Shortly after dawn on a July morning in 2007, a convoy of black FBI utility vehicles snaked down Ridge Road, a tranquil, leafy street lined with modest homes and manicured shrubs in the Maryland suburb of Severn. After a few twists and turns, they came to a stop at the end of a cul-de-sac opposite a two-story gray colonial. Seconds later, a dozen agents, weapons pulled from their holsters, burst into the house. Upstairs was William E. Binney, a former senior employee of the National Security Agency headquartered at nearby Fort Meade.

“They shoved my son out of the way as they rushed in with their guns drawn and charged upstairs, where my wife was getting dressed and I was in the shower,” Binney told me. “After pointing their guns at her, one of the agents came into the shower and pointed a gun directly at my head as he forcibly pulled me out. Then they took me out to the back porch and began interrogating me, attempting to implicate me in a crime.”

Binney was suspected—wrongly—of leaking details about the NSA’s illegal and highly secret domestic eavesdropping operation, code-named Stellar Wind. Although he was not arrested, his computers and files were seized. But instead of keeping quiet about the top secret wiretapping effort, Binney spoke out forcefully about the agency’s illegal spying, becoming the first former NSA official to go on the record about the program.

A decade after the raid, in October 2017, the government again questioned Binney. But this time the situation was reversed. President Donald Trump was seeking his help in attacking the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community, which have been investigating whether his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the presidential election. Trump has, at various points, called the investigation a “witch hunt,” “ridiculous,” and a Democratic “hoax.” And he has attempted to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia meddled in the election by comparing it to the mistake over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “They were wrong, and it led to a mess,” Trump said last July. Now, on orders from Trump, according to The Intercept, CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited Binney to meet with him in his office at Langley to discuss an analysis the former NSA official had put together.

Binney’s analysis contradicted the conclusion of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead Binney told Pompeo it was his view, based on a variety of technical factors, that a DNC insider leaked the data. If that conclusion were true, it would discredit the findings of the intelligence community and let the Russians—and Trump—off the hook.