President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that a whistleblower who filed a complaint against him is "a spy" who may have committed treason, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times reported.

The punishment for treason is death.

The complaint centers on Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump pressured Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr on investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and to discredit the Russia probe.

"Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they're almost a spy," Trump said, according to the Los Angeles Times report.

"You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now," the president added, per the Los Angeles Times.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that a whistleblower who filed a complaint against him is "a spy" who may have committed treason, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times reported.

The punishment for treason is death.

"Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they're almost a spy," Trump said at a private breakfast in New York, according to the Los Angeles Times report.

"I want to know who's the person, who's the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that's close to a spy," he said.

He added: "You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now."

On Thursday evening, Bloomberg News obtained video footage of Trump's comments:

Read more: Trump is facing impeachment over a whistleblower complaint and a phone call with Ukraine's president. Here's what we know.

The complaint centers on Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr on investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and to discredit the Russia probe.

Days before the call, Trump ordered the US to withhold a nearly $400 million military-aid package to Ukraine. Notes on the call released by the White House on Wednesday showed that the US president did not directly mention offering aid in exchange for Zelensky's assistance in investigating Biden but said the US does "a lot for Ukraine" right before asking Zelensky to do him "a favor" and investigate Biden and the origins of the Russia probe.

The whistleblower said they were not a direct witness to the conduct described in the complaint or Trump's conversation with Zelensky but learned of it from "multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call."

The whistleblower said they heard "various facts related to" it from more than half a dozen US officials. "Multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another," the complaint said.

The complaint also said White House officials who informed the whistleblower of Trump's call were "deeply disturbed" by what they had heard. They also told the whistleblower that White House lawyers were already discussing how to handle the call because they believed they'd witnessed Trump "abuse his office for personal gain."

Read more: Acting DNI Joseph Maguire undermined the GOP's entire argument against the whistleblower in one sentence

Trump and his allies have repeatedly alleged that the whistleblower learned details about the call because someone within the intelligence community leaked them.

But the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, told the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday that the whistleblower likely got the information from Trump's own staff.

Maguire also said the complaint was "in alignment" with the White House's memo of the call.

Trump has a history of baselessly accusing law-enforcement agencies, specifically the FBI, of spying on him or committing treason.

Trump has pushed discredited conspiracy theories that the FBI under President Barack Obama spied on him and his campaign and wiretapped him in Trump Tower, his signature property in midtown Manhattan.

Read more: In white-hot attack on the Russia probe, Trump is now calling an FBI informant talking to his campaign 'SPYGATE'

The FBI was not wiretapping him but did have a warrant from 2011 to 2013 to surveil a Russian crime ring running out of the 63rd floor of Trump Tower, ABC News reported in 2017.

And The Washington Post and The New York Times reported in 2018 that the FBI had not spied on the campaign as Trump described but sent an informant to speak to three Trump campaign officials — Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos — after opening an investigation into the campaign's potentially "suspicious" connections to Russia.

In December 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia-linked individuals and ended up serving about two weeks in prison.

Earlier this year, the news website Axios compiled a list of 24 instances since January 2018 in which Trump had accused someone of treason or "treasonous" behavior. Trump has applied the label to the FBI, the former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, the Democratic Party, the media, and now an intelligence whistleblower.