How the Law Protects Intelligence Whistle-Blowers, and Leaves Them at Risk

WASHINGTON — President Trump has threateningly targeted the whistle-blower who brought to light how he pressured Ukraine’s leader to open investigations that could benefit him politically, not only portraying the whistle-blower as a spy but also expressing a desire to “interview and learn everything about” him.

As the House pursues an impeachment inquiry, Mr. Trump’s ominous talk, including allusions to the historical practice of executing spies, has heightened interest in what legal rules protect officials who raise alarms about wrongdoing inside the executive branch.

A whistle-blower is someone inside an organization who sees a problem going uncorrected — like waste, fraud, abuse, crime or something that poses a threat to public safety and security — and tells outsiders about it. In ordinary parlance, a whistle-blower can be someone who brings problems to light in any number of ways, including by speaking out publicly or providing information to journalists.

But the government tries to maintain control of information by legally defining a whistle-blower only as someone who follows certain procedures that channel a complaint to its internal oversight mechanisms — chiefly, inspectors general and congressional oversight committees.

As an incentive to blow the whistle through such authorized channels, the law gives legal protections to those complainants that officials who instead talk to reporters do not get.

Congress has enacted a hodgepodge of laws covering various aspects of whistle-blowing through approved channels.

For example, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 forbids interfering with or denying federal employees a right to furnish information to lawmakers. The Inspector General Act of 1978 prohibits officials from threatening the jobs of or making other reprisals against federal employees who complain or disclose information to an inspector general in good faith.

Congress bolstered that rule with the Whistle-Blower Protection Act of 1989, which covers most federal employees, including most State Department officials. Among other things, it protects them from adverse personnel actions — like being fired — taken in reprisal for reporting potential wrongdoing via the authorized channels.

Intelligence officials are covered by a different law, the Intelligence Community Whistle-Blower Protection Act, which Congress passed in 1998 and later amended. The Obama administration enhanced it with two major policy directives.

This system creates a shield from reprisal for intelligence officials who make a so-called protected disclosure to Congress by following a process that involves filing a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general for initial vetting.

If the inspector general decides a complaint is credible and presents an urgent concern, the director of national intelligence is supposed to send it to Congress. If the inspector general rejects it, the whistle-blower may still then talk about it to lawmakers with protections from reprisal so long as he or she obeys rules for protecting classified information.

By law, if they follow the prescribed procedures, officials making complaints cannot be punished by their superiors as reprisal. That includes disciplinary action like being fired or demoted or being given significantly worse responsibilities or working conditions. Intelligence officers may also not lose their security clearances, the intelligence whistle-blower law adds.

These laws were written with job reprisals in mind. They were not written for, and do not cover, the highly unusual situation in which a president uses his public platform to denigrate and vaguely threaten a whistle-blower.

Only in a limited way. Another part of the Inspector General Act says that agency watchdogs “shall not, after receipt of a complaint or information from an employee, disclose the identity of the employee without the consent of the employee, unless the inspector general determines such disclosure is unavoidable.”

In line with that law, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, did not include the whistle-blower’s name in his report to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire. Mr. Maguire testified last week that he did not know the name of the person, whom people familiar with the matter have identified as a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to the White House at one point.

But the legal prohibition on disclosing the official’s name applies only to Mr. Atkinson. It does not bar Mr. Trump and his allies from trying to identify him or disclosing his name if they figure it out. (It would be illegal under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for any official to disclose his name if he is a covert agent, but no one has suggested that he is.)

The White House and the Justice Department have known since shortly after Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that a C.I.A. employee was raising concerns because he first anonymously approached the agency’s top lawyer. He also approached a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee, who advised him to hire a lawyer and to meet with an inspector general.

In a statement this week, Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is known as a champion of whistle-blower protections, said, “We should always work to respect whistle-blowers’ requests for confidentiality.” And the whistle-blower’s legal team has raised alarms that its client’s identity may be publicly disclosed, putting him in danger.

Mr. Maguire has pledged to protect the whistle-blower from reprisal, but it is not clear that the official still has the legal shield under the Intelligence Community Whistle-Blower Protection Act that he thought he had when he filed the complaint with Mr. Atkinson.

The Trump administration initially tried to block lawmakers from receiving the complaint by commissioning an opinion from Justice Department lawyers saying that it fell short of the criteria for the type of disclosure covered by the Intelligence Community Whistle-Blower Protection Act. They concluded that it did not qualify as an “urgent concern” that Mr. Maguire was legally required to show to Congress.

In a letter to lawmakers, Mr. Atkinson, who disagreed, wrote that a side consequence of this interpretation was to suggest that the reprisal protections in that act also did not apply. He portrayed the Justice Department as having created a loophole that could deter future potential whistle-blowers from coming forward with important complaints.

Still, even if the executive branch does not consider the Intelligence Community Whistle-Blower Protection Act to apply to this situation, that theory would not remove the similar reprisal protections in other laws like the Inspector General Act.

Probably not. The whistle-blower laws protect from reprisal only those who share information about wrongdoing via the prescribed oversight channels. They do not appear to cover government officials who instead share it with someone else — even an eventual whistle-blower.

Still, the whistle-blower suggested in his complaint that White House officials were authorized to disclose information about the call to him. He wrote that while his sources had expressed concerns, their relaying of the information about the call was a “routine” step “in the course of official interagency business.”

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