Whistleblower Defended By Acting Intel Chief
During his testimony, Maguire repeatedly stood by the whistleblower.
I think the whistleblower did the right thing, Maguire told the committee, adding that the statute surrounding whistleblowers was followed in this case.
He said the U.S. must protect those who demonstrate courage to report alleged wrongdoing.
WATCH: White House memo confirms Trump pushed for info on Biden
While expressing his support, Maguire said he believed the complaint was credible and important.
Trump, meanwhile, has described the whistleblower as a political hack job.
Maguire said he did not know the whistleblowers identity and that Trump never asked him to find out the whistleblowers identity.
Maguire believes the phone call between Trump and the foreign leader is a conversation typically subject to executive privilege, which is why, he says, he didnt release it earlier.
He added that he believes both the whistleblower and the inspector general who handled the case acted in good faith. Also, the whistleblower could testify fully and freely if desired.
I believe that the situation we have and why were here this morning is because this case is unique and unprecedented, Maguire said.
Trump Retweeted The Name Of The Alleged Whistleblower
Twitter says the president’s retweet is not a violation of its rules.
On Friday, a few minutes before midnight in Washington, DC, President Donald Trump retweeted a message to his 68 million followers that named the alleged whistleblower. It was an escalation from the president, who has until this week refrained from publicly disclosing the name of a CIA officer that has been floated by conservative news outlets and pro-Trump commentators as the person who filed the whistleblower report.
On Saturday morning, some users reported they could no longer see the retweet on Trump’s Twitter timeline and believed that he may have undone the action. Others could still see the retweet. A Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that Trump never deleted or undid the retweet and that the issue was caused by an unspecified system outage that led certain tweets to be visible to some accounts but not others.
The White House did not return a request for comment.
The retweet comes after several months of increasing pressure from the president and his supporters to take action against the whistleblower who raised concerns about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A complaint, filed by the anonymous whistleblower in August, touched off the investigation and eventual impeachment process against Trump.
Google Whistleblower Says Google News Altered Its Algorithm Against President Trump
If you’re tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties
Google changed its news search algorithms in order to target Donald Trump, according to Zach Vorhies, a Google whistleblower and author of a new book titled Google Leaks.
The new book Google Leaks: A Whistleblowers Exposé of Big Tech Suppression investigates how Big Tech suppresses views to go against the mainstream narrative. During his career as a software developer, he worked for both YouTube and Google, but resigned after learning of the suppression of conservative voices.
Using Googles internal search engine, Vorhies discovered 950 pages of these plans and made them public on Project Veritas with James OKeefe.
In the book, Vorhies gives a first-hand account of these events and helps you imagine what America may become, from the enclaves of Silicon Valley since Trumps 2016 win through the November 3 election in 2020.
To learn more about this, and the other programs that Google has been running behind the scenes, EpochTV sat down for an interview with Vorhies.
Zach Vorhies testimony illustrates the nature of Big Tech and their attempt to turn our reality into one that mirrors their perspective of the world. He had been a senior programmer at Google for many years and knew about their prejudices, but he saw in dread how Donald Trumps victory in 2016 threatened to lead them into conflict.
His study, according to Vorhies, changed conspiracy theories into conspiracy facts.
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President Trump And The White House
On September 27, Trump characterized the person who provided the whistleblower with information on the call as “close to a spy”, adding: “you know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle them a little differently than we do now.” On September 29, Trump requested to meet the whistleblower, saying that he and the American people “deserved” to meet them. He later said the White House was trying to learn the identity of the whistleblower. He also demanded that Adam Schiff be arrested and questioned “at the highest level” for fraud and treason. A letter from the whistleblower’s lawyers, addressed to the director of national intelligence, said that the whistleblower was afraid for their safety. On November 7 the whistleblower’s lawyer sent a letter to the White House warning Trump to “cease and desist” calling for the public disclosure of the whistleblower’s identity and “engaging in rhetoric and activity that places and their family in physical danger”. The lawyer said the president would be legally and morally liable if anyone were to be “physically harmed as a result of his, or his surrogates’, behavior”.
Impeachment: Trump’s Son Tweets Name Of Alleged Whistleblower
Washington – President Donald Trump’s son published on Wednesday the name of the alleged anonymous whistleblower whose complaint fired the impeachment inquiry against Trump, breaking strict conventions for protecting officials who reveal wrongdoing in government.
Amid calls by the president himself to expose the whistleblower, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the name of a CIA analyst which has circulated online for weeks, and linked to a Breitbart news article implying the person was pro-Democrat and anti-Trump.
AFP could not independently verify the whistleblower’s identity and is not publishing the name.
But the revelation by the president’s son comes as the White House seeks to discredit the mounting impeachment effort in Congress against Trump, painting it as driven by politics.
“There is no Whistleblower. There is someone with an agenda against Donald Trump,” the president tweeted on Monday.
Standing beside Trump at a political rally in Kentucky Monday, Republican Senator Rand Paul threatened to expose the person and demanded they testify in Congress.
“We also now know the name of the whistleblower… I say tonight to the media, do your job and print his name.”
Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s lawyer, would not confirm or deny the reported name, but said Trump Jr. and others were endangering the person as well as the system built to protect whistleblowers.
“Identifying any name for the whistleblower will simply place that individual and their family at risk,” he told AFP.
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- Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who reviewed the initial complaint, says he’s not been asked by the White House to ascertain and turn over the whistleblowers identity.
- The whistleblower has some indication of an arguable political bias, according to a memo released the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel but also noted that the complaint was credible.
- A tentative agreement has been put in place for the whistleblower to meet with lawmakers behind closed doors though that depends on his lawyer getting security clearance, according to CNN.
