Sen. Rand Paul has called for the identity of the whistleblower at the center of an anonymous complaint against President Trump to be revealed.
Speaking at an event in his state of Kentucky, the Republican senator said that the man who accused Trump of wrongdoing in his dealings with Ukraine should be known.
“Ultimately, if someone’s going to accuse you of something that’s going to bring down a presidency, I think we deserve to know who that person is,” Paul said. “Our criminal justice system is usually predicated upon if I accuse you of something, I’ve got to show up in court and accuse you of it.”
The identity of whistleblowers is protected by U.S. statutes, but Paul said that the circumstances of this particular complaint are different, given the gravity of the accusation and the fact that it led Democrats to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into the president.
“So, I think there are reasons to have whistleblower statutes, and have anonymity,” Paul said. “If you’re accusing somebody of something with the ramifications of impeachment, I think really the person ought to come forward.”
Trump has also said he wants to know who the whistleblower is. He raised eyebrows when he told a group of officials that the person who provided the whistleblower information is “close to a spy.”
“You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now,” Trump said.
Conspiracy theorists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl are also offering a $50,000 “bounty” for information about the whistleblower.
The whistleblower’s lead attorney, Andrew Bakaj, pushed back on calls for his client’s identity to be revealed, warning that doing so could put the intelligence officer in danger. He said last week that recent developments “have heightened our concerns that our client’s identity will be disclosed publicly and that, as a result, our client will be put in harm’s way.”
The whistleblower, reportedly a CIA agent, alleged in the complaint that President Trump exerted wrongful pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate political rival Joe Biden. A July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky is a central part of the complaint. The White House released a rough transcript of that phone call the day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry. The complaint itself was subsequently released last week.
Paul, a frequent ally of the president, said at the same event that he didn’t think that transcripts of Trump’s calls to foreign leaders should be made public.
“Should we be listening to all of the president’s phone calls? And should we then be making them public because we disagree with something he said in the phone call?” Paul said.
