S A T U R D A Y, O C T O B E R 5 , 2 0 1 9 . T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T EZ RE A
on earth will come at them,
making you lose everything and
destroy your family.”
That’s the advice Robert
MacLean has for the CIA
whistleblower.
MacLean, a former air
marshal, won the first federal
whistleblower case before the
Supreme Court in 2015. Yet now
he’s driving for Uber and Lyft, his
legal victory frustrated by a
series of Transportation
Department maneuvers.
He was fired in 2006 after
complaining, first internally and
later in a leak to MSNBC, about a
decision to temporarily cancel
overnight air marshal missions
to save on hotel bills, days after
an agency warning about
potential hijacking.
Would he blow the whistle
again? “In a heartbeat. I was a
sworn law enforcement officer,
exposing violations of law and
dangers to public safety.”
But, MacLean added, “it
wrecked my career and
continues to make my children
miserable. Many family members
lecture me that I should’ve
remained silent because nobody
cares and the wrongdoers are
never held accountable.”
[email protected]stripped of her gun and badge
and paraded past her co-workers
as she was escorted away by
armed DOI [Department of
Interior] employees,” she said. “I
felt betrayed by my superiors —
the very people who often
praised my leadership and
accomplishments.”
Intelligence community
employees, like the CIA staffer,
have fewer whistleblower
protections than other feds, like
Chambers. Nonetheless, “my
experience is that those
protections are often in written
words only,” she said. “Many of
the steps I had to take were a
farce.... It became clear to me
early on that the actual facts in
my case did not seem to matter to
anyone along the way.”
Chambers was reinstated after
an emotionally draining fight —
“seven years, one month and 26
days after my nightmare began”
— against the government she
protected. Despite the
retribution, she is “absolutely”
glad she spoke out.
“Telling the truth, especially as
a police official, is always the
right thing to do,” she said.
But it comes with a steep price.
So steep that “I’d first try to
talk them out of it because hellwhistleblowing the right thing?
Yes. Would I do it again? My
moral and legal compass would
not allow any different course of
action.”
Her advice to the CIA
whistleblower: “Carefully weigh
the costs to you, your family and
your career when deciding
whether to blow the whistle. And
document, document, document... because the hierarchy will
lie.”
Teresa Chambers was the U.S.
Park Police chief. Highly ranked,
she didn’t consider herself a
whistleblower, yet was treated
with the scorn that too often
greets renegade truth-tellers. Her
sin — advocating for greater
agency resources.
Her on-the-record remarks for
a 2003 Washington Post article
led to her firing. Her comments,
about the need for more officers
to patrol the Baltimore-
Washington Parkway and federal
lands in the District, seemed
innocuous. But they led to
retaliation from her supervisors,
she said.
“Without warning, I was
catapulted from a rising star who
had devoted her life to her
profession and was transformed
to a shunned employee who was
branded them “right-wing smear
merchants.”
Like Fitzgerald, who died in
January, more-recent federal
employees felt the whip of
retribution for exposing
government wrongdoing. We
contacted three former national
security whistleblowers whose
stories of official revenge are a
frightful warning to the CIA
staffer. Yet all three would do it
again, in service to their country.
Jane Turner was an FBI agent
when she spoke about
malfeasance related to
investigations of crimes against
Indian Country children and
thefts by fellow agents from New
York City’s Ground Zero. She was
forced out in 2003 following a
series of retaliatory measures.
She fought back. A 2015
Government Accountability
Report critical of FBI
whistleblower procedures said
the Justice Department
“ultimately found in her favor in
2013 — over 10 years later.”
“Was the destruction of my
career and family worth the
excruciating time and money,
ostracism and vilification? No,”
she said Wednesday. “Was
standing up and doing the
ethical, legal and moralwhose anonymity is protected by
law, to be revealed.
“This country has to find out
who that person was, because
that person is a spy, in my
opinion,” Trump said Wednesday.
Whistleblowers are often
punished, even as federal
officials say they support the
right of workers to report
wrongdoing.
“As a rule, whistleblowing is
an act of professional suicide,”
said Tom Devine, legal director of
the Government Accountability
Project, which defends
whistleblowers. The threat of
retaliation “exponentially
increases when Trump calls you a
spy.”
