The president’s new strategy is reprehensible and dangerous.
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Now that the impeachment inquiry has been formally approved by a vote of the whole House, will Republicans start cooperating with the Intelligence Committee investigation? Probably not, if their behavior so far is any indication. In the closed-door depositions, some Republicans—to the extent they attended at all—reportedly focused their questioning on the identity of the whistleblower rather than on wrongdoing by the President of the United States. The Wall Street Journal reports that, going forward, Republican lawmakers and conservative media outlets plan to focus their impeachment counterpunch on outing and attacking the whistleblower, beginning with speculation as to that person’s identity. The president’s own tweets from the last few days reflect that strategy. “Where is the whistleblower?” he tweeted on November 2. The next day: “Reveal the whistleblower.” The president’s allies have begun openly calling for the news media to “print his name”—a brazen invitation to harassment, flouting whistleblower protections.
This strategy is unsurprising, given that Trump and his allies—so far—have no answer to the damaging facts relating to the July 25 phone call. Only a couple of options are left in defense of Trump’s indefensible actions: either argue that it doesn’t matter if a president enlists a foreign power to investigate a political rival, or deflect attention off the president and onto an innocent scapegoat—the whistleblower.
The latter strategy, the one the president and his team have apparently selected, is both reprehensible and dangerous. The whistleblower laws have roots that go back to the earliest days of the republic—in fact, to even before the Constitution was adopted—and are designed to foster officeholders’ accountability to the people. If the people don’t know what government is up to, abuses of office are allowed to happen with impunity. By scapegoating the whistleblower to save a corrupt presidency, Republicans are sending a chilling message to other career public servants: serve your country at your own personal peril.
Under these circumstances, House Democrats have no choice but to maintain a tight leash on the process, to ensure that it doesn’t digress into a due process-less indictment of an innocent person who exercised legal rights for the benefit of the country. At this point, the focus must be on what the holder of the highest office did, by his own admission. Leave the whistleblower alone, please.
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"By scapegoating the whistleblower to save a corrupt presidency, Republicans are sending a chilling message to other career public servants: serve your country at your own personal peril."
https://t.co/JRaHqq0lgZ via @BulwarkOnline— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) November 5, 2019
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