‘Urgent concern’ about the president
It’s not every day that a whistleblower in the intelligence community files a complaint about the president of the United States. But it seems to have happened last month, when an unidentified intelligence employee alerted the inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, to multiple acts by President Donald Trump, including a promise he is said to have made to a foreign leader during a phone call.
The complaint alarmed Atkinson enough that he considered it a matter of “urgent concern” and alerted the acting director of national intelligence, or DNI, Joseph Maguire.
Under federal law, the DNI “shall” deliver an inspector general’s report about an “urgent concern” to Congress within a week of receiving it. But Maguire has so far refused to.
So Atkinson reached out to Congress himself. In a letter dated Sept. 9, he informed Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, of the existence of the complaint.
On Thursday, Atkinson appeared before a meeting of the House Intelligence Committee that was closed to the public and the news media. Maguire is scheduled to appear before that committee in an open hearing next week. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said they expect him and Atkinson to brief them next week, too.
While the lawyers battle over who is authorized to withhold what from whom, it’s worth making two observations: first, that the intelligence community’s watchdog — not some disgruntled denizen of the “deep state,” but a man appointed by Trump — was alarmed enough that he thought it necessary to inform Congress.
Second, that the administration is doing whatever it can to keep the complaint from becoming known, even behind closed doors.
Trump mocked the whole episode on Twitter, asking, “Is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call. I would only do what is right anyway, and only do good for the USA!” That’s a curious claim from a president who has gone to great lengths to hide from his own administration the details of his many conversations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia; who has casually revealed Israeli classified intelligence to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in the Oval Office; and whose defense secretary decided to quit after learning that Trump had told the president of Turkey over the phone that he was breaking with long-standing policy and withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria.
Three House committees are investigating whether Trump tried to get the Ukrainian government to investigate business dealings of the son of former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden. They have asked for a transcript of a July 25 phone call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine.
The No. 1 task of America’s intelligence and lawenforcement communities is to identify and deal with threats to national security. The problem, as explained by Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, is that Trump’s behavior has repeatedly revealed “the extent to which our constitutional system assumes and relies on a president with a modicum of national fidelity, and decent judgment and reasonableness.”
In other words, the system isn’t designed to deal with a situation in which a hazard may come from the president himself.