- Trump said that the transcript of that call shows how wrong the whistleblower actually was about what had transpired.
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Ukraine And The Bidens
In 2014, the Obama administration was trying to provide diplomatic support to the post-2014 Ukrainian revolutionYatsenyuk government in Ukraine, and then-vice president Joe Biden was “at the forefront” of those efforts. Biden’s son Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, on April 18, 2014. Hunter, then an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, was hired to help Burisma with corporate governancebest practices, and a consulting firm in which Hunter is a partner was also retained by Burisma. In a December 2015 interview, Joe Biden said he had never discussed Hunter’s work at Burisma. Joe Biden traveled to Ukrainian capital Kyiv on April 21, 2014, and urged the Ukrainian government “to reduce its dependence on Russia for supplies of natural gas“. He discussed how the United States could help provide technical expertise for expanding domestic production of natural gas.
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What Does Trump Have To Say
The U.S. president put his thoughts on Twitter on Thursday morning shortly before Maguires testimony began.
He called the situation an attempt by Democrats to destroy the Republican party in a since-deleted tweet.
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Later, he said he watched a little bit of Maguires testimony on Air Force One and accused the Democrats of making up stories.
Its Adam Schiff and his crew making up stories, Trump said, referring to the chairman of the House intelligence committee.
Theyre going to lose the election, they know it, thats why theyre doing.
He went on to tell reporters: What these guys are doing, Democrats are doing to this country is a disgrace, and it shouldnt be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it.
On Twitter, he continued to rail against Schiff, saying he has zero credibility and is creating fantasy to hurt the Republican party.
Liddle Adam Schiff, who has worked unsuccessfully for 3 years to hurt the Republican Party and President, has just said that the Whistleblower, even though he or she only had second hand information, is credible. How can that be with zero info and a known bias. Democrat Scam!
Donald J. Trump
With files from the Associated Press
Communications With Ukrainian Officials
| White House memorandum of a telephone conversation between U.S. President Trump and Ukraine President Zelensky |
On September 20, 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trump had in a July 25 phone conversation repeatedly pressed Ukrainian president Zelensky to investigate matters relating to Hunter Biden.The New York Times reported that Trump told Zelensky to speak to Giuliani, and according to The Wall Street Journal, he urged Zelensky “about eight times” to work with Giuliani and investigate Biden’s son. On September 22, Trump acknowledged he had discussed Joe Biden during the call with Zelensky, and that he had said: “We don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.” As of October 2019, there has been no evidence produced of any of the alleged wrongdoing by the Bidens.
The Wall Street Journal reported on September 30 that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also listened in on the call. Two days later, The Washington Post reported that Vice President Mike Pence’s national security advisor Keith Kellogg had listened in on the call as well, and that “Pence should have had access to the transcript within hours.” Others on the line included Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia Robert Blair, an aide to Mick Mulvaney and Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine expert for the NSC.
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Atkinson: Trump Fired Me Because I Handled Whistleblower Complaint Properly
As an Inspector General, I was legally obligated to ensure that whistleblowers had an effective and authorized means to disclose urgent matter.
Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general. | J. Scott Applewhite, File/AP Photo
04/05/2020 10:09 PM EDT
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Link Copied
The intelligence community watchdog removed abruptly late Friday by President Donald Trump says he believes Trump ousted him because of his evenhanded handling of a whistleblower complaint that ultimately led to the president’s impeachment.
“It is hard not to think that the Presidents loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General,” Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general said in a statement Sunday, “and from my commitment to continue to do so.”
Atkinson was the federal official who revealed to Congress in September the existence of a whistleblower complaint against Trump, which indicated that the president improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. When Atkinson sought to share that complaint with Congress under a federal whistleblower law, the White House and Justice Department intervened and blocked the transmission of the complaint for days.
I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible, Trump said of Atkinson on Saturday at a press conference, adding, He took this terrible, inaccurate whistleblower report and he brought it to Congress.”
Key Takeaways From The Whistleblower’s Complaint Against Trump
A whistleblowers complaint against President Trump over his repeated calls for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son was made public on Thursday morning.
In it, the unnamed whistleblower cited conversations and details provided by more than half a dozen U.S. officials, alleging that Trump is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. During a hearing Thursday morning, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire said that he didnt believe the whistleblower was a political hack, stating that he operated in good faith.
I think the whistleblower did the right thing, I think he followed the law every step of the way, said Maguire.
Here are five key points from the complaint.
The White House worked to restrict a full transcript of the call
The complaint alleges that in the days following the call, the White House worked to try and lock down all records of the call, particularly the official word-for-word transcript that was produced. On Wednesday, the White House released what they called a transcript but was in reality a rough memo that contained the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty Officers and policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place.
Barr stars in the complaint
Trump personally ordered aid to be withheld from Ukraine
The whistleblowers complaint states:
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Opinionnew Senate Report Proved Trump Was Wrong And Mueller Was Right Here’s Why
By all credible accounts, the president was the beneficiary of Russian attempts to boost his chances during the 2016 campaign. Most notably, the recent report by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee found that the Russian government “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” Furthermore, the report found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered at least some of the attacks that sought to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Obviously, it’s in Trump’s best interests to try to suppress this truth and to distort the reality that the Russians continue their efforts to aide his re-election. And those are the kinds of truths that Murphy says he was trying to report in his nixed draft intelligence assessments.
Similarly, Trump is compelled to distance himself from the reality that the hate-based white supremacy movement, so closely aligned with some of his worst rhetoric, poses a growing threat to our domestic security. FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly advised that the threat of racist violence is on the same priority level as international terrorism. But the young shooter in the tragic Walmart mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, adopted the language of Trump in his manifesto railing against an “invasion” from Mexico.
