Background to the story of the CIA whistleblower who jump-started the impeachment of President Trump.
Patrick Eddington, a former CIA imagery analyst turned Cato Institute pundit, writes about the ill-named Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. He says it actually harms people inside the CIA and other intelligence agencies who want to expose, waste fraud, or abuses of power.
Eddington knows because he was a whistleblower. In October 1996, Eddington and his wife, also a CIA analyst, spoke to a New York Times reporter. They accused their former employer of covering up evidence of potential chemical agent exposure among veterans of the Desert Storm operations in Kuwait in 1991.
The agency was not happy, Eddington recalls in a piece for the Just Security blog.
“For the first time in its history, the CIA called a press conference, and the purpose was to rebut our allegations,” he writes. Even worse, he says, was the response of Congress and the Clinton administration
Two years after we went public, Congress passed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (PL 105-272). The law was not a truly serious attempt to stop the kind of retaliation I and others had faced. It forced Intelligence Community whistleblowers to go through their department or agency Inspector General before coming to Congress. That was a prescription for sabotaging any attempts to report waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement or criminal conduct.
Case in point: the CIA whistleblower who first complained about Trump’s pressure on Ukraine.
Until recently, Congress was completely uninterested, he says.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) has not exactly been terribly interested in whistleblower protection issues until the two “Ukrainegate” IC whistleblowers stepped forward.
As a result, Schiff and his Democratic colleagues have, at least in this author’s view, created the impression that these whistleblowers are simply a quick means to a short-term end: the removal of Donald Trump from the Oval Office. For anyone truly concerned about deterring or detecting future abuses of executive power at any level — and there will be such abuses — securing ironclad protections for national security whistleblowers will always take precedence over the partisan political drama of the moment.
