Thursday on Capitol Hill, House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the Justice Department is involved in stopping Congress from hearing a whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump allegedly making a promise to a foreign leader.

Schiff said, “We know that the Department of Justice has been involved in the decision to withhold that information from Congress. We do not know because we cannot get an answer to the question about whether the White House is also involved in preventing this information from coming to Congress. We do not have the complaint. We do not though whether the press reports are accurate or inaccurate about the contents of that complaint. But what I do know is this, if in a matter within the jurisdiction of the Director of National Intelligence an employee or contractor who follows the law and makes a complaint and it is possible for the subject of that complaint to essentially quash the complaint or keep it from Congress, then this system is badly broken.”

He added, “Now, I don’t think this is a problem of the law. I think that the law is written very clearly. I think the law is just fine. The problem lies elsewhere. And we’re determined to do everything that we can to determine what this urgent concern is, to make sure that the national security is protected and to make sure that this whistleblower is protected. Because the impact of this opinion which the Department of Justice has been unwilling to share with us, the impact of this opinion is that if the Department of Justice decides that an employee of the intelligence community comes forward, follows the law, the process, is nonetheless outside the process, they are not protected.”

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