Will Hurd says it is important to safeguard the identity of those who would expose corruption.
Republican Rep. Will Hurd on Sunday broke with members of his party who have been calling for the release of the Ukraine whistleblower’s identity, though he agreed with his party’s calls to have Hunter Biden testify in the first public impeachment hearings set to begin this week.
Hurd, a retiring Texas Republican who spent years in the CIA, told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace that outing the whistleblower by compelling their testimony in a public hearing would send a chilling message to potential whistleblowers in the future.
“I think we should be protecting the identity of the whistleblower. I’ve said that from the very beginning because how we treat this whistleblower will impact whistleblowers in the future,” Hurd argued. “Having this whistleblower law on the books is important; it’s important checks and balance are not only in the intelligence committee, but in our government.”
The whistleblower is on a list of witnesses Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee want to see testify this week and submitted to Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) this weekend, though Schiff has veto power over those requests and shut that notion down late Saturday.
While Republicans have clamored for the whistleblower’s public testimony, arguing that most of what the complaint contained is hearsay, nearly every accusation in the complaint has been independently confirmed over weeks of closed-door testimony from Trump administration officials.
Right-wing media outlets have been circulating a name they claim is the whistleblower’s, prompting an outcry from lawyers representing the whistleblower and concerns about the whistleblower’s safety.
But while Hurd strayed from his party in calling for the continued protection of the whistleblower’s identity, he echoed their calls for another potential witness whose appearance Schiff suggested he would deny: Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden whose foreign business interests were at the root of Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign.
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Schiff swatted down this request from Republicans on Saturday, saying the impeachment inquiries “will not serve, however, as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the President pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit.”
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Rep. Will Hurd said it is important to safeguard the identity of those who would expose corruption https://t.co/PraAgvrKEv
— POLITICO (@politico) November 10, 2019
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