It’s not just government
retaliation that concerns
Danielle Brian, executive
director of the Project on
Government Oversight, which
Fitzgerald helped found. “I’m
frankly terrified for his personal
safety,” she said, citing Trump’s
words. She’s also worried
because of the $50,000 reward
for “information relating to the
identity of the ‘Trump
Whistleblower’ ” offered by Jack
Burkman and Jacob Wohl,
according to the Washington
Examiner, which previouslyThe unnamed
CIA employee
who reported
President Trump’s
effort to use
diplomacy with
Ukraine for
personal political
gain has
something in
common with A.
Ernest Fitzgerald
— White House wrath.
Fitzgerald was an Air Force
senior financial management
specialist when he told Congress
about a $2 billion cost overrun
on Lockheed C-5A transport
planes. That 1968 testimony was
followed by other congressional
appearances, a government
probe of his private life and a
smear campaign against him. He
was fired in 1970 at the direction
of President Richard Nixon,
who has something in common
with Trump — potential
impeachment.
“This guy that was fired,”
Nixon bragged in a Jan. 31, 1973,
taped White House conversation.
“I said, ‘Get rid of that son of a
bitch.’ ”
Fitzgerald eventually was
reinstated with back pay. Now
Trump wants the CIA employee,
the impeachment inquiry
BY WILL ENGLUNDkiev, ukraine — Ukraine’s new
chief prosecutor, who has prom-
ised to root out corruption and
political favoritism in his office,
said Friday that his staff will
review all previous cases con-
cerning a gas company at the
heart of the impeachment inqui-
ry into President Trump’s deal-
ings with Ukraine.
The decision by prosecutor
Ruslan Ryaboshapka does not
open the criminal investigation
Trump wants against Joe Biden
and his son Hunter, who was a
board member of the gas compa-
ny, Burisma.
Instead, the “audit” of past
cases involving Burisma seems
more designed to show that Rya-
boshapka is following up on the
clean-government pledges he
and President Volodymyr Zel-
ensky made upon taking office,
analysts said.
It also may buy some time for
Ukrainian authorities at a sticky
moment — as they deal with the
aftermath of Trump’s alleged fa-
vor-trading demand for a Biden
probe, while trying to keep
Ukraine’s image from being too
tarnished by the House impeach-
ment inquiry.
But the prosecutor’s intended
audience is not the White House
or Capitol Hill, said Oleksiy
Baganetz, a former deputy pros-
ecutor general in Ukraine. He is
striving to keep public opinion in
Ukraine behind him.
“This is a political issue more
than a criminal one,” Baganetz
said.
Ryaboshapka reiterated Fri-
day that he has seen no evidence
of criminal wrongdoing by Hunt-
er Biden. He added that no
foreign or Ukrainian official had
asked him to pursue the audit of
the cases.
“We are now reviewing all
proceedings that were closed,
fragmented or investigated earli-
er, in order to make a decision in
cases where illegal procedural
decisions were made and to re-
view them,” said Ryaboshapka.Ryaboshapka, appointed by
Zelensky, has a reputation as a
legal reformer, and he vowed to
clean up the deeply compro-
mised system of prosecution in
Ukraine.
He’s one month into the job,
and his supporters want results,
Baganetz said.
The reviews, however, may
take time and could move far
more slowly than the fast-devel-
oping political events in Wash-
ington.
Oleksandr Lemenov, an anti-
corruption activist, said any at-
tempt by outside politicians,
Ukrainian or otherwise, to inter-
fere in the business of the pros-
ecutor’s office could prompt
widespread resignations among
the new, idealistic staff.
Ryaboshapka would have no
desire to get caught up in Ameri-
can politics, said Lemenov. “Ev-
ery smart top public official
should understand that the story
about Trump-&-Biden (read Re-
publicans-&-Democrats) is not so
fun for us,” he wrote in a text
message.
Hunter Biden was invited to
join Burisma’s board in 2014. The
company’s principal owner,Mykola Zlochevsky, had served
as minister of ecology and natu-
ral resources in the brazenly
graft-ridden administration of
President Viktor Yanukovych,
who fled to Russia after being
ousted.
Ryaboshapka said Friday that
he was aware of at least 15 cases
that were launched against Zlo-
chevsky after Yanukovych’s
downfall in 2014, all of which
focused on the period before
Biden joined the board and none
of which came to anything.
Zlochevsky was accused of ille-
gally awarding licenses to his
own companies.
