IN FAIRNESS TO DONALD AND HIS BOTS...:

"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." [...]

In fact, House Intelligence staffers did exactly what they were supposed to do in these situations: tell the whistle-blower to lawyer up, and submit a complaint to an inspector general. That's their long-established role in the whistle-blower ecosystem. "Like other whistle-blowers have done before and since under Republican- and Democratic-controlled committees, the whistle-blower contacted the committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the intelligence community," Intel Committee spokesperson Patrick Boland said in a statement. "Consistent with the committee's longstanding procedures, committee staff appropriately advised the whistle-blower to contact an inspector general and to seek legal counsel."

What also gets lost is that these interactions happen all the time. "The intelligence committees are approached by prospective whistle-blowers several times a month, probably. That is not unusual," says Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who focuses on national security issues. "Folks who are talking about coordination, as if this is some kind of inherently dodgy activity, are just revealing that they're not very familiar with intelligence or how this works."

If anything, Schiff and the whistle-blower went out of their way to follow appropriate channels. There's a constitutional argument, Sanchez says, that Congress could have accepted the report itself, rather than redirect it through the prescribed whistle-blower channels. Instead, Schiff's team appears to have followed the statute to the letter.

Other attacks on the whistle-blower's credibility and process are similarly misinformed. A recent news report erroneously claimed that the intelligence community until recently required that whistle-blowers have first-hand knowledge of events. This has already been debunked repeatedly, though that didn't stop Trump from amplifying the bogus information. The upshot: The form in question was updated in August 2019, but has allowed for second-hand knowledge of events since long before that.

As it should! Cries of "hearsay" have dogged the whistle-blower complaint since it first came out. Trump's defenders have sought to illegitimatize its contents because the author was not, for instance, on the controversial phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. It's yet another canard.

"That assertion is a shameless legal bluff," says Devine. "We'd eliminate 95 percent of law enforcement activity if agencies couldn't investigate on the basis of hearsay evidence. The point of an investigation is to see how decisively the initial leads can be confirmed and corroborated."

Fortunately for all involved, the White House itself has provided that corroboration, in the form of a call transcript that lines up neatly with the whistle-blower's assertions. The hearsay argument is moot, because the underlying facts have already been proven correct.

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