By Elie Mystal
We cannot guarantee the safety of whistle-blowers. Oh, we pass all kinds of laws with fancy names like the “Whistleblower Protection Act.” Our presidents sign executive orders called “Protecting Whistleblowers with Access to Classified Information.” But when the rubber meets the road, when a whistle-blower wants to dish about the people in charge of enforcing the laws, all of our acts and proclamations are easily ignored pieces of paper.
Chelsea Manning lives in the Alexandria Detention Center. Edward Snowden lives in Moscow. People get to be called “whistle-blowers” only when the institutions they’re blowing the whistle on allow it. Otherwise, they’re called “criminals” or “spies” and are subjected to the full weight of the American justice system.
That justice system is currently run by Attorney General William Barr, and he is the most obvious reason our current “whistle-blower” has yet to come forward to Congress about whatever he or she would like to tell the American people about Donald Trump’s interactions with, and promises to, foreign leaders. What we know is that this whistle-blower, an intelligence official who worked at the White House, filed a complaint with Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community — and that Atkinson deemed the information credible enough to forward it to the director of national intelligence (DNI), and then to Congress. What we also know is that the Department of Justice told the DNI to ignore our whistle-blower laws and keep the information hidden from Congress.
Now, there are people in Congress, the media, and on the presidential campaign trail who hope that the whistle-blower takes the heroic step of risking their professional career and personal freedom to come forward, to Congress. Senator Kamala Harris urged the whistle-blower to “go directly to Congress,” saying that the “American people will stand with you.”
Man, if I were the whistle-blower, I’d tell all of these politicians and pundits to kiss my whole entire backside. We “American people” are a decadent bourgeoisie who won’t storm concentration camps to save children. Why should the whistle-blower believe that the “people” will do anything to “stand with” them, unless the whistle-blower has the secret recipe for chicken sandwiches? Our leaders in Congress are feckless cowards. They have failed, repeatedly, to hold President Donald Trump or A.G. Barr accountable for any of their past transgressions against the rule of law. Why should the whistle-blower believe that Congress — through the newly opened House Intelligence Committee investigation or other means — is going to start holding Trump and Barr accountable now?
Read more here; https://www.thenation.com/article/whistleblower-trump-ukraine/