The whistleblower who recently filed a complaint against President Donald Trump will soon testify before the House Intelligence Committee, the panel’s chairman Adam Schiff confirmed on Sunday.
The testimony, however, will protect his identity, which remains unknown. What The Wall Street Journal managed to confirm last week is that he is an employee at the Central Intelligence Agency. Schiff added that the House is now waiting for the man’s attorneys to receive security clearances, which the testimony depends on.
“…as (acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph) Maguire promised during the hearing, that whistleblower will be allowed to come in and come in without…a minder from the Justice Department or from the White House to tell the whistleblower what they can and cannot say. We will get the unfiltered testimony of that whistleblower,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week.”
He added that all necessary precautions are being taken to ensure that the whistleblower’s identity is protected because, as he said, serious security concerns exist due to President Trump’s comments that whistleblowers need to be treated as traitors and spies.
The whistleblower has found himself in the center of a scandal involving Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. The complaint, which prompted an impeachment inquiry in Washington, claims that Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
An attorney for the whistleblower, Mark Zaid, said in a tweet Sunday that discussions with House and Senate officials, concerning the testimony, are underway.
According to CNN, Zaid said that “protecting whistleblower’s identity is paramount” and that “discussions continue to occur to coordinate & finalize logistics but no date/time has yet been set.”
On Wednesday, Schiff made the clearance request in a letter to Maguire after the whistleblower’s lawyers agreed to meet with lawmakers. In the interview with ABC News, the chairman noted that he hoped “the acting director doesn’t delay that clearance process.”
Preserving the whistleblower’s identity will pose a hurdle, the Journal writes, as the number of people who hear him testify and read full transcripts needs to be limited and he has to be “sneaked into the building.”
Be the first to comment