The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.
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Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of “urgent concern,” a legal threshold that ordinarily requires notification of congressional oversight committees.
But acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire has refused to share details about Trump’s alleged transgression with lawmakers, touching off a legal and political dispute that has spilled into public and prompted speculation that the spy chief is improperly protecting the president. The dispute is expected to escalate Thursday when Atkinson is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee in a classified session closed to the public. The hearing is the latest move by committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to compel U.S. intelligence officials to disclose the full details of the whistleblower complaint to Congress.
Maguire has agreed to testify before the committee next week, according to a statement by Schiff. He declined to comment for this story. The inspector general “determined that this complaint is both credible and urgent,” Schiff said in the statement released Wednesday evening. “The committee places the highest importance on the protection of whistleblowers and their complaints to Congress.”
The complaint was filed with Atkinson’s office on Aug. 12, a date on which Trump was at his golf resort in New Jersey. White House records indicate that Trump had had conversations or interactions with at least five foreign leaders in the preceding five weeks.
Among them was a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the White House initiated on July 31. Trump also received at least two letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the summer, describing them as “beautiful” messages. In June, Trump said publicly that he was opposed to certain CIA spying operations against North Korea. Referring to a Wall Street Journal report that the agency had recruited Kim’s half-brother, Trump said, “I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices.”
Trump met with other foreign leaders at the White House in July, including the prime minister of Pakistan, the prime minister of the Netherlands, and the emir of Qatar. Trump’s handling of classified information has been a source of concern to U.S. intelligence officials since the outset of his presidency. In May 2017, Trump revealed classified information about espionage operations in Syria to senior Russian officials in the Oval Office, disclosures that prompted a scramble among White House officials to contain the potential damage. Statements and letters exchanged between the offices of the DNI and the House Intelligence Committee in recent days have pointed at the White House without directly implicating the president.
Schiff has said he was told that the complaint concerned “conduct by someone outside of the Intelligence Community.” Jason Klitenic, the DNI general counsel, noted in a letter sent to congressional leaders on Tuesday that the activity at the root of the complaint “involves confidential and potentially privileged communications.”
The dispute has put Maguire, thrust into the DNI job in an acting capacity with the resignation of Daniel Coats last month, at the center of a politically perilous conflict with constitutional implications.
Schiff has demanded full disclosure of the whistleblower complaint. Maguire has defended his refusal by asserting that the subject of the complaint is beyond his jurisdiction.
Defenders of Maguire disputed that he is subverting legal requirements to protect Trump, saying that he is trapped in a legitimate legal predicament and that he has made his displeasure clear to officials at the Justice Department and White House.
After fielding the complaint on Aug. 12, Atkinson submitted it to Maguire two weeks later. By law, Maguire is required to transmit such complaints to Congress within seven days. But in this case, he refrained from doing so after turning for legal guidance to officials at the Justice Department.
In a sign of Atkinson’s discomfort with this situation, the inspector general informed the House and Senate intelligence committees of the existence of the whistleblower complaint — without revealing its substance — in early September.
Schiff responded with almost immediate indignation, firing off a letter demanding a copy of the complaint and warning that he was prepared to subpoena senior U.S. intelligence officials. The DNI has asserted that lawyers determined there was no notification requirement because the whistleblower complaint did not constitute an urgent concern that was “within the responsibility and authority” of Maguire’s office.
Legal experts said there are scenarios in which a president’s communications with a foreign leader could rise to the level of an “urgent concern” for the intelligence community, but they also noted that the president has broad authority to decide unilaterally when to classify or declassify information. Revealing how the United States obtained sensitive information could “compromise intelligence means and methods and potentially the lives of sources,” said Joel Brenner, former inspector general for the National Security Agency.
It was unclear whether the whistleblower witnessed Trump’s communication with the foreign leader or learned of it through other means. Summaries of such conversations are often distributed among White House staff, although the administration imposed new limits on this practice after Trump’s disclosures to Russian officials were revealed.
