On August 12, an unidentified whistle-blower filed a complaint, addressed to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, concerning the behavior of President Donald Trump. Ever since that report became public a week ago, Trump and his defenders have done their best to discredit both its contents and the author. But underneath the increasingly large pile of misinformation, misinterpretation, and outright fabrication sits one simple truth: The whistle-blower did nothing wrong.
That may sound hard to believe at this point, especially if you understandably don't have the time or energy to take more than a glancing look at the headlines. But a closer examination of the accusations thrown the whistle-blower's way reveals no impropriety. In fact, it reinforces a portrait of a government official who took pains to go by the book. And the more the administration portrays that sequence of events as a deep-seated conspiracy, the more likely it becomes that the next whistle-blower goes rogue.
"I've been working with whistleblowers for 40 years," says Tom Devine, legal director at the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower protection and advocacy organization. "I've never seen a disclosure which was handled more flawlessly, and more scrupulously followed the rules, than this one."
The latest imbroglio centers around a New York Times report Wednesday that House Intel Committee head Adam Schiff (D-California) learned the "outlines" of the whistle-blower's concerns in early August, prior to the complaint reaching the inspector general for the intelligence committee.
Trump seized on the news, apparently handed to him on his way into a Wednesday press conference with the president of Finland. "It shows that Schiff is a fraud," Trump said. "I ..
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