Democrats say testimony from Trump officials backs whistleblower’s claims

WASHINGTON — The whistleblower who initially unmasked President Donald Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for political favors has moved steadily toward the periphery of the House impeachment inquiry as several Democrats said Thursday they have ample testimony from senior Trump administration officials to back his claims.

Democrats were once prepared to take extraordinary steps to preserve the whistleblower’s identity under questioning, considering him central to their investigation.

But over the past month, they have grown cold to the idea of exposing him to additional scrutiny after several witnesses described how Trump leveraged access and military aid to secure a promise from Ukraine to launch investigations that could help his 2020 reelection bid.

“I think it’s quite clear we have a surfeit of evidence that corroborates in full every aspect of what happened and the policy they were pursuing,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., a member of the Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees.

A person familiar with the discussions between the whistleblower and House investigators, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks, said Thursday that there are no active efforts to arrange for the individual’s testimony. A spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is leading the inquiry, declined to comment.

Republicans, meanwhile, have stepped forward to demand the whistleblower’s public testimony, arguing in a letter Wednesday that revealing his identity is necessary “to fully assess the sources and credibility” of the individual — and, impeachment advocates fear, fuel an effort to undermine the probe itself.

“Why don’t we know who the person is who started this whole charade?” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. “It’s time that we know who started this whole thing.”

The GOP effort to question the whistleblower is part of a broader effort to impugn the impeachment inquiry and the Democrat leading it.

The targeting of the whistleblower has been led by President Trump himself, who has called for the whistleblower’s unmasking on multiple occasions in tweets and public statements.

“Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called ‘Whistleblower,’ represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way,” he wrote on Sept. 29.

The Washington Post had identified the whistleblower only as a male CIA officer.

Republicans escalated their condemnation of the House inquiry on Thursday, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introducing a resolution assailing the probe as unfair to Trump.

“I’m not here to tell you that Donald Trump’s done nothing wrong. I’m not here to tell you anything other than that the way they’re going about it is really dangerous for the country and we need to change course while we can in the House,” Graham told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Graham said 44 of the 53 Senate Republicans support his nonbinding resolution.

While some Republicans have been respectful of the whistleblower’s right to anonymity, as guaranteed in the statute governing intelligence community complaints and other federal whistleblower statutes, many others have fully embraced Trump’s rhetoric.

“I certainly think in American jurisprudence, the ability to cross-examine your accusers is pretty fundamental,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Thursday. “I think that would be important.”

Democrats have played down the necessity of the whistleblower’s testimony for weeks, starting with the Sept. 25 release of the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asks Zelensky to do him “a favor” by investigating an alleged Ukrainian role in the 2016 election, as well as the role that the son of former Vice President Joe Biden played at a Ukrainian gas company.

Schiff said in an Oct. 13 interview on CBS’ Face the Nation that the whistleblower’s testimony “might not be necessary,” and several Democrats involved in the investigations said this week that new testimony from key figures — including former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, former National Security Council senior director Fiona Hill and William Taylor Jr., the current top U.S. diplomat in Kyiv — all made the whistleblower’s testimony even less essential to the probe.

“This is the role that whistleblowers play: Whistleblowers are the people who set off a process by telling the truth,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who has participated in the impeachment inquiry as a member of the Oversight Committee. “The whistleblower will go down in history as a hero for kicking off this process. But the whistleblower is no longer integral to the investigation in any way.”

Neither Raskin nor Connolly said they were aware of any final decision not to seek testimony from the whistleblower. A spokesman for Schiff declined to comment.