OPINION — Up to now, a politically divided Congress has been unsuccessful in slowing down President Trump’s accumulation of power, which thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, has expanded his ability to distribute government funds and favors without firm accountability.
It’s time to take seriously the implications of what ABC’s Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl said last Friday on PBS’ Washington Week about what Trump has implied in public and said explicitly in private that he does not accept any form of oversight.
According to Karl, Trump has said “he doesn’t need somebody looking over [his shoulder]…He detests the entire idea of internal watchdogs. Two of the dirty words or phrases he’s come up with are ‘whistleblower,’ and ‘inspector general.’ He does that. [emphasis added] He will be the ethics watchdog. He doesn’t want somebody else doing that.”
Trump has proved Karl’s words to be true based on the past two weeks.
When he signed the $2 trillion, Coronavirus Relief Act, on March 27, Trump said he would ignore the legislative provision requiring him to consult with Congress on staffing of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which was to oversee the $2 trillion spending bill. Eleven days later, he forced the removal of Glenn Fine, the commission chairman chosen by a panel of government inspectors general as required by the law.
Another section of the Coronavirus Relief Act established a temporary Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery with power to audit loans and investments made by Treasury and other federal agencies. The Act also required reporting to Congress if any federal agency did not cooperate.
In that same signing statement, Trump indicated he would decide what information the special inspector general would share with Congress. Ironically, he wrote he based this “presidential supervision” of any report sent Congress on the Constitutional clause requiring that the president must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
In a move that made almost certain that he would not have to worry about the proposed special inspector general, Trump nominated a person from his own White House staff. His nominee, Brian Miller, now is a special assistant to the president and senior associate counsel in the White House Counsel's office, but in the past, Miller served for almost a decade as inspector general for the General Services Administration.
Perhaps Trump’s most serious act illustrating his contempt of whistleblowers, oversight and inspectors general took place late on Friday evening, April 3, when he removed Michael Atkinson as Intelligence Community Inspector General. Atkinson played a key role in providing Congress with details of the Ukraine whistleblower’s complaint that led to Trump being impeached by the House.
Trump, who has moved against others who testified against his interests, attempted to justify removing Atkinson by claiming in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, “It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General. That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General.”
There is precedent. When President Obama fired Inspector General Gerald Walpin in 2009, Obama also used the not having “the fullest confidence” in him argument, which was subsequently upheld in federal court.
That was hardly the end of it. Asked about Atkinson’s termination at his daily Covid-19 press briefing the next day, April 4, Trump said, “I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible.”
Trump then began to rewrite history: “He [Atkinson] took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report — it was fake. It was totally wrong. It was about my conversation with the President of Ukraine. He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump fan — that, I can tell you.”
In fact, documents and congressional testimony during the impeachment hearing confirmed the whistleblower’s description of the conversation was correct as were Atkinson’s concerns. The facts were just not enough to convince Republicans that Trump should be impeached.
Trump is not the only one to join in rewriting history.
Attorney General William Barr, appearing on Fox News April 9, said Trump “did the right thing” in firing Atkinson, claiming the Intelligence Committee IG had notified Congress of the whistleblower’s complaint “without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem.”
In fact, Atkinson, before notifying Congress, had confirmed the whistleblower’s allegations with others at the White House, including a second whistleblower. Atkinson also had taken the whistleblower’s account to the National Security Council’s attorney and even had sent the White House Counsel’s office “a notice of a document access request and a document hold,” on records related to Trump’s July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukraine’s president.
In addition, Atkinson had told his boss, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, prior to his reporting the matter, as the law required, to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Barr claimed also that Atkinson’s job was only to investigate “wrongdoing by intelligence people,” implying that allegations affecting intelligence community activities [investigating possible Russian interference in a U.S. election], which alleged involvement of American officials such as the president and White House employees, should be ignored.
In that April 4 press conference, Trump also lashed out at the Ukraine phone call whistleblower. Trump told the reporters present, “You know who the whistleblower is, and so do you and so does everybody in this room, and so do I. Everybody knows.”
In fact, some media have reported a name, Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted that name, and President Trump, himself, has re-tweeted an item with the same name. Most mainstream media have not.
The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 requires the inspector general and his staff to not “disclose the identity of the [whistleblower] employee without the consent of the employee,” but there is no criminal penalty in that law if others do it. Most media outlets withholding the name are doing so to protect the whistleblower from harm, because there have been death threats to the person whose name has been published.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower is still working in government. That person is hopefully protected from being fired by a 1980s federal law that makes it a felony to “retaliate, [or] take any action harmful to any person, including interference with the lawful employment or livelihood of any person, for providing to a law enforcement officer any truthful information relating to the commission or possible commission of any Federal offense….”
Trump’s April 4, verbal assault on the whistleblower did not stop, but concluded with the President claiming, “He’s a fake whistleblower. And, frankly, somebody ought to sue his ass off.”
Probably the only person with possible legal standing to sue is the whistleblower, and the possible target would be Trump, himself.
Atkinson’s last semiannual report as Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, released October 31, 2019, made protection of whistleblowers a key issue.
Already under fire himself, Atkinson reported, “The past few months have been a searing time for whistleblowers’ rights and protections…Time will tell whether whistleblowers’ rights and protections will emerge from this period with the same legal, ethical, and moral strength they had previously.”
He ended by writing, “It is my hope that recent events will not have a chilling effect on the willingness of individuals within the Intelligence Community to continue to shed light on suspected fraud, waste, abuse, or malfeasance in an authorized manner.”
His report noted ICIG Hotline contacts, the confidential means by which Intelligence Community employees, contractors, and the public report suspected fraud, waste, and abuse, had sharply increased over the three years of the Trump administration.
In fiscal year 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, the number of ICIG Hotline contacts was 251. It grew in fiscal 2017, the first year under Trump, to 369, and again in fiscal 2018 to 563. In this last report for fiscal year 2019, that ended September 30, 2019, the number of contacts had grown to 663.
Rather than being chilled, the number of whistleblowers appears to have heated up during the Trump administration. The next semi-annual ICIG report is due in May. Let’s see whether this trend continued with Atkinson no longer there.
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