But the chief prosecutor from
2015 to 2016, Viktor Shokin, did
little to move those or other
corruption cases along. Even-
tually, Western officials, includ-
ing then-Vice President Joe
Biden, sought his ouster. Shortly
after Shokin was fired, the case
against Burisma was closed.
That fueled Trump’s insistence
that the senior Biden brought
pressure on Kiev to protect his
son and that a new criminal
probe should be undertaken.
But a former deputy to Shokin,
David Sakvarelidze, told TheWashington Post that the Buris-
ma case was shut down by
Shokin’s successor, Yuri Lutsen-
ko, after a deal was reached in
which the company agreed to sell
natural gas at a favorable price to
companies controlled by then-
President Petro Poroshenko.
That version is supported by
clandestine recordings made by
a businessman now in exile,
Oleksandr Onyshchenko.
This is the sort of allegation
that Ryaboshapka now wants to
revisit.
Sakvarelidze said the furor
over Trump’s demand and the
attention now being paid to Bu-
risma required some response
from Ukraine. Ryaboshapka was
in a position to give the least
politically difficult one.
“He cannot ignore this issue,”
Sakvarelidze said. “But the other
question is, where will this inves-
tigation lead?”
The audit does not mark a
reopening of the criminal probe.
But, in theory, the prosecutor’s
office could find enough evi-
dence to bring charges against
those who formerly ran it, espe-
cially if the allegation of a cor-
rupt deal with Poroshenko isborne out.
And if a criminal case even-
tually emerges from this, said a
former associate, Ruslan Radetz-
ky, “It will be a Ukrainian matter,
and no one else’s.”
At the news conference, Rya-
boshapka was asked about corre-
spondence that was turned over
to the House on Thursday by
Kurt Volker, the former special
U.S. envoy for Ukraine. The text
messages show that Volker
helped arrange a meeting be-
tween Rudolph W. Giuliani,
Trump’s attorney, and Andrey
Yermak, foreign affairs adviser to
Ukraine’s president, Zelensky.
“These questions,” Ryaboshap-
ka said, “should be addressed to
the authors of this correspon-
dence.”
He said that his office “is
independent of the office of the
president and of political influ-
ence by that office.”
He also said he was not both-
ered by Zelensky calling him
“100 percent my person” in the
July 25 phone call with Trump.
[email protected]Natalie Gryvnyak contributed to this
report.Ukraine prosecutor to ‘audit’ past cases on gas firm linked to Hunter Biden
Anti-corruption action
isn’t the criminal probe
Trump has soughtPresident Trump
paced. He
pointed. He
parried —
jokingly shaking
one reporter’s
hand and
blocking
another’s iPhone with his own.
But then came the
denouement, a sudden shift into
the aggrieved alternate reality
that has consumed him since
House Democrats launched
their impeachment inquiry into
Trump urging his Ukrainian
counterpart to dig up dirt on a
political rival.
“I feel there was in the 2016
campaign — there was
tremendous corruption against
me,” said Trump, transforming
himself — a man who has now
publicly asked no fewer than
three foreign countries (Russia,
Ukraine and China) to look into
his political opponents — into
the victim of corrupt behavior.
And he was just getting
started.
“I was investigated, I was
investigated, okay?” he said,
before pointing at himself — two
rapid-fire taps to his right
breast — and adding: “Me! Me!”
He barked at the media that it
was he who ran, he who won, he
who was investigated, before
accusing the assembled press:
“You won’t say that, will you?”
Finally, he began wrapping
up: “I was investigated. I was
investigated. And they think it
could have been by U.K. They
think it could have been by
Australia. They think it could
have been by Italy. So when you
get down to it, I was
investigated by the Obama
administration.”
“By the Obama
administration,” he concluded,
shouting now, and using both
hands to point at himself, “I was
investigated.”
It was unclear, exactly, to
which unfounded, unproven
theory Trump was referring.
Perhaps he was incorrectly
claiming that Barack Obama’s
administration was
investigating him. In fact, the
FBI opened investigations into
several of his campaign aides —
including Carter Page and
George Papadopoulos, both
foreign policy advisers — but
not actually Trump himself.
Or maybe he was conflating
Christopher Steele — a former
British intelligence officer who
during the 2016 campaign
compiled a dossier of damaging
information on then-candidate
Trump — with the British
government itself.
