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I question the public value of reporting this, but frankly, if the Times could figure this out, so could White House staff, which is almost certainly enough to ID the person. The odds Trump doesn’t already know who this is are, unfortunately, somewhere between slim and nil.
Which means it’s down to Gina Haspel to reject the inevitable push for illegal retaliation.
I’ll confess, on initially reading the whistleblower complaint I did a little mental Red Team exercise: If I were the White House, how would I attack this complaint to deanonymize the whistleblower? And my impression was that it would probably be very, very easy.
The complaint implies pretty strongly the whistleblower’s portfolio includes Ukraine; they’re in direct personal contact with White House officials (he can report they were “disturbed”) and were in the distribution chain for a readout of the call. They were apparently present...
…at interagency meetings on July 23 & 26 with OMB officials, because this is one of the few points where they don’t explicitly characterize it as information related to them by another party. That’s not going to be a huge Venn diagram.
Only because this White House is extraordinarily incompetent do I think there’s even a slender possibility they have’t already figured out the whistleblower’s identity. But it’s still pretty slender.
I think people should consider the possibility—and I’d say likelihood—that the Times’ sources for this story are *White House officials* who had already figured it out. There’s almost no chance it came from the ICIG’s office, and the pool of others who’d know is small.
*Three sources* “familiar” with the whistleblower's identity confirmed facts about him to the Times. It’s borderline inconceivable the ICIG would burn their own person that way. But then who outside that office, other than the whistleblower & his attorneys, would be “familiar”?
One obvious possibility is: the White House officials from whom the whistleblower got his information about Trump’s extortion efforts, and quickly put 2+2 together. Not the only possibility, but as plausible as any alternative I can think of.
"The C.I.A. officer did not work on the communications team that handles calls with foreign leaders, according to the people familiar with his identity.” This line makes me lean even more strongly toward thinking White House/NSC sources.
“Little else is known” about the whistleblower, beyond that he’s returned to CIA, but they know specifically what team he worked on while seconded to the White House? That basically screams White House or NSC sources.
The information specifically ascribed to the “people familiar” is exactly the information sources within the WH/NSC would have. If that’s true, though, “White House officials seek to out whistleblower” would be the only part of this that’s genuinely newsworthy.
I guess it’s conceivable that White House officials know who it is, but Trump himself doesn’t yet, because nobody wants to cop to being the “spy” who shared their concerns with the person who ultimately filed the complaint.
The complaint goes out of its way at several points to emphasize that the WH officials who shared info were themselves disturbed by the apparent abuse of power. So his own sources are surely targets of Trump’s wrath.
And, of course, HIS sources don’t have any of the same legal protections against retaliation. So they might well be more willing to talk to the Times than to the president.
