Add CNN’s Chris Cuomo to the list of Democrats and media liberals perpetuating the myth that there’s a law somewhere granting anonymity to government whistleblowers.
No such law exists. Yet Cuomo, who claims to have completed law school, looked so uncomfortable on his show Thursday night as he tried to invent one.
“The reason you protect the whistleblower is because there is a law that protects whistleblowers from whatever it is that they reasonably have a fear of,” he said, making up a policy on the spot. “That’s why we protect their name.”
He admitted that he had personally “heard names, one specifically, about who this is supposed to be,” referring to the career government employee who has set off an impeachment inquiry over President Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine. But, Cuomo said, he wouldn’t divulge the name “because I respect the law.”
Cuomo may respect the law, but what about the intelligence of his viewers? It must have been obvious to them that he was trying to pull one over.
If there’s a law that forbids Cuomo from naming a “whistleblower,” shouldn’t CNN tell us which one it is? Perhaps he could even put up one of those sassy “fact check” graphics that explains it.
But no, they didn’t do that, because the statement is false. There is no such law.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York promulgated the same fiction earlier this week, writing to the intelligence community to say, in part, that “the whistleblower anonymity is protected by law.”
No, it’s not. The Whistleblower Protection Act and the follow-up law that enhanced it do nothing more than shield a federal employee from demotion, termination, or disciplinary action by superiors if he discloses information about waste and abuse or a violation of law within the government. There is no guarantee of anonymity.
The law does mandate that the inspector general of any agency where a complaint is filed not disclose the person’s identity, but that does not apply to anyone else, let alone journalists in the business of uncovering and reporting government secrets.
If the anonymity of the “whistleblower” is “protected by law,” there are a few people at the New York Times who should be in jail right now. Four of the paper’s journalists authored the first story to break details about who the career government employee is. The editor, Dean Baquet, subsequently defended the decision to report the information about him, which means he knows who it is too.
Why haven’t any of them been prosecuted for knowing the identity of this guy? Why aren’t their sources for the information being investigated and prosecuted? Easy! It is because there’s no law that says the public doesn’t get to know his name!
Literally, the only reason we don’t know his name is because it’s being hidden, in large part by the national media. (The Washington Examiner’s editorial position is that the public has a right to know this person’s identity.)
It looks like Chris Cuomo, just like many journalists in Washington, knows who the “whistleblower” is. If he doesn’t want to tell us the identity, that’s fine. But there’s no law preventing him from doing so.
