The “Whistleblower Complaint” is the real 2020 election interference
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.
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Comments
The democrats are acting as if they don’t have anything to lose at this point. They need to suffer a catastrophic defeat at the ballot box.
DEMS and the DEEP STATE have nothing to lose now because their entire history of vile corruption and international crimes are all coming out on them.
Around the web, citizens are saying this is the Death of the CIA, and that there is obviously panic in the Deep State.
Should Romney be correct, which I doubt, but should he be, that there are 30 “republican” senators who would vote to impeach, would you ever vote for republicans again should the efforts of the deep state succeed in removing Trump from office? I know I wouldn’t.
Of course should Democrats gain power we won’t have a country left for either party – other than the totalitarians who will have succeeded in overturning a duly elected President.
We could very likely see a hot civil war from all this. What else would be left?
Romney is a Republican as Rachel Dolezal is Black
I would hope that every Republican would vote to remove Trump, if he is shown to have committed a serious offense. So far evidence for such an offense doesn’t seem to exist; if it did I’d expect the Dems to have found it by now. So I would expect all Rs to vote against removing him. But if one day he were to shoot someone on fifth avenue, or grab someone by their anatomy, then I would expect every decent Republican to turn on him.
If we are on the impeachment route, what about getting rid of corrupt Democrats and their judicial henchmen? What Biden did is certainly more troubling than anything that has come out about Trump.
What Biden did is by definition at least as bad as the worst that Trump is suspected of having done. But Biden holds no office, so he can’t be impeached or removed.
However anyone who says this allegation makes Trump unfit to be president must say the same about Biden, and that they will not support him even if he wins the nomination, and how many Dems are willing to say that?
” the worst that Trump is suspected of having done”
Trump isn’t suspected of having done anything wrong. Only you progs lying about it.
“But Biden holds no office, so he can’t be impeached or removed.”
It’s quite possible that what Biden did is criminal and prosecutable, but you fail to mention that. Wonder why?
An investigation should be started to determine this. That is what Trump asked for.
“So far evidence for such an offense doesn’t seem to exist…”
Ah, no kidding. Thanks for the reminder.
So far, no evidence exists that you killed and ate your mother.
Evidence does exist that you are a commie prog enabler, working to insure they destroy what is left of freedom in this country.
The subject is the whistleblower complaint that isn’t. It’s a illegal conspiracy to remove the elected president of the United States.
That is your goal as well. You’ve said it and made it clear over and over.
Your the enemy of freedom and liberty.
Aah! Always the “if true” believer.
At this point, nobody shoud vote to remove Trump based on anything, other than the voters next November if they so choose. The deep state with so many criminals has been against him so consistently, there’s not much that would be too much for him to do against it.
And yet he’s clean as a whistle. But he doesn’t have to be.
Remember that a Romney guy, Cofer Black, replaced Hunter on the board at Burisma. He’s also ex-CIA and somebody with deep ties to Comey. I think Comey replaced him when he retired from the CIA.
Trump will deliver the needed catastrophic defeat next year. The Dem’s impeachment ploy gives Trump the unique gift of being able run for reelection next year as a DC outsider, despite holding office for 3.75 years.
They must suffer much more than a catastrophic defeat, anything less than the complete and utter destruction of the Socialist-Democrat Party and all elected and appointed members is insufficient to protect the country from a resurgence as voters go back to sleep and forget about the damage done in these years.
They suffered a horrendous defeat last time they tried this, in 1972. Nixon was reelected with 49 states.
In 1973 Nixon was inaugurated for his 2nd term, and later that year he resigned, hounded out of office by the essentially vapid Watergate “scandal”.
We now have a legally protected “whistleblower”. Then they just had Deep Throat with no legal protection, as their vehicle to leak stuff into the “investigation”.
The one upside I see in all of this: There will be absolutely no forward movement on any legislation until after the next election.
