I know we’ve repeated this line, but let’s recap again. House Democrats decided to get the impeachment circus going based on an anonymous whistleblower complaint that alleged President Trump shook down the Ukrainian political leadership by withholding military aid unless they opened a corruption probe into Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden. The quid pro quo allegations spread like Ebola and the Democrats are now moving forward with their three-year-long project: impeaching President Trump for…winning the 2016 election. Did the person, who is reportedly a CIA agent, listen in on the July call where this mob-like shakedown occurred? No. He heard it from second and third-hand sources, hence why it’s loaded with errors. The media reporting drummed it up as Watergate 5.0. It was another nothing burger. There was no quid pro quo. There was nothing illegal.

Well, you’d think that actual witnesses to activities that deem unethical would be the benchmark for reports like this, especially ones that will be used to impeach a president, right? A first-hand account is one thing, but this complaint is certainly not that. And it seems like the intelligence community secretly removed the direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing requirement. Sean Davis of The Federalist has more:

At a minimum, the complaint contains numerous factual errors, which is unsurprising since it was not first-hand information. https://t.co/FZ4zPMF2bU — Brit Hume (@brithume) September 26, 2019

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting. The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.” The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed. The complaint alleges that President Donald Trump broke the law during a phone call with the Ukrainian president. In his complaint, which was dated August 12, 2019, the complainant acknowledged he was “not a direct witness” to the wrongdoing he claims Trump committed. A previous version of the whistleblower complaint document, which the ICIG and DNI until recently provided to potential whistleblowers, declared that any complaint must contain only first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing and that complaints that provide only hearsay, rumor, or gossip would be rejected.

If this isn't a giveaway about the operation that was being run, I don't know what is. https://t.co/cRTaMEwr5h — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 27, 2019

Alas, this doesn’t matter. House Democrats retook the House due to their promise to stop Trump, and yes—impeachment was their ultimate goal. There is a deep state, folks; it is not tin foil hat fodder anymore. We have two instances where our intelligence community is seen trying to boot an elected president. The FBI cited the Steele Dossier, compiled by ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele and funded by the Democrats, to find dirt on Trump, used it as credible evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant on Carter Page, Trump’s former foreign policy adviser for his campaign, and it was the focal point for the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into Russian collusion which became the special counsel probe. Oh, and the document wasn’t verified. Now, we have another shoddy whistleblower complaint from someone reportedly working at The Company that’s being weaponized into the impeachment ICBM to take out this White House. It’s not the job of the IC to snitch to Congress what the president says to foreign leaders. It’s not, even CNN contributor Phil Mudd, a former CIA and FBI official, made that point, saying he was about to blow a gasket over this story. It’s an overreach. Period. But now the Democrats have chosen a path. It will fail because the Republican Senate will never convict and it looks like it could morph into one of the biggest in-kind contribution Democrats and their media allies have made to the Trump re-election campaign so far this year. I would say ‘ever,’ but we all know they’re going to screw up again.



