The lawyers for the intelligence official who filed a whistleblower complaint against President Trump that triggered a formal impeachment inquiry have expressed “serious concerns” for their client’s safety, according to reports.
A letter signed by the whistleblower’s lead attorney, Andrew Bakaj, and sent to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire pointed to Trump’s call for “the person who gave the whistleblower the information” to be publicly identified, NBC News reported.
The letter, dated Saturday and made public Sunday, said events from the past week “have heightened our concerns that our client’s identity will be disclosed publicly and that, as a result, our client will be put in harm’s way.”
Bakaj acknowledged that it was the unidentified whistleblower’s source of information whom Trump’s comment targeted — but he wrote that the distinction “does nothing to assuage our concerns for our client’s safety,” and claimed that “certain individuals” also had offered a $50,000 bounty for information about their client’s identity.
The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, reported last week that two right-wing activists had offered the sum for “credible information corroborating” the person’s identity.
On Sunday, the president suggested in a tweet that he wants the whistleblower to be outed.
“Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called ‘Whistleblower,’ represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way,” Trump wrote.
The lawyers also called on lawmakers to speak out for whistleblower protections and insist that retaliation against the official — “whether direct or implied” — would not be tolerated, according to Business Insider.
“Unfortunately, we expect this situation to worsen, and to become even more dangerous for our client and any other whistleblowers, as Congress seeks to investigate this matter,” the letter said.
CBS News has reported that the whistleblower — identified by the New York Times as a CIA officer — was already under federal protection.
But Mark Zaid, a lawyer from Compass Rose Legal, tweeted that CBS “completely misinterpreted contents of our letter,” saying the legal team had not yet reached an agreement with Congress regarding contact with their client.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that he expected the whistleblower to testify “very soon” once security measures were implemented to protect the person’s identity.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would launch a formal impeachment inquiry in light of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
A rough summary of the conversation revealed Trump’s apparent efforts to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
On Thursday, the complaint by the whistleblower, who believed Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country” in the 2020 election, was released to the public.
The intelligence community inspector general, Michael Atkinson, deemed the Aug. 12 complaint “credible” and of “urgent concern” and passed it on to Maguire, who testified before the House Intelligence Committee.
Maguire said that both the whistleblower and the inspector general “acted in good faith throughout” and “have done everything by the book and followed the law.”