The “Whistleblower Complaint” is the real 2020 election interference
Posted by William A. Jacobson Saturday, September 28, 2019 at 8:30pm
Whistleblower protections are being used to shield what the Inspector General called the whistleblower’s “arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate”
A plain reading of the so-called Whistleblower Complaint supports the reporting by the New York Times and others that the complainant is in the intelligence community, likely the CIA.
It’s not so much a whistleblower complaint as a closing argument crafted by lawyers based on information the complainant never witnessed in order to create a pretext for impeachment, or at a minimum to damage Trump’s 2020 prospects.
The complainant, by his or her own account, is but a figurehead for a broader community within the government united against Trump. The Inspector General letter on the complaint noted:
“the ICIG’s preliminary review identified some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate.”
That sentence is the single most important sentence in this whole saga. The so-called whisteblower is politically hostile to Trump and favors another political candidate.
The gravamen of the Complaint and the Inspector General letter is that that Trump potentially violated the law in suggesting that Ukraine investigate alleged corruption of the Biden family in using Joe Biden’s then-position of Vice President to enrich his son, Hunter.
The notion that urging an investigation would be obtaining a thing of value or inviting interference in the 2020 election is absurd on its face. The alleged corruption took place in Ukraine. Seeking the truth of what happened is not a de facto campaign contribution to or interference on behalf of Trump, anymore than refusing to get to that truth would be a de facto campaign contribution to or interference on behalf of Biden.
Joe Biden and his son should be investigated. He has no immunity as a presidential candidate. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were investigated during the 2016 campaign. Calling for an investigation of Hillary or Trump or Biden is fair politics, not illegal election interference.
There does, however, appear to be an attempt to interfere in the 2020 election by the whistleblower and the people on whose behalf he or she was working.
This has every appearance of collective action to take down Trump, much as the upper echelons of the FBI collectively tried unsuccessfully to accomplish that mission. Kris Kolesnik, who has spend several decades addressing whistleblowers and laws to protect them, writes at The Hill:
On Thursday, former CIA officer Robert Baer suggested on CNN that the whistleblower’s efforts, together with others cited in his complaint, might reflect “a palace coup” against the president. I believe he said that before The New York Times reported that the whistleblower was allegedly a CIA officer.
Baer’s allusion was neither sinister nor fanciful. It was a well-grounded hypothesis.
I not only had a long career of dealing with whistleblowers; I also had the intelligence and national security portfolios while working in the Senate. After reading the whistleblower’s complaint, I reached a similar conclusion before I heard Baer’s remarks but with a slightly different twist.
Kolesnik’s “different twist” is that while there appears to be collective action against Trump with the complainant as the coordinator, it was justified:
I view this whistleblower group as of the same ilk. Trump would refer to them as deep staters who ratted him out. I would call them national treasures who pulled down his knickers for, literally, all the world to see.
It’s likely that this group of rats or patriots, depending on your view, was laying in wait, using their access to highly sensitive classified information to monitor Trump waiting for the gotcha moment. That moment came, for them, during and immediately after Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, to which the complainant was not a party. It must have appeared to be a clean chance for a coup de grâce, being divorced from the politics of the failed Mueller investigation and Russia collusion.
From there, they spun a tale of cover-up (putting transcripts on a secure server — something not unique to the Ukraine call) and even planted a poison pill, making sure to include Attorney General Bill Barr’s name prominently in the document to justify calls for his recusal. They then utilized the Whistleblower protections of the law to shield the complainant and those helping him from scrutiny of “arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate.”
The Whistleblower protections are being use to conceal, not reveal, the truth.
The abuse of the Whistleblower process is just the latest in a long line of broken norms used to try to overturn the 2016 election — from attempts to intimidate Electors to change their Electoral College votes, to James Comey trying to set up and entrap Trump in their early meetings, to Comey leaking memos to the press to get a special counsel appointed. At every step of the way there has been a collusion to remove Trump or at least damage his 2020 prospects.
The attempt to interfere in the 2020 election came not from Trump suggesting the Ukrainians do the obvious, but from those who put together a Whistleblower Complaint that is not a whistleblower complaint but a political document.