The administration’s gun grabbers (with Barr as likely leader*) are already grumbling that this is interfering with gun control legislation they wish to see passed. GOOD!
* As Bush 41’s AG Barr pushed gun control for that administration. The fact that he is back pushing “Universal Background Checks” after all these years would tend to indicate he wasn’t just doing the bidding of Bush 41.
The weaponized the IRS. Then the FISA courts. They used fake accusations of sexual improprieties against supreme court nominees. Now they’ve weaponized whistleblower statutes to boost fake accusations of corruption against the president.
In every one of these cases, they ignored or trivialized similar but real accusations against their side, acting as if they think no one will notice.
Not to repeat the obvious but this is how you get more Trump.
The very FIRST thing the DNI needs to do is to revoke the current whistleblower form and re-institute the one from the Obama administration (i.e. the one that was in service for the last ten years or so) By stating that it is the same form as the Obama administration used, that should strangle any shrieks of outrage from the media, particularly if that phrase gets used when any press questions get bombed onto anybody at his office.
“No, I don’t think going back to the Obama-era form for whistleblower complaints is a bad thing. The Obama-era form had been in force for the last decade, and only was changed a few days before the current DNI took office. In the event the Obama-era form really does need revised, we will take steps to bring it up to current standards. In the mean time, the Obama-era form will remain in place.”
I think this “whistle blower” incident will go down in American history as a touchstone, a turning point. Something akin to Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride, or the Shot Heard Around the World. A moment in American history when we got to see two diametrically opposed forces, one trying to destroy American freedom, the other trying to preserve it. They went too far, and when the methods and reasons come to light, they will be (cliche alert) relegated to the ash heap of history.
I’m sorry, I was trying to up-vote your excellent comment, hit the ? by mistake, and couldn’t back it out. Arrrgh!
No worries. I’m an optimist. Things might get worse before they get better, but we’re going to be ok.
Oh baloney. And I say that with total sympathy. The dichotomy has been obvious for years. And still nothing will happen.
We can see the wheels are greased. These or other “whistleblowers” can use the same method to leak more nonsense to stimulate and excuse more House investigation. The House process doesn’t really allow the Republicans to push back on witnesses, insulating against this splashing over onto the real culprits including Biden and Hillary. The questions won’t even be asked.
It’s all hermetically sealed. Trump will be impeached while Biden and Hillary remain protected, and someone else will write a comment saying “this impeachment trial will be a turning point …”
All these things keep blowing up in the democrats faces. It’s because the Truth wins. I’ll fight for the Truth, just as I’ll fight for all of our American values. Freedom, Liberty, self-determination and governance. Anyway, I respect your point of view, I would just ask that you vote in every election for which you are eligible and vote your own conscience.
they need to bring the whistle-blower out, actually it probably is a ‘committee’ of person so they can face the music
…so they can face the
musicfiring squadFIFY
Not only no, but HELL no.
Every single Republican and Conservative should be wishing this guy/gal a long, happy, healthy life. The biggest negative impact Bob has made on the Trump administration is over. From this point onward, all Bob can possibly do is show how the Deep State is flailing about, willing to lie, cheat, and steal to defeat Trump. My worst concern is he will be found in Ft. Marcy Park, because then he becomes a martyr to the cause, and un-criticizable.
Stay healthy, Bob. You’re going to be answering some questions soon.
They won’t. They’ll use the whistle-blower again if they need to stir the pot some more.
Because it’s being framed as a whistleblower, does this mean the President and his defenders during impeachment are allowed to question the whistleblower? American Juris prudence allows for one to confront their accusers. If the whistleblower remains anonymous, how can one confront them?
No, and the Republicans won’t even be given advance notice of witnesses appearing to accuse Trump, so they won’t be able to develop questions aimed at Biden or Hillary.
One thing about the timing struck me, are we sure this was a laid trap, rather than a hasty reaction?
