,
23 tweets,
6 min read
Read on Twitter
This is extremely convincing if you don’t read past the caps, don’t understand the law, and don’t look at the rest of the form. “Required” for what? For the credibility determination the IG must make 14 days after receiving a complaint.
If firsthand information were “required” *to submit a complaint*, which would be moronic, it would be awfully weird that the disclosure forms and templates explicitly provide for whistleblowers to indicate they’re reporting conduct they know about secondhand.
This guidance on the whistleblower section of the DNI website is not new, and makes clear that complainants aren’t expected to have all the facts. They should report concerns and let the IG investigate. As occurred here. 
Here is the section of the IG’s letter to the DNI where he explicitly spells out that, though the complainant was not a direct witness to the Ukraine call, the ICIG’s own preliminary investigation confirmed the complaint’s claims about it. documentcloud.org/documents/6430…
So the standard wasn’t “changed”, it was satisfied. The ICIG obtained information beyond the whistleblower’s secondhand report before making a credibility determination. Also, again, *why does this matter* now that we can actually read the call summary?
For those who require Ocular Proof, here’s a screenshot from the same May 2018 version of the “Urgent Disclosure” form The Federalist is basing its claims on that explicitly permits submissions based on secondhand accounts or “other sources”. scribd.com/document/42776…
I’m spending time on this, even though it’s frankly irrelevant at this stage, because it’s maddening that millions have been exposed to inaccurate reporting that could’ve been cleared up if anyone involved had spent ten minutes talking to someone knowledgeable before running it.
And with Trump, Fox, & other prominent Republicans all drawing attention to it, The Federalist is effectively being economically rewarded for their failure to do elementary due diligence. Which, as an erstwhile journalist, I find pretty offensive.
Incidentally... does anyone who’s buying into this not find it odd that we’ve been talking about this for a week, and neither the DNI nor the DOJ letter said *anything* about this supposed “firsthand knowledge” requirement? When they were under heavy fire for not forwarding?
Aaanyway. For those of you who don’t feel like wading through a lengthy thread, I just recorded a lengthy podcast on all of this that should be up at Cato.org in the morning.
Last thing in this interminable thread: Suppose the IG had determined the whistleblower’s complaint was NOT credible, because it did not contain sufficient “firsthand information”. What happens then? Under the statute, the wb is then entitled to contact Congress directly.
So even if we humor the incorrect belief that the change in language between the two forms made some substantive difference, it would not have prevented the complaint from reaching Congress.
Why? Because whatever internal standard the ICIG establishes for assessing credibility, that is not part of the statutory definition of an “urgent concern”—which says nothing about firsthand, secondhand, or any other hand.
In a scenario where the ICIG says “I’m not transmitting this to DNI because I don’t find it credible”—whether because it’s “secondhand" or for some other reason—the law explicitly provides for the complaint to be taken directly to the intel committees (with guidance from DNI).
OK wow. Three *Republican* senators now writing ICIG to demand to know… why the old disclosure form *incorrectly* implied whistleblowers must have firsthand information. grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/…
Kudos to Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Mike Lee for getting this right rather than joining the partisan noise machine.
And it looks like the ICIG has finally weighed in directly on this nonsense.
"[B]y law the Complainant – or any individual in the Intelligence Community who wants to report information with respect to an urgent concern to the congressional intelligence committees – need not possess first-hand information in order to file a complaint…"
"The ICIG cannot add conditions to the filing of an urgent concern that do not exist in law.” dni.gov/files/ICIG/Doc…
"Since Inspector General Atkinson entered on duty as the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, the ICIG has not rejected the filing of an alleged urgent concern due to a whistleblower’s lack of first-hand knowledge of the allegations."
Forgive me an “I told you so” moment, but the ICIG statement exactly tracks everything I’ve been saying on this for the last few days. Apologies from any of the folks who’ve confidently denounced me as a lying hack will be cheerfully accepted. dni.gov/files/ICIG/Doc…
Again, I did actually explain all of this to one of their writers *on Friday evening*—before the story even ran, as far as I know. Don’t expect them to take a mean ol’ Cato scholar’s word, but they might have held it to check whether I was right.
Induct this man into the NFL Hall of Fame, because that is some truly heroic goalpost shifting.