But either way, Trump was
angry, and his rambling
question-and-answer session
seemed to convey an essentialtruth: that he considers it fair
game for him ask foreign
governments to investigate
former vice president Joe Biden
and his son Hunter — who,
Trump claimed again with no
evidence, were the perpetrators
of “tremendous corruption.”
The president has long been
comfortable with conspiracy
theories. His political rise was
abetted by the racist lie of
birtherism — the false claim
that Obama was not born in the
United States. But ever since
special counsel Robert S.
Mueller III’s Russia probe, and
now amid the throes of an
impeachment inquiry, Trump
seems to have moved into a
split-screen reality — one in
which he is the hero who has, as
he tweeted Thursday,the “absolute right” to do just
about anything he pleases.
And his South Lawn session
Friday again laid bare the
incongruity between actual facts
and what the president
espouses.
Trump repeatedly insisted
that he was not worried about
Biden as a possible 2020 rival —
“I don’t care about Biden’s
campaign, but I do care about
corruption,” he said — a claim
undermined by the fact that
Trump fixated on Biden,
mentioning the former vice
president more than two dozen
times.
The president as caped anti-
corruption crusader is also
undermined by his own
previous behavior. He refused to
condemn and was slow todismiss some of his own Cabinet
officials, including former
Environmental Protection
Agency administrator Scott
Pruitt and former interior
secretary Ryan Zinke, amid
ethical lapses and controversy.
Unlike previous presidents, both
Democratic and Republican,
Trump has often expressed
admiration and fondness for
dictators, rather than pressuring
them to improve their record on
human rights.
He again claimed his phone
call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky — during
which he asked that the
Ukrainians dig up dirt on Biden
as “a favor” — was “perfect,” and
that when he released notes
from the conversation, the
reaction was positive.
“They say, ‘Wow, this is
incredible,’ ” Trump said. “We’re
very proud of that call.”
In fact, even some of his
Republican allies have been
reticent to publicly defend the
content of the call, and on
Friday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-
Utah), a former GOP
presidential nominee, criticized
Trump in a duo of tweets.
“When the only American
citizen President Trump singles
out for China’s investigation is
his political opponent in the
midst of the Democratic
nomination process, it strains
credulity to suggest that it is
anything other than politically
motivated,” Romney wrote. “By
all appearances, the President’s
brazen and unprecedented
appeal to China and to Ukraine
to investigate Joe Biden is
wrong and appalling.”
Trump also falsely claimed
that Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said
the president’s phone call with
Zelensky was “wonderful.”
Though McConnell did defend
Trump in a statement to
Politico, saying the Democrats
had “already overplayed theirhand” by using the phone call to
launch an impeachment inquiry,
he was hardly effusive about
Trump’s conversation with
Zelensky.
The president also accused
Hunter Biden of taking “a
billion and a half dollars out of
China.” He seemed to be
referring to the sum of money
that a private-equity company
based in China had said it hoped
to raise. Hunter Biden became a
board member of the firm, BHR
Partners, in 2013, and later
acquired a 10 percent interest in
the entity overseeing the fund —
but his lawyer has described
Trump’s allegations against him
as “a gross misrepresentation of
Mr. Biden’s role with BHR.”
Turning his attention to
Mueller’s Russia investigation,
Trump described that probe
as “perfect.”
“We went through two years
of Mueller, and that came out
like a 10,” the president said.
Even many of Trump’s most
stalwart allies, however,
privately are unlikely to describe
Mueller’s investigation and
subsequent report as having
been ideal for the president.
Though Mueller determined
that current Justice Department
policy prevented him from
concluding whether Trump
committed a crime, he did lay
out possible evidence of
obstruction of justice by the
president in his final 448-page
report and noted that “while
this report does not conclude
that the president committed a
crime, it also does not exonerate
him.”
Trump did, however, utter at
least one thing that seemed to
be unambiguous.
“I’ve been president now for
almost three years, and I’ve
been going through this for
almost three years,” he said. “It’s
almost become like a part of my
day.”
[email protected]An aggrieved Trump spins an alternate reality as House inquiry escalates
TOM BRENNER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump speaks to the press on the South Lawn of the White House, where he portrayed
himself as the victim of corrupt behavior: “I was investigated, I was investigated, okay? Me! Me!”White
House
Debrief
ASHLEY
PARKER
These federal whistleblowers would do it again, despite the consequences
Federal
Insider
JOE
DAVIDSON