too, and it looks an awful lot like witness intimidation and tampering, and an effort to try to get you to perhaps shape your testimony today."419
Threats of Retaliation
The President suggested that witnesses who testified as part of the impeachment inquiry could face retaliation. For example, on November 16, the President sent a pair of tweets indicating that three witnesses appearing before the impeachment inquiry could face dismissals as a result of their testimony. The President tweeted language he attributed to radio host Rush Limbaugh:
"My support for Donald Trump has never been greater than it is right now. It is paramountly obvious watching this, these people have to go. You elected Donald Trump to drain the Swamp, well, dismissing people like Yovanovitch is what that looks like. Dismissing people like Kent ... and Taylor, dismissing everybody involved from the Obama holdover days trying to undermine Trump, getting rid of those people, dismissing them, this is what it looks like. It was never going to be clean, they were never going to sit by idly and just let Trump do this!" Rush L420
Intelligence Community Whistleblower
In addition to his relentless attacks on witnesses who testified in connection with the House's impeachment inquiry, the President also repeatedly threatened and attacked a member of the Intelligence Community who filed an anonymous whistleblower complaint raising an "urgent concern" regarding the President's conduct. The whistleblower filed the complaint confidentially with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, as authorized by the relevant whistleblower law. Federal law prohibits the Inspector General from revealing the whistleblower's identity.421 Federal law also protects the whistleblower from retaliation.422
On September 9, the Inspector General notified Congress that this individual had filed a credible complaint regarding an "urgent concern," but that the Acting Director of National Intelligence was withholding the complaint from Congress-contrary to his statutory obligation to have submitted the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees by no later than September 2.423 On September 13, 2019, the Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to the Acting Director of National Intelligence for the whistleblower's complaint and other records.424
On September 26, the Intelligence Committee received the declassified whistleblower complaint and made it available to the public.425
That day, the President issued a chilling threat against the whistleblower and those who provided information to the whistleblower regarding the President's misconduct, suggesting that they could face the death penalty for treason. President Trump stated:
I want to know who's the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that's close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now."426
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