The Mueller report did its explosion into radioactive clowns the day before this call happened. Given the complete disconnect between what the complaint alleged and the actual transcript, I’d have to suspect that they could not have been expecting the transcript to be released. And to be fair, if Trump and Zelensky had discussed anything of more sensitivity, the transcript could very well have required significant redaction, which, of course, would have been played as ‘obviously’ hiding something.
I’m beginning to wonder if they wrote the complaint without actually know what was in the call.
Neither. The Dems really don’t care. They’ve rigged the process so their lack of a case, and the obvious and serious culpability of many on their side, won’t really matter until the Senate trial at the earliest.
And then who knows what rules Roberts (thanks for Obamacare) will set to keep things in line and prevent leaks of anything unrelated to Trump’s activities.
The senate will determine their ruleset, not Roberts.
Anybody can be a whistleblower now, and just make everythig up.
So, if I file 50 complaints, will they have to investigate them?
They sure seem to want them.
Sure if you work in the Intelligence Community. But they wouldn’t let somebody like us in the Intelligence Community, due to our politics.
Whether they are patriots does indeed depend on your view, but on any view they are rats, and guilty of disloyalty to the President. Executive employees are entitled to their private views of their boss, but he is their boss, and they are not entitled to use their positions to undermine him. That was true under 0bama and it’s just as true under Trump.
Trump should order the IG to reveal this rat’s name, and then fire the rat. If the IG refuses, fire him and give the same order to his deputy. The rat is not a true whistleblower and should not enjoy the protection of that status, just as someone who falsely claims to have been sexually assaulted is not entitled to the protections given to victims of actual assaults.
Everyone who had a hand in this needs their name dragged into the light. Every “colleague,” every “co-worker,” every congressperson, congressional staffer, lawyer, “journalist,” White House staffer… anyone and everyone that had ANYTHING to do with it. democrats LOVE transparency, right? By the way, my opinion: “Whistle blower” complaint was a cooperative effort. fusion gps.congressional democrats. perkins coie. The usual MSM suspects. cia. And a Judas Goat.
Who approved the modification of the complaint form to include hearsay allegations?
That’s actually a *BIG* question. If it turns out to be the departing gal who did not get the DNI spot, then she messed with a government form just to allow her junk report in.
Government bureaucrats don’t like that. Neither do judges.
“You ask too many questions.”
/s
Let’s pretend to be Democrats and argue in Federal Court that the revised form is invalid because it violates the Administrative Procedures Act.
ICIG Atkinson ought to be fired for his handling of this incident regardless of whatever else develops.
At least he said there’s bias. That’s one of the few elements of defense that exists here.
Is it time for pitchforks and torches yet?
Have they forgotten that we are a revolutionary people, or have we? A little tar and feathers will go a long way toward reminding them that this is our government; of,by,and for. Half the country will not be disenfranchised.
The Swamp has foolishly revoked the Constitution so we return to our founding document for guidance: the Declaration of Independence. It is there that our social contract was defined, not the Constitution. It declares that our individual rights are ours, granted by God and that our national sovereignty rests with the people, not with the government. It is there that we find the remedy: revolution.
The Constitution my be a bit too bland to be a source of inspiration but the Declaration is passionately inspired and inspiring. We should all be reading it regularly by now.
BTW, the “American experiment” is not embodied in the US Constitution. Our original attempt for self-government from 1789 to 1792 was the Articles of Confederation. But inevitably, parochial interests weakened the Union and an alternative was needed or the Experiment would fail (as England expected). So referencing the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and other sources, they staged the “Philadelphia Miracle of 1787” to produce our Constitution where certain numerated powers (and ONLY those powers) were ceded to the Federal government in order to provide a strong backbone against foreign interests.
Today, the Federal government has so stepped beyond their constitutional limits that it has become a tangled mess that will not be solved by lawyers having pedantic debates online. We have attempted legal solutions within a system that is so thoroughly corrupted that the elites have managed to frustrate of votes through ballot rigging, judicial decree or just bureaucratic torpor. It appears hopeless.
