Trump attacks whistleblower while meeting Finnish president
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday lashed out at House Democrats, casting their impeachment inquiry as a political crusade and again threatening to unmask the still-unidentified whistleblower.
“He either got it totally wrong, made it up, or the person giving the information to the whistleblower was dishonest,” Trump said. “And this country has to find out who that person was, because that person’s a spy, in my opinion.”
The bulk of the whistleblower’s complaint has been corroborated by Trump himself. He has acknowledged asking the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden even as Trump was withholding critical aid to that country. A White House account of the July 25 call described Trump as asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for a “favor.”
Asked about his rhetoric potentially endangering the whistleblower, Trump brushed off the question. Federal law guarantees whistleblowers’ anonymity, but Trump said, “I don’t care.”
“I think the whistleblower should be protected — if the whistleblower is legitimate,” he said.
Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, and Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, have both said the whistleblower has followed the law and filed a legitimate complaint.
Trump’s outburst, which occurred during a meeting with the president of Finland in the Oval Office, came amid an intensifying showdown with Capitol Hill as House Democrats said they would issue a subpoena to the White House on Friday if the Trump administration did not voluntarily turn over records.
Among the documents being sought are any communications among administration officials involving Trump’s phone conversation with Zelenskiy.
The State Department inspector general, Steve Linick, is briefing legislative staff behind closed doors on Wednesday afternoon on what has been described as an “urgent” matter.
Linick has not said publicly what he will discuss, but Democrats have previously expressed concerns that Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo has been pressuring officials not to cooperate with congressional investigations.
Pompeo rejected criticism that he was failing to cooperate with Capitol Hill during a news conference in Italy, one of his stops on a four-nation tour of Europe this week. He accused congressional staff leading the impeachment inquiry of mistreating State Department workers.
“We won’t tolerate folks on Capitol Hill bullying, intimidating State Department employees,” he said. “That’s unacceptable and it’s not something that I’m going to permit to happen.”
At the same news conference, Pompeo acknowledged that he was listening in on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelenskiy. It’s common practice for diplomats and intelligence officials to take part in phone calls between heads of state, but Pompeo had previously suggested he didn’t know details of the conversation.
Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Pompeo should recuse himself from Ukraine-related issues because of his involvement. He also said Pompeo “must refrain from any direct or indirect participation in or influence over the State Department response to the Ukraine scandal, including congressional requests for documents or to interview State Department personnel.”
Rep. Adam B. Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said refusal to hand over documents to Congress would create the “adverse inference that those (underlying) allegations are in fact correct,” while Democrats have warned that any attempts by the administration to block the impeachment inquiry could themselves be impeachable offenses.
“We’re not fooling around here, though. We don’t want this to drag on months and months and months,” said Schiff, D-Burbank.
He also sharply criticized Trump’s attacks on the unidentified whistleblower. Trump had apparently alluded to the execution of past American spies during private remarks last week, saying that “we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”