A high-level person in our Intelligence Community has filed a formal complaint against Donald Trump for making repeated inappropriate commitments to a foreign leader. Read all about it at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/us/politics/intelligence-whistle-blower-complaint-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share.
The identity of the whistleblower — who is protected from reprisals by law — has not been released, but what does concern us greatly is the substance of the whistleblower’s complaint. That’s because Trump has a notably free-wheeling style of dealing with foreign leaders, in great contrast to his very careful predecessors, President Obama and both Presidents Bush as well as President Clinton, who was very careless in his personal behavior, but he never endangered our national security as Trump has so frequently done.
Congressman Adam Schiff (D-California), the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is very intent on learning why Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph McGuire — yet another Acting executive under the thumb of Trump — is in a tug of war with his subordinate, Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the top watchdog within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, since Atkinson is taking The Whistleblower’s complaint very seriously, labelling it as of "Urgent Concern."
The National Security Agency, based in Fort Meade, Maryland, has 40,000 employees — the largest US intelligence agency in terms of personnel.
The motto of the NSA is "Defending Our Nation, Securing the Future.”
Donald Trump isn’t intrested in defending our nation or securing the future, because, ever since his collusion with Vladimir Putin in 2016 became obvious to everyone, he repeatedly lambasted the very Intelligence Community over which Acting Director Joseph McGuire presides (let’s not forget that Trump’s first pick as Director of National Intelligence was Dan Coats, a well-respected GOP senator from Indiana who was also Ambassador to Germany. Director Coats repeatedly contradicted Trump as Special Counsel Robert Mueller III was documenting Trump’s obstruction of justice).
Former Republiclan presidential candidate and Mayor of Gotham Rudy Giuliani is one of Trump’s personal attorneys (he needs a lot of those), and Rudy is one talkative guy. See https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/19/politics/rudy-giuliani-joe-biden-ukraine-cnntv/index.html, where he contradicted himself twice in conversation yesterday with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, about The Whistleblower and what that’s all about.
Seems likely that The Whistleblower knows that Trump, in his freewheeling, careless style, has had substantial phone conversations with Ukraine’s president, Володи́мир Олекса́ндрович Зеле́нський (Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky), an entertainer, like Trump, before he was elected to lead the largest nation in Europe, a nation which Vladimir Putin covets.
All this is, we think, because Trump believes (mistakenly) that Joe Biden will be running against him in our 2020 presidential election; and Biden’s son Hunter has had business dealings in Ukraine, and Giuliani has demanded that Zelensky investigate Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine so Trump can use that information to defeat Biden in November 2020.
So we sent our chief investigative reporter, associate solitary reporter Susanna Sherman, together with our chief international correspondent, Larry Theis, to visit with Inspector General Atkinson in his office, where they had a three-minute conversation, in which Atkinson told them who
The Whistleblower is.
Before doing so, Atkinson reminded Sherman and Theis — both of whom are far too young to remember the identity of Deep Throat in the Watergate investigation of the early 1970; it was Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI, who met very secretly with WaPo reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.
“Larry and Susanna,” Atkinson said, “The Whistleblower of the Decade, and the Deep Throat of the moment, is Vaughn Bishop, the Deputy Director of the CIA. Go talk to him and he’ll tell you all about how Trump has consistently flouted all legal provisions and all best practices in diplomacy. Vaughn will tell you everything you want to know, so you can immediately tell Congressman Schiff and Tom Perez at the DNC all about it.”