Dan Abrams, chief legal analyst for ABC News, issued a stark examination of President Trump’s decision to fire the inspector general who handled the Ukrainian whistleblower complaint.
President Trump informed lawmakers late last week that he was firing Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson citing a lack of confidence in Atkinson.
“I can’t emphasize enough how disturbing what I’m going to be describing to you is, and how unusual and out of the ordinary it is,” Abrams said Monday on his SiriusXM show, according to Mediaite. “What I’m about to tell you about the firing of the intelligence community inspector general is so egregious and so off the grid, and the president hoped that the country would be focusing on the coronavirus so he could do this on a Friday night.”
He added, “Our supposedly pro-law enforcement president again demonstrating how anti-law enforcement he actually is. This guy, a longtime federal prosecutor, appointed to this position to be nonpartisan, that’s not what the president wants! He doesn’t want nonpartisan!”
At a White House briefing over the weekend, Trump excoriated Atkinson’s decision to notify Congress of a whistleblower complaint, allegedly made by career CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, after he deemed the complaint “urgent” and “credible.”
“He took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report — it was fake. It was totally wrong,” Trump said Saturday of the complaint about his July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress, with an emergency.”
The complaint started a chain of events that resulted in the Democrat-led House to impeach Trump, but the Republican-controlled Senate later acquitted him of the charges.
The president’s firing of Atkinson came months after he removed officials who testified in the impeachment process, including Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union at the time, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who worked on the National Security Council.
Abrams also said that he hopes “even the most fervent Trump supporters out there are troubled by this” and accused the president of “engaging in these petty, vindictive punishments for people who don’t agree with him.”
