THE MASKED SINGER
Who is the deep state whistleblower targeting Trump?
As his complaint was revealed to the world, reports emerged yesterday that the person who blew the whistle on a phone call between President Trump and Ukraine is a CIA officer.
The hotly anticipated whistleblower complaint was finally released Thursday, laying bare his claims about President Trump’s phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, but leaving one key question unanswered: Who is the anonymous accuser?
The author of the nine-page document was identified Thursday as a male CIA officer once assigned to the White House, according to a New York Times report citing multiple sources.
Although the whistleblower’s name remains a mystery, the report paints the most detailed portrait yet of the man who sparked the powder keg, also deducing that he likely has extensive knowledge of Ukrainian politics based on his writing in the complaint.
The document details the insider’s secondhand claims that senior White House officials tried to “lock down” records of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple US Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election,” read the complaint, dated Aug. 12.
“This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
In the 30-minute phone call, Trump prodded Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden, and urged the Ukrainian leader to reach out to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General William Barr. A rough summary of the conversation was released by the White House Wednesday.
The whistleblower — who reportedly has a tentative agreement in place to tell his story directly to some lawmakers behind closed doors — is represented by attorney Andrew Bakaj, himself a former CIA agent.
Bakaj donated to Biden’s campaign in late April through a nonprofit, and also once worked for Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, according to a report — tweeted Tuesday by Trump — in The Federalist.
The whistleblower noted that he was not a direct witness to the call, but claimed he had heard from “more than half a dozen US officials” with concerns, spurring him to speak up.
The whistleblower said White House officials who confided in him “were deeply disturbed” by Trump’s phone call, which was heard by about a dozen officials.
“They told me that there was already a ‘discussion ongoing’ with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain,” the complaint said.
The whistleblower also claimed he was notified by “multiple US officials” that “senior White House officials intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, including the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room.”
“This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call,” the whistleblower wrote.
The officials allegedly told the whistleblower they were “directed” by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript of the call from the computer system where such transcripts are usually stored and instead put it on a separate system used to store “classified information of an especially sensitive nature” and only accessible via code word.
“One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective,” the complaint said.
The whistleblower claimed the abuse of the classified computer system was part of a pattern.
“According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistleblower said.
A day after the Trump-Zelensky phone call, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, and US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland met with Zelensky and other officials to provide advice on how to “‘navigate’ the demands that the president had made of Mr. Zelensky.”
US officials also raised concerns to the whistleblower about Giuliani’s contact with Ukrainian officials and believed he was used as a liaison to relay messages between them and Trump.
Around that same time, US officials told the whistleblower that leaders in Ukraine were “led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelensky would depend on whether Zelensky showed willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues” raised by Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, and Giuliani.
Lutsenko has previously claimed that Ukrainian officials interfered in the 2016 US election.