not constrain my constitutional authority to review and, if appropriate, control disclosure of certain classified information to Congress” — that’s the narrow jurisdictional defect to which Moss was referring. The national security lawyer told me, “the attempt to keep this quiet could make this far worse than the actual substance of the complaint itself.”
On Thursday, Rep. Eric Swalwell told PLAYBOY, “it’s completely lawless to not follow the whistleblower procedure” and joked, “I know you guys have a job to do but we prefer that [whistleblowers] don’t leak to the press.”
The whistleblower story has evolved strangely because we do not know who the whistleblower is, and there’s no hint at what their motivation might be. It leaked in drops but the official channels are designed to be free of leaks and the whistleblower doesn’t seem to want to leak. A government official who is rubbed the wrong way or ethically concerned can either mention the inside-the-White-House-gossip to a friend who happens to be a reporter at a cocktail party or they can go through the official channels. But there seems to be very little faith in the official channels under the Trump era, which makes this whistleblower rare.
That slow pace is frustrating a lot of members of Congress. Swalwell told me “the urgency is what concerns me … we don’t have time for lengthy court battles.” On Friday, I caught up with a slightly peeved San Francisco congresswoman Jackie Speier, who said she only knows what she reads in the press, adding “we have no knowledge about the Ukraine, no knowledge whatsoever.” When asked what the next steps are for the Intel Committee, Speier said “contempt for all these guys. Inherent.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Trump talked about Joe Biden with the Ukranians because Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma Holding; which right-wing talking heads have used to tie a “massive bribery scheme” to Joe. Trump surrogate Rudy Guiliani admitted to asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden in a botched CNN interview only the night before.
And if Trump wanted to make anybody believe that he wasn’t trying to get the Ukrainains to do his opposition research, he did a terrible job convincing us. When asked if he discussed Joe Biden with the Ukrainians, Trump said “it doesn’t matter what I discussed, but I will say this, somebody ought to look into Joe Biden’s statement” about Ukraine.
Now, as we frequently seem to be, we are in a mire, waiting to see and trying to find out what Trump may have actually said to foreign leaders and if it’s the sort of thing that will louden the drumbeat of impeachment.