Meanwhile, I think I've decided that Giuliani is the red herring who hopes to divert attention by acting even more batsh!t crazy than his client...
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While the precise details of the complaint remain murky, the Ukraine revelation prompted Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani — who was in the news months ago for his dealings with Ukraine — to go on CNN and made a disastrous attempt to get ahead of the story.
If anything, Giuliani made it worse, by seemingly confirming the long-standing, but vaguely sourced reports, that Trump’s administration was trying to pressure Ukraine into investigating former vice president (and frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination) Joe Biden — perhaps by withholding military aid to Ukraine unless they complied.
Giuliani insisted to CNN’s Chris Cuomo that he didn’t ask Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden — but then, less than 30 seconds later, did a complete about-face and admitted that “of course” he did just that.
“You just said you didn’t!” Cuomo replied, disbelievingly, as Giuliani struggled to make a distinction between Ukraine investigating Biden and “look[ing] into allegations that related to my client, which tangentially involved Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme.”
President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ’s son, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on a probe, according to people familiar with the matter.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Trump didn’t mention a provision of U.S. aid to Ukraine on the call, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid-pro-quo for his cooperation on any investigation.
Mr. Giuliani in June and August met with top Ukrainian officials about the prospect of an investigation, he said in an interview. The Trump lawyer has suggested Mr. Biden as vice president worked to shield from investigation a Ukrainian gas company with ties to his son, Hunter Biden. A Ukrainian official earlier this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son.
After the July call between the two presidents, the Ukrainian government said Mr. Trump had congratulated the new president on his election and expressed hope that his government would push ahead with investigations and corruption probes that had stymied relations between the two countries.
The White House declined to comment. The Biden campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. Last week, a Biden campaign spokesman said of Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to pressure Ukraine: “This is beneath us as Americans.”
Mr. Trump on Friday defended his July call with Mr. Zelensky as “totally appropriate” but declined to say whether he had asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate Mr. Biden, a former U.S. vice president. “It doesn’t matter what I discussed,” he said.
At the same time, he reiterated his call for an investigation into Mr. Biden’s effort as vice president to oust Ukraine’s prosecutor general. “Somebody ought to look into that," he told reporters.
In his tweets, Murphy revealed he asked questions about a possible link between the Trump campaign and the president withholding military aid to Ukraine before finally releasing it after receiving pressure from lawmakers.
"A few weeks ago in Ukraine, I met w President Zelensky and we discussed the surprise cut off of aid and the inappropriate demands the Trump campaign was making of him," Murphy tweeted. "The obvious question everyone in Kiev was asking was - were the two things connected?"
Murphy continued: "Zelensky did not explicitly connect the two in our meeting, but he was VERY concerned about the cut off of aid, and VERY aware of the conversations that Rudy Giuliani was having with his team. I told him it was best to ignore requests from Trump's campaign operatives. He agreed."
The intelligence watchdog at the center of Ukraine firestorm
President Trump appointed Michael Atkinson, a widely respected career DOJ official, to keep the intelligence community accountable. Now, he’s unexpectedly in the middle of a presidential scandal.
The intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, is known to his peers and colleagues as a highly cautious “straight shooter” who tends to keep his head down.
So when he sounded the alarm to Congress earlier this month about an “urgent” complaint he’d received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications, those who’ve worked with him were surprised — and took it seriously.
“As soon as I saw that it was Atkinson, I thought, ‘Oh ****, this is real,’” said one of Atkinson’s former Justice Department colleagues. “He’s not a political guy. He’s a classic career prosecutor who’s only going to call balls and strikes.”
It’s that commitment to the letter of the law, according to people who know him, that has landed the typically cautious lawyer at the center of a political firestorm.
Atkinson, formally the Intelligence Community Inspector General, was nominated by Trump in November 2017 after serving 16 years at the Justice Department. The ICIG conducts investigations and reviews of activities within the purview of the Director of National Intelligence, and also handles whistleblower complaints from within the intelligence community.
