President Donald Trump. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images White House The intelligence watchdog at the center of Ukraine firestorm President Trump appointed Michael Atkinson, a widely respected career DOJ official, to keep the intelligence community accountable. Now, he’s unexpectedly in the middle of a presidential scandal.

The intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, is known to his peers and colleagues as a highly cautious “straight shooter” who tends to keep his head down.

So when he sounded the alarm to Congress earlier this month about an “urgent” complaint he’d received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications, those who’ve worked with him were surprised — and took it seriously.


“As soon as I saw that it was Atkinson, I thought, ‘Oh shit, this is real,’” said one of Atkinson’s former Justice Department colleagues. “He’s not a political guy. He’s a classic career prosecutor who’s only going to call balls and strikes.”

It’s that commitment to the letter of the law, according to people who know him, that has landed the typically cautious lawyer at the center of a political firestorm.

Atkinson, formally the Intelligence Community Inspector General, was nominated by Trump in November 2017 after serving 16 years at the Justice Department. The ICIG conducts investigations and reviews of activities within the purview of the Director of National Intelligence, and also handles whistleblower complaints from within the intelligence community.

With two red-alarm letters to the congressional intelligence committees — flagging the whistleblower’s complaint and outlining why it “relates to one of the most significant and important” of the DNI’s responsibilities — Atkinson has gone from a virtually unknown career official to sitting on potentially explosive information that Democrats hope will fuel their incipient impeachment fight. He’s also irked Republicans who have accused both him and the whistleblower of being partisan actors.

There’s no evidence Atkinson is a political partisan in either direction — a search of campaign finance records, for instance, finds no evidence that he’s ever donated to a candidate.

And those who know Atkinson say he wouldn’t have gone this far if he didn’t believe his actions were consistent with the law. “Michael is a careful, temperate, and thoughtful lawyer,” said David Laufman, who worked with Atkinson in the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “He would not have gone down this road unless he believed he was on sound legal footing.”

Others who worked with Atkinson at the Justice Department — where he served as a prosecutor and in top positions in the Fraud and Public Corruption Section at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. from 2002-2016 — described him as “incredibly rule-oriented,” “very diligent,” “meticulously thorough” and “highly ethical.”

“He’s not somebody who’s ever looking for the limelight,” said Steve Bunnell, who worked with Atkinson while serving as the chief of the criminal division in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. “I’d put him into the Bob Mueller school of prosecutors — very traditional, with a no-stone-unturned approach. I’d assume he’s doing that here.”

The dispute centers on a mysterious whistleblower complaint that multiple reports have said concerns the president’s communications with a foreign leader — namely, the president of Ukraine.

Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire has refused to share the substance of the whistleblower’s complaint with Congress, as is normally required by law after the IG determines that the complaint is of “urgent concern.”

The ODNI’s general counsel, Jason Klitenic, told Congress that after consulting with the Justice Department, the ODNI had concluded that “no statute requires disclosure of the complaint to the intelligence committees.”

At a closed-door briefing with the House Intelligence Committee last week, Atkinson stonewalled Democrats’ attempts to get answers — but only, he said, because his hands were tied by the Justice Department’s opinion, which was that the complaint “did not concern allegations of conduct by a member of the intelligence community” or an intelligence activity under ODNI’s supervision and is therefore outside the ODNI’s purview.

“I understand that I am bound by the determination reached as a result of the acting DNI’s consultations with DOJ,” Atkinson wrote to lawmakers on Sept. 17. And he noted that he will continue to abide by that determination, even though he disagrees with it.

The whistleblower complaint that has roiled Washington for nearly two weeks reportedly centers around a conversation Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymor Zelensky, in which he allegedly pressured him to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden.

Atkinson deemed the complaint to be credible and “urgent,” but has not received authorization to share even “the general subject matter” of the complaint with lawmakers, he told them in the Sept. 17 letter.

“As it now stands, my unresolved differences with the Acting DNI are affecting the execution of two of my most important duties and responsibilities as Inspector General of the Intelligence Community” to both whistleblowers and to Congress, he wrote.

The impasse has highlighted the fact that whistleblower protection laws never envisioned a scenario in which the director of national intelligence would withhold a complaint from lawmakers — especially one the inspector general had deemed “urgent.”

Atkinson was nominated by Trump to serve as the intelligence community’s inspector general after a long legal career, in private practice and in senior positions at the Justice Department. And he was confirmed by the Senate with the understanding that the intelligence committees wanted someone who could restore some order to the IG’s office and reinvigorate the whistleblower program, which had effectively been gutted by his predecessor.

“When Atkinson took over, the chairman and I specifically charged him with fixing an office that had been through years of churn and increasing dysfunction,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO in a statement. “He's really worked hard to correct a lot of those problems over the last year or so. I've been extremely impressed by his work, so much so that I wrote a letter to [former DNI] Dan Coats this summer praising the ICIG’s work.” (A spokesperson for Richard Burr, the panel’s Republican chairman, declined to comment.)

A Democratic House Intelligence Committee aide likewise praised Atkinson, saying the committee has been “incredibly impressed with Atkinson’s professionalism, but even more so his independence and neutrality in adhering to the strict letter of the law to protect the whistleblower and the whistleblower process.”

A former U.S. intelligence official said the office was also “fairly pleased” with Atkinson’s appointment, especially because the ICIG “had been in turmoil for a while.”

“They felt Atkinson was a professional with IG experience who came from a good office,” he said. “People were relieved.”

But Atkinson likely couldn’t predict that, just 16 months into his tenure, he’d be in the middle of an unprecedented standoff between Congress and DOJ and moved to address a novel legal predicament: What happens when an intelligence agent blows the whistle on the president?

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Whistleblower experts say Maguire doesn’t have the authority to overrule Atkinson, but effectively tied the inspector general’s hands when he involved the Justice Department. As such, the substance of the complaint may never reach Congress—at least not through formal channels.

“I can’t underscore this enough: The fact that Atkinson determined this complaint to be serious enough to notify Congress really carries weight,” said Irvin McCullough, a national security analyst for the Government Accountability Project who has worked with Atkinson on whistleblower protection cases.

McCullough said that while he’s been disappointed in the past with some of Atkinson’s work, “the one time we got into a statutory argument” about whistleblower protections “it became clear he has a very good understanding of the law. While he drew conclusions I disagreed with, I still trusted him to come to those conclusions,” McCullough said. “It’s clear he’s a good-faith actor.”

The issue of whistleblower protection was a central focus of Atkinson’s confirmation hearing, where he pledged to establish “a safe program where whistleblowers do not have fear of retaliation and where they’re confident that the system will treat them fairly and impartially.”

He also testified that he would consider resigning if he were prevented from pursuing an investigation that he found significant or to be a potential abuse of the ODNI. But he indicated that it would be a last resort.

“I would consider it, but I think the process is in place that people who— can disagree without necessarily having to resign,” he said. “But if I felt strongly enough and it really went to a core principle, yes, I would consider resigning. That would be part of my thought process.”



CORRECTION: Steve Bunnell‘s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article.