The may soon be coming for us to step out of this mess from the grassroots level. We at least need more Hong Kong spirit if we cannot find it within ourselves to reconnect ourselves with the “Spirit of ’76”. That was a year when many took the ultimate risk of putting their lives on the line. I would sure feel better if we could express that forcefully to the spineless Republicans (for a start) who think the Tea Party is dead and they can just lay low and wait for this storm to pass. The storm must show signs of turning into a raging tempest. How do we do that?
Correction:
“The TIME may soon be coming…”
Game on!
TrumpMarch.com
Pitchfork optional.
Of course I mean that metaphorically
Think about what the deep state would be doing if the 2A was not in place? Would the nighttime Mueller raids and the Wisconsin raids would be the norm? The Democrats (and the GOPe) clearly want to crush all resistance. Freedom is and has always been their enemy.
Remember the attacking dogs on the Animal Farm? They are in Congress and the deep state.
“Would the nighttime Mueller raids and the Wisconsin raids would be the norm?”
Yes.
They get away with a few because it’s not widespread. Should they try more often many Americans will be up and waiting on them.
Fred Fleitz, a former Chief of Staff for the NSA, has suggested that, based on the quality and legalese in the complaint, it was written by Congressional DemoncRats or their staff. Is this a frame up to undo the 2016?
Mark Levin agrees with Fred Fleitz; they discussed this on Levin’s talk show on 9/26/19.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-levin-audio-rewind-9-26-19/id209377688?i=1000451394236
You forgot to mention that the last step was to change the whistle blower form to allow second hand account. That indicates the coup went pretty high up.
Right to the top.
To Obama to Pelosi to……….
A careful reading of the complaint shows that the last four full pages contained 30 references to publicly available information from public statements, tweets, interviews and articles. This was just oppo research and should not be included in a whistleblower complaint
.
Excluding the introduction and the CYA statements that the opposition attorneys included, there are two and a half pages excluded the appendix which is heavily redacted. In those couple pages there are 30 references to things heard over the water cooler or outside smoking cigarettes.
.
This is another dossier hiding behind the whistleblower laws.
They used the same playbook as they did with the “Russia Russia Russia” claims
they planted stuff in their compliant media, who reported it and they then used the media reports to bolster their false claims
Thanks for mentioning that. There are circular references everywhere but never more noticeable than in the FISA applications where they justified the Dossier with an article in USA today.
And Watergate. Reports from Deep Throat. “News” stores from agents Woodward and Bernstein.
Yup. This is the Schiff Dossier.
I really need to A) stop buying black leather couches or B) stop with the black dogs.
I was hunting for my dog. In a growing panic. It turned out he was right next to me all along, wondering why I was making such a fool of myself.
Excellent camo, black dog. You blend right in with the couch.
Hunting for your dog? He shot the pigeons and you fetched?
There apparently is a whistle blower law whose terms I once saw or thought I saw, which requires that the alleged whistle-blower has first hand information about serious misdeeds of an intelligence officer.
Unless Congress passes a modification of that law, the first hand requirement remains in effect no matter what is written on the reporting form.
This so called whistle blower admits having no first hand information on the Trump-Zelensky call, and Trump is not an intelligence officer.
There was, in consequence, no conceivable way the complaint should have been considered to be sent to Congress in conformance with this law, and Atkinson, who apparently suggested this, violated his oath of office by recommending doing so.
Either he is ignorant of the law, or part of a political conspiracy to undermine Constitutional Government. His days in office should be numbered.
That’s an important point. The law you recall Daniel was, I am told, changed to allow hearsay whistle-blowers very recently.
Lookee here, they really did change the form for the purpose of allowing this complaint.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/dbm1nr/mollie_hemingway_icig_says_instructions_that/