“Intelligence, unlike law enforcement, is a small, closed private world,” says John Kiriakou, a CIA whistle-blower who spoke out about the Bush-era torture program on ABC News in 2007. He was later sent to prison under the Obama administration for giving the name of a covert CIA officer to a freelance reporter, who didn’t publish it. “I think for all intents and purposes, whoever [the whistle-blower is], his career is probably over.”
Unlike Drake and Kiriakou, it doesn’t appear the Trump whistle-blower has spoken with journalists or other members of the media, which likely protects them from criminal prosecution. That doesn’t mean, however, they are in completely settled legal territory.
It's not entirely clear, for instance, how fully the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act shields people from retaliation, says Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit that works to expose misconduct in the US government. “Retaliation protections that intelligence community whistle-blowers have are not very enforceable,” she says. “It’s a problem because on paper, they look pretty good.” The issue, in part, is that the protections rely a policy directive from the Obama administration, rather than a statute written by Congress.
Hempowicz hopes that as a result of the current complaint, Congress will step in and provide greater clarity about how whistle-blowers from intelligence agencies will be protected in the future. “The silver lining to all of this is that there is an appetite to address the deficiencies in the law,” she says. If the White House is “questioning if someone is even a whistle-blower—who followed al ..
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