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SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY DEFENDS WHISTLEBLOWER IN BREAK WITH TRUMP, OTHER REPUBLICANS
The senator’s comments put him at odds with Trump and some of his Republican colleagues.
By Claire Hansen, Staff Writer
Oct. 1, 2019

SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY ON Tuesday called for the protection of the anonymous whistleblower who first raised concerns about President Donald Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and said the fact the whistleblower did not witness certain events does not invalidate the report.

The Iowa Republican's comments put him at odds with Trump and some of the president's most ardent defenders in Congress.

"This person appears to have followed the whistleblower protection laws and ought to be heard out and protected. We should always work to respect whistleblowers' requests for confidentiality," Grassley said in a statement. Grassley is widely known as a defender of whistleblowers and is the co-founder of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus.

"Complaints based on second-hand information should not be rejected out of hand, but they do require additional leg work to get at the facts and evaluate the claim's credibility," the statement continues.

Trump has repeatedly sought to discredit the whistleblower's complaint and has suggested that his administration is attempting to uncover the whistleblower's identity, despite the fact that federal law protects whistleblowers from being outed and facing repercussions. The complaint is at the center of an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Trump tweeted Sunday, "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."

The whistleblower's complaint charges that Trump suggested that the Ukrainian president investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The complaint also says that the White House moved notes of the Ukraine call into a more restricted computer system.

The president has focused on the fact that the whistleblower did not personally witness the phone call with the Ukrainian president and was not directly involved in the decision to move the rough transcript of the call to a computer server for classified information, a move that severely limited who had access to it. Instead, the whistleblower pieced together the account from the recollections of others who knew about the call.

A memorandum detailing the phone call was released by the White House last week and shows that Trump did suggest to Zelenskiy that Ukraine should investigate the Bidens.

Grassley said Tuesday the "distinction being drawn between first-and second-hand knowledge aren't legal ones."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who heads the Judiciary Committee, has defended Trump vigorously against the claims in the whistleblower's report. Grassley was the prior chair of the committee.

"This seems to me like a political setup," Graham said on CBS' "Face The Nation" on Sunday. "It's all hearsay. You can't get a parking ticket conviction based on hearsay. The whistleblower didn't hear the phone call."

But the Officer of the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community appeared to push back on the claims that the whistleblower was not credible because the individual did not witness the phone call first hand.

"In short, the ICIG did not find that the Complainant could 'provide nothing more than second-hand or unsubstantiated assertions,'" the watchdog agency said in a news release. "Therefore, although the Complainant's Letter acknowledged that the Complainant was not a direct witness to the President's July 25, 2019, telephone call with the Ukrainian President, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community determined that other information obtained during the ICIG's preliminary review supported the Complainant's allegations."
-usnews.com
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-10-01/sen-chuck-grassley-defends-whistleblower-in-break-with-trump-other-republicans