WHI$TLEBLOWING
Tipster donor fund eyed as illegal
The whistleblower whose allegations touched off House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry may have violated federal law by indirectly soliciting more than a quarter-million dollars from mostly anonymous sources on a GoFundMe page, a complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general alleges.
The complaint, which was filed anonymously last week and obtained by Fox News, alleges the donations from roughly 6,000 individuals “clearly constitute” gifts to a current intelligence official that may be restricted because of the employee’s official position under federal ethics laws.
The GoFundMe pitch has raised more than $227,000 as of Tuesday afternoon and has a goal of raising $300,000 to cover legal fees.
It was started by John Tye, a former State Department official who came forward in 2014 as a whistleblower seeking to publicize the government’s electronic surveillance tactics. Tye also is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid.
“A US intelligence officer who filed an urgent report of government misconduct needs your help. This brave individual took an oath to protect and defend our Constitution. We’re working with the whistleblower and launched a crowdfunding effort to support the whistleblower’s lawyers,” Tye wrote on the page.
Tye did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint raised the possibility that some of the donations may have come from improper sources, and asked the ICIG to look into whether any “foreign citizen or agent of a foreign government” contributed.
The fundraising page claims that “donations will only be accepted from US citizens.”
But the majority of the GoFundMe donors to the whistleblower’s campaign were anonymous, and legal experts told Fox News that the ICIG could need to subpoena the Web site to obtain more information on their origins.
Tully Rinckey, the New York law firm representing the person making the allegations, was guarding the identity of their client, though Fox News learned that the individual holds a top-secret security clearance and has served in government.
“I have not seen anything on this scale,” Anthony Gallo, the managing partner of Tully Rinckey, told Fox News, referring to the fundraising.
“It’s not about politics for my client — it’s whistleblower-on-whistleblower, and [my client’s] only interest is to see the government ethics rules are being complied with government-wide.”
The complaint alleges that the donations through the GoFundMe page constitute a “gift” for a federal employee, and that they were made due to the whistleblower’s official “status, authority or duties.”
“[M]y client believes . . . that the federal employee you are protecting and their attorneys apparently have strategically weaponized their alleged whistleblowing activities into a very lucrative money-making enterprise . . . which would appear to my client to be a clear abuse of the federal employee’s authority and access to classified information,” Gallo wrote to IG Michael Atkinson, the same government watchdog who originally received the Ukraine complaint from the whistleblower.
The whistleblower, reportedly a member of the intelligence community, filed a complaint about President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he asked for probes of Joe Biden, his son Hunter and Ukraine’s purported role in the 2016 elections.
The call came as Trump was withholding nearly $400 million in security aid at a time Ukraine was battling Russian-backed insurgents in the country’s east.