The order of the whistleblower process
======================================

Asked repeatedly in late 2019 whether the anonymous complainant behind the first Trump impeachment deserved the word, John Kiriakou declined to give it.

The definition

"There is a legal definition of whistleblowing in the United States. It's written into the whistleblower protection law: any person who brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threat to the public health or public safety."

He adds elsewhere that the definition carries a practical corollary, that people who meet it do so "almost always with a great personal cost attached."

The sequence

The procedural objection is the substance of his argument. "There is a way to go about doing it," he says, and the way is fixed: "you are supposed to go to the inspector general, then the inspector general investigates and the inspector general goes to the committee. You don't go to the committee first."

What happened instead, on his account, ran the chain backwards and then sideways: "the whistleblower first went to the committee, then to the inspector general, then the IG went to the legal staff, the general counsel, and then went to the DNI IG. It was an unwieldy situation and it spun out of control."

He allows that the complainant "may have begun the process the way he was supposed to begin it" before it went wrong, but treats the meeting with committee staff before filing as "a violation of the letter of the law."

What he calls the person instead

Rather than whistleblower, Kiriakou offers a description of function: "I would call him an anonymous source for the Democratic staff members of the House Intelligence Committee." Pressed for a stronger label he declines that too, settling on "a busy body" and "a Democratic operative wannabe."

His further objection concerns anonymity. The complainant, he notes, was not an undercover officer but by all accounts an analyst, and "you can't hide this person's name, identity, just to save him from embarrassment." His position is that a genuine whistleblower "needs to come forward in public, testify in an open session, and blow that whistle."

He also raised the money: a GoFundMe campaign that had reportedly raised $225,000 for a person whose name was supposed to be secret and whose process was supposed to be confidential. "It doesn't make any sense to me, certainly not any legal sense."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- The Ukraine call whistleblower
- Whistleblower Protection Act
- Only Fox Came To My Defence
- Espionage Act
