The Ukrainegate “Whistleblower” is no Deep Throat – and Not Even a Whistleblower
by John D. O’Connor
There is currently raging controversy over whether the revelation of the anonymous Ukrainegate leaker showed clear criminality or mere crudity. But one conclusion is crystal clear: the laws protecting this so-called “whistleblower” are not encouraging principled non-partisan truth telling, as was intended, but rather are promoting governmental corruption the laws were meant to curtail.
The statutes protecting whistleblowers, which include “shield” laws preventing journalists from being coerced into revealing their sources, received much of their original support from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s seemingly gallant protection of his iconic, gold plated source Deep Throat, whose cool, fact-based guidance helped the Post push President Richard Nixon from office.
Deep Throat was a man of character, acting, not out of partisan animus toward Nixon, but out of nonpartisan revulsion at the White House’s obstruction of an FBI investigation, which in turn was ferreting out White House electoral corruption. As it turned out years later, this man was my client, W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s #2 official and head of the Watergate investigation.
In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, it was widely recognized that honest civil servants might need both encouragement to report clear illegality and protection from retaliation from their partisan governmental employers. Legal “whistleblower” protections were born.
Why wouldn’t the Ukrainegate whistleblower be an intended beneficiary of this statutory scheme? In general answer, because every noble aim of the law has been perverted by this individual’s actions, exacerbating all of the partisan “swampy” corruption the law was intended to fight.
The wrongs of the Nixon Administration could be encapsulated as the cynical use of governmental power to enhance electoral advantage, in that case in the 1972 elections. Americans on both sides of the aisle saw and still see such abuse of governmental mechanisms as foul play subverting our democracy.
Our present “whistleblower” is using our governmental procedures, not to protect nonpartisan revelation of crimes, but, rather, to harm his political enemies by using governmental power to himself wrongfully influence the 2020 elections.
The “crime” which the whistleblower has breathtakingly revealed, ironically and hypocritically, was attempted “interference in the 2020 election.” But this is merely a highly tendentious partisan opinion, not the factual, nonpartisan reporting of crimes the law encourages. True electoral interference would be present only if there were no reasonable basis to investigate the corrupt oligarchic Burisma Holdings or Hunter Biden, the highly-paid, influence-peddling son of our country’s Vice President, seemingly using his father to protect Burisma, and to subvert President Obama’s policy of clawback from corrupt oligarchs.
Need his identity be “protected” from public disclosure? Of course not. His employers, from his agency up through the White House, know who he is. Does it serve a valid purpose to shield his identity from Joe Schmo of Kokomo? No. So anonymity is only for political purposes, i.e., not showing the voting public that given his motives and political bedfellows, he is mostly concerned with protecting his political allies and harming his enemies. He hopes to protect Joe Biden from exposure and former CIA Director John Brennan from indictment, while at the same time crippling Trump in the 2020 election.
Whether the country knows his name or not, his job is protected. But having him named publicly, then questioned under oath in a public forum, would reveal that this purported Clean Gene was really a weaving spider, plotting to overthrow a President he has detested since the moment of his election. This motive, in turn, demonstrates the fatuity of his jejune, opinionated claim of recent “electoral interference.”
This whistleblowing was carefully plotted, in seeming conspiracy with Adam Schiff’s highly partisan Intelligence Committee and lawyers to whom Schiff’s office referred the leaker, the type of “fixed” investigation Deep Throat fought in Watergate. Obvious witness “preparation” was undertaken not only with Schiff and his lawyers, but also with at least Obama holdovers Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the original, perhaps criminal, leaker, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Yovanovitch herself was possibly involved in Ukrainian corruption through her “do not prosecute” list imposed on the Ukrainian corruption prosecutor Lutsenko.
But isn’t the supposed harm from all this merely another overblown political drama not harming legitimate law enforcement? To the contrary, by attempting punishment of President’s Trump for seeking to investigate Joe Biden, the whistleblower is protecting corruption. By helping Brennan, he is defending horrific intelligence agency abuse. He is, in short, protecting Watergate-style abuses, not fighting them.
So our “whistleblower,” unlike Deep Throat, is assisting the corrupt use of governmental power for partisan purposes, not fighting it. He, in short, is not quite ready to replace Deep Throat in the pantheon of noble American truthtellers.
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John D. O’Connor is the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the book, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.