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This why one shouldn’t dabble in intelligence law based on random stuff one saw going around on social media. Nothing in the relevant statute (ICWPA) or directives (PPD-19, ICD-120) has ever required that protected whistleblower disclosures contain “firsthand” information.
Apparently one IG disclosure notice someone turned up explains that IG’s standard for assessing whether complaints are sufficiently “credible” to transmit to the DNI, noting that complaints won’t be forwarded based only on secondhand information.
But we already know from the IG’s letters to Maguire and Schiff that he did, indeed, conduct a preliminary investigation to assess credibility, and independently corroborated key elements of the complaint. usnews.com/news/national-…
So there’s no reason to think the ICIG changed his standard for assessing whether a complaint is sufficiently credible to transmit to DNI. The Federalist folks are confusing this with a requirement for making a report in the first place.
That would be pretty silly, and deter valuable reporting. It would also lack any basis in the relevant statutes or directives. What the form they’re citing does say “this won’t go up the chain without something more,” which the IG did indeed get in this case.
I explained all this to @MZHemingway last night, incidentally, when she made the same error, but I infer the correction wasn’t deemed credible enough to transmit up the chain of command.
Needless to say, all this is sort of moot now that the White House itself has provided firsthand confirmation of the key points in the complaint. But even treating this as a strictly procedural complaint, it’s based on a misunderstanding.
If the language in the current form was added to clarify that whistleblowers could still submit an initial complaint based on indirect knowledge of an abuse, well... good. That’s consistent with the law. Investigating is the IG’s job, not the whistleblower’s.
If anything’s sketchy here, honestly, it’s not the current form, but the old one: Precisely because it could easily be misread as implying you aren’t entitled to protection if you disclose abuses learned about indirectly. Which would be a serious misrepresentation of the law.
Relieved to see previous disclosure forms also made it explicit that whistleblowers may file protected disclosures based on indirect knowledge of misconduct or abuse.
As a final aside: Discouraging whistleblowers with indirect knowledge—which, again, has no legal basis—would be particularly damaging in the IC given how profoundly siloed it is. You kind of need secondhand whistleblowing there.
What I mean is: Distinguishing between an abuse and an innocent anomaly often requires multiple data points. Is that a one-off error or part of a pattern that suggests intentional misconduct? But you have to be awfully high up to have firsthand visibilty on that.
Hell, that’s what most of intelligence itself is. Not just being handed one big smoking gun piece of evidence, but correlating data and reports from a lot of different sources to find patterns that suggest a problem afoot.
