Our former client faced, and still faces, a sustained public campaign of intimidation — including repeated tweets by President Trump and other senior figures that the whistle-blower must be publicly outed — despite having participated in an established and encouraged process that guaranteed them certain protections under the law. Even members of Congress, individuals within the very body that created the statutory protections that exist for whistle-blowers, sought to expose the whistle-blower for political purposes and created harmful doubts concerning the integrity of the system.

Joseph Maguire, until last week the acting director of national intelligence and himself an appointee of Mr. Trump, stated in public testimony last September that the whistle-blower “acted in good faith and followed the law every step of the way.” The whistle-blower demonstrated that one can ensure that legitimate oversight occurs within the confines of the law and the policies and procedures of the intelligence community.

Whistle-blowers play a particularly critical role in Congress’s ability to oversee the intelligence community. As the executive branch controls classified information, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are reliant on inspectors general and whistle-blowers to conduct their constitutionally mandated oversight over federal agencies and even the president of the United States.

In correspondence dated Oct. 22, 2019, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, composed of dozens of appointees, made it clear that “whistle-blowers play an essential public service in coming forward” by reporting their reasonable belief of waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct — and that whistle-blowers “should never suffer reprisal or even the threat of reprisal for doing so.” Significantly, the letter quotes Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, chairman and a co-founder of the Senate’s Whistleblower Protection Caucus, who noted recently that whistle-blowers “ought to be heard out and protected” and “we should always work to respect whistle-blowers’ requests for confidentiality.”

Members of the intelligence community, whether they are federal employees or government contractors, must follow the law in disclosing their reasonable belief of a violation of law, rule, regulation or an abuse of authority. They cannot avail themselves of whistle-blower channels available to other federal employees because they deal almost exclusively with classified information, the unauthorized disclosure of which could cause grave harm to our national security. It is for these reasons that Congress created a specific process where members of the intelligence community may disclose such information lawfully through an Office of Inspector General.