The intelligence community whistleblower behind the complaint reportedly linked to President Trump and Ukraine has requested to speak to the House and Senate Intelligence committees, according to the chairs of both panels.
Why it matters: Congress has yet to hear directly from the whistleblower or be provided the complaint in full by the Trump administration. While Trump has authorized the release of the transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that interaction is said to be only one part of a series of events that make up the complaint.
What they're saying: House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted, "We have been informed by the whistleblower’s counsel that their client would like to speak to our committee and has requested guidance from the Acting DNI as to how to do so. We‘re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower’s testimony as soon as this week."
The Washington Post unloaded another seminal scoop Monday night in the chronicle of President Donald Trump’s reckless phone calls around the world.
The Post’s reporting, since confirmed by Bloomberg News and other media outlets, revealed that Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to withhold about $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before the president phoned his counterpart in the Ukraine in July and asked him to unearth dirt about a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Per the Post’s reporting, the White House wanted to keep the aid block sub rosa:
Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.
The Post neatly encapsulates the obvious problem all of this has highlighted since it first surfaced a week ago, thanks primarily to the principles and courage of a still-anonymous government whistleblower:
Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival.
So now we know that aid was in play as part of Trump’s strong-arming of Zelenskiy. In the wake of the Post’s story, White House officials have said — on background, of course — that the aid was not presented to Zelenskiy as a quid pro quo: you shiv Biden, you get aid.
Trump said on Monday that he didn’t tie aid to his request that Zelenskiy play dirty for him. But one of his lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, continuing his Yosemite Sam routine, said on Monday that he couldn’t rule out the possibility that Trump linked an aid threat to a Biden probe when he spoke to Zelenskiy. Chatting with reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he withheld aid from Ukraine, but said he did so to induce European countries to pay more to support the country.
I've been busy with a house project (replacing the roof on our three season room), so I'm not following this very closely. But I think he may be in very deep doo-doo on this one.
Guess we'll see what happens...or doesn't happen...
-------------------------------- When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
Posts: 38221 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
When is the last time there was a 100 - 0 vote in the Senate?
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Multiple media outlets reported that the complaint raised alarms about Trump’s call on July 25 with Zelensky, a five-page memorandum of which was made public Wednesday morning. Trump had asked in the call if Zelensky “can look into” allegations of corruption made against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
But Joseph Maguire, the acting Director of National Intelligence, did not forward the complaint to Congress, which lawmakers have called a violation of the law. On Tuesday, the usually-polarized Senate voted unanimously for Maguire’s office to hand over the complaint.
The following is a record of a conversation I had this afternoon with a White House official about the telephone call yesterday morning between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The official who listened to the entirety of the phone call was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call. After my call with this official I [redacted] returned to my office, and wrote up my best recollection of what I had heard.
The official described the call as "crazy," "frightening" and "completely lacking in substance related to national security." The official asserted that the President used the call to persuade Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political rivals, chiefly former Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter. The official stated that there was already a conversation underway with White House lawyers about how to handle the discussion because, in the official's view, the President had clearly committed a criminal act by urging a foreign power to investigate a U.S. person for the purposes of advancing his own reelection bid in 2020.
The phone call lasted approximately half an hour. The two leaders spoke through interpreters. My conversation with the official only lasted a few minutes, and as a result, I only received highlights:
The President asserted that "it all started in Ukraine," referring to the allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent investigation into the Trump campaign's contact with Russian individuals
The President asked Zelenskyy to locate the "Crowdstrike server" and turn it over to the United States, claiming that Crowdstrike is "a Ukrainian company," (Note: This appears to be a reference to the DNC server from which Russian hackers stole data and emails that were subsequently leaked in mid-2016; the DNC hired cyber security firm Crowdstrike to do the forensic analysis, which informed the FBI's investigation. It is not clear what the president was referring to when he claimed Crowdstrike is a Ukrainian company; one of its cofounders was born in Moscow.)
