Matt Taibbi, no friend to Breitbart or Donald Trump, writes that the federal bureaucrat who set off Democrats’ impeachment inquiry does not deserve the “whistleblower” moniker.

If the individual were not a pawn in “a hardcore insider political battle,” he argues, he or she would likely be persecuted by the federal government instead of celebrated.

From Rolling Stone:

Americans who’ve blown the whistle over serious offenses by the federal government either spend the rest of their lives overseas, like Edward Snowden, end up in jail, like Chelsea Manning, get arrested and ruined financially, like former NSA official Thomas Drake, have their homes raided by FBI like disabled NSA vet William Binney, or get charged with espionage like ex-CIA exposer-of-torture John Kiriakou. It’s an insult to all of these people, and the suffering they’ve weathered, to frame the ballcarrier in the Beltway’s latest partisan power contest as a whistleblower. … “He or she” [the individual who filed a complaint with the ICIG] was instantly celebrated as a whistleblower by news networks and major newspapers. That last detail caught the eye of Kiriakou, a former CIA Counterterrorism official who blew the whistle on the agency’s torture program. “It took me and my lawyers a full year to get [the media] to stop calling me ‘CIA Leaker John Kirakou,” he says. “That’s how long it took for me to be called a whistleblower.” … Actual whistleblowers are alone. The Ukraine complaint seems to be the work of a group of people, supported by significant institutional power, not only in the intelligence community, but in the Democratic Party and the commercial press.

Read the rest of the story here.