The career government employee — excuse me, I mean “patriotic public servant” — who kicked off the impeachment proceedings is so confident in the substance of his complaint that he’s refusing to answer questions about it in public.
Lawyers for the so-called whistleblower said Sunday that he’s willing to testify in front of Congress but only in written form, meaning members could submit questions to his legal team and that his answers would come back in written form.
The New York Times generously described this evasion as an attempt to “deter Republican attacks and show that the whistle-blower, a C.I.A. officer, is above the political rancor unleashed by House Democrats’ inquiry.”
That’s not what it is. It’s an attempt at avoiding scrutiny.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo and other liberals in the national media have been saying that there’s no need to know anything more about the whistleblower because other testimony has already corroborated his account. The White House has released the transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, offering further confirmation of the original complaint.
But one niggling fact is that not everyone is in agreement on whether Trump did anything wrong. Those who think he did were given the opportunity by Congress to say why and each time, the reasoning boiled down to a disagreement over policy and politics.
In his testimony last week, National Security Council official Alexander Vindman said he was uneasy with Trump’s remarks on the phone call as they related to Joe Biden because he thought they “would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.” In other words, Vindman personally disagreed with Trump and thought the call would jeopardize yet more and more financial aid to Ukraine. Well, I’m glad he blew the lid off that one.
As the issue relates specifically to the whistleblower, though, the public deserves to know a lot more directly from him. To what extent was there a coordinated effort to bring his complaint forward? With whom did he coordinate?
The inspector general’s report on the complaint said that the whistleblower demonstrated a political bias in favor of one of Trump’s political rivals and that he has a direct personal connection with one of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. What’s the nature of that connection, and who is the candidate?
An impeachment based on policy disagreements from a handful of bureaucrats is weak. It’s not going to get any stronger if the public doesn’t get to hear directly from the bureaucrat who started it all.