The President told Zelenskyy that he would be sending his personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine soon and requested that Zelenskyy meet with him. Zelenskyy reluctantly agreed that, if Giuliani traveled to Ukraine, he would see him.
The President raised the case of Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden's role in the company, and former Vice President Biden's role in setting Ukraine policy. The President urged Zelenskyy to [end page 1] investigate the Bidens and stated that Giuliani would discuss this topic further with Zelenskyy during his trip to Kyiv.
The President urged Zelenskyy not to fire Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who the President claimed was doing a good job. (Note: Lutsenko has spearheaded various politicized investigations, including on Burisma Holdings and alleged "Ukrainian interference" in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Lutsenko is widely reviled in Ukraine, and Zelenskyy has pledged to fire him but has been unable to secure approval from the legislature.)
The President stated that he wanted Attorney General William Barr to speak with Zelenskyy as soon as possible. (Note: It was not clear whether this conversation was to be in reference to Crowdstrike or the investigations of the Bidens.)
The President reiterated his concern that Zelenskyy was surrounded by people who were enemies of the President, including "bad oligarchs."
The President did not raise security assistance. According to the official, Zelenskyy demurred in response to most of the President's requests.
I did not review a transcript or written notes, but the official informed me that they exist.
The standard White House practice for Presidential-level phone calls with world leaders is for the White House Situation Room to produce a word-for-word electronic transcript that memorializes the call. The transcript is typically then circulated to key White House officials to be transformed into a formal memorandum that is distributed as an eyes-only document, to the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Director of the CIA.
In this case, the official told me that such a transcript had indeed been produced and was being treated very sensitively, in hard copy only. Moreover, several additional senior White House officials listened to the entire phone call in an adjacent room in the Situation Room suite and they presumably took written notes on the call.
The official did not know whether the President was aware that other people were listening and that the call was being transcribed. The official also was not certain whether anyone else was in the Oval Office with the President during the call.
On the Ukrainian side, it is unclear who listened to the call or whether a record was produced.
Who cares about the law that protects the whistleblower....
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President Trump on Sunday said the media should name the whistleblower behind a complaint about his dealings with Ukraine and that such reporting would be "doing the public a service."
"The whistleblower gave a very inaccurate report about my phone call. My phone call was perfecto. It was totally appropriate. He gave a report — he or she, but according to the newspapers it's a he," Trump told reporters.
"They know who it is. You know who it is. You just don't want to report it. CNN knows who it is, but you don't want to report it. And you know, you would be doing the public a service if you did," he added.
The whistleblower's identity is not public. Trump did not give evidence for his claim that CNN or newspapers know the person's identity.
Addressing a packed arena in Lexington, Ky., Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) claimed on Monday night that he knows the identity of the whistleblower whose complaint is at the center of the impeachment inquiry against President Trump. Then, Paul delivered a pointed message to the media.
“Do your job and print his name!” the senator yelled, prompting the crowd to raucously chant, “Do your job!”
As the House Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump heats up, the president and his allies have fixated on unmasking the whistleblower, whose identity is protected by federal law, and the person’s alleged political motives. Earlier on Monday, Trump demanded public testimony from the whistleblower.
But Paul’s comments drew intense criticism from many who accused him of putting the anonymous U.S. intelligence officer in danger, a firestorm that turned the senator’s name into a top trending term on Twitter with more than 63,000 mentions.
“A member of Congress who calls for the identity of any lawful whistleblower to be publicly revealed against their wishes disgraces the office they hold and betrays the interests of the Constitution and the American people,” Mark S. Zaid, one of the whistleblower’s attorneys, told The Post in an emailed statement Monday night.
The senator did not respond to a request for comment late Monday.
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On Monday, Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of Trump’s staunchest allies on cable news, suggested that he too knew the name of the whistleblower.
“I actually have multiple confirmations of who the whistleblower is, but you know what? I’ll play the game for a little bit and I’ll take the lawyers’ threats that they’re going to sue me,” Hannity said on his show Monday night. “Wouldn’t go anywhere.”
