Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

“Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests,” the complaint read. “Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid.”

On August 3, Bakaj and the whistleblower met at Bakaj’s office on Connecticut Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. The analyst had finished the complaint and was prepared to transmit it. The two discussed how, once the analyst filed it, the entire matter would be outside their control.

The possibilities of how it could go wrong were endless. Whistleblowers’ identities are supposed to be protected. But given how the Trump administration functioned and the potential damage the complaint could do, the analyst’s name could be revealed, subjecting him to harassment ranging from nasty social media posts to professional retaliation to death threats.

While both the analyst and Bakaj felt a sense of dread of what could come, Bakaj told the analyst it was unlikely the complaint would lead to much. After all, Bakaj thought, Mueller’s report had done nothing to move Democrats. And then Trump had promptly done something similar with yet another country. Why would more of the same move the needle?

That afternoon, the whistleblower emailed the complaint on the classified networks to the inspector general of the intelligence community, known as the ICIG, which was led by a career Justice Department official named Michael Atkinson.

The following day the inspector general’s office reached out to the whistleblower to tell him the complaint had been received, and the office began an investigation to determine whether it was credible and urgent—the standards required to transmit it to Congress. As part of that investigation, the inspector general’s office secretly interviewed the whistleblower and several NSC staffers without telling the White House. Within two weeks the inspector general’s office determined that it was indeed credible and urgent, and Atkinson prepared to report it to Congress.

But then, on September 5, the whistleblower’s quest looked doomed. The inspector general’s office told the whistleblower that the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, had decided against sending his complaint on to Congress. It was made clear to the whistleblower that Atkinson was not happy about Maguire’s decision. What the whistleblower did not know was that Trump had been told about the complaint in August and that the White House and Justice Department had instructed Maguire not to send it to Congress.

Bakaj had never before heard of a complaint that an inspector general deemed urgent and credible being stopped from transmitting to Congress—he didn’t even think that Maguire had the power to stop it from being sent to Congress. To Bakaj, it reeked of the way officials tried to cover up wrongdoing during Watergate—the exact event that caused the formation of the inspectors general offices in the first place. Concerned now both for his client and for the sanctity of the entire whistleblower system that formed the backbone of government transparency and accountability, Bakaj decided to take matters into his own hands. Over the weekend he drafted a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, saying that his client’s complaint had been deemed urgent and credible by the inspector general but, in an apparent violation of the law, had been blocked from being sent to Congress.

On the afternoon of September 9, Bakaj decided to hand deliver the letter to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. He first went to the Senate, where the staff of the Republican chairman, Richard Burr, showed no interest in speaking with him. But when he arrived at the office of Schiff, his staffers were intrigued.

Bakaj sat down with three of the committee’s top attorneys in the office’s library. The group talked for about thirty minutes, building an overview of the complaint Bakaj was bringing to the lawyers’ attention. Bakaj made sure not to say too much in an effort to avoid any future allegations of leaking, but he also wanted to say enough to pique the lawyers’ interest in the hopes they would put pressure on Maguire for the complaint.

The lawyers seemed to have some understanding of what the whistleblower knew and began ticking off the topics. They mentioned Ukraine, and Bakaj cut them off.

“It may have something to do with that,” Bakaj said.

The lawyers started peppering Bakaj with questions.

Was it about a presidential communication?

It was, Bakaj said.

Did it involve the president of Ukraine?

Bakaj said he couldn’t tell them either way on that, but he essentially gave it away with a hint.

“You’re warm on that one,” Bakaj said.

Just as the lawyers were asking their last questions and wrapping up the meeting, someone knocked on the library’s door. One of the lawyers answered the knock and briefly left the room while Bakaj and the other two attorneys continued chatting.

When the staff lawyer returned, he looked ashen.

“Andrew, we just received a letter from the ICIG,” the staff lawyer said. “It matches up exactly with what you came in here with today.”

It was one thing to have the lawyer of a whistleblower come into the House committee to say that his client had filed a complaint that they might be interested in. That did not happen every day, but it was not an infrequent occurrence. But the letter from the inspector general was a game changer. In Atkinson’s two-year tenure, he had never deemed a complaint both “credible” and “urgent.” On top of that, Atkinson was saying that he was being stopped from sending it to Congress. In the letter, he was alleging that Maguire had violated the law by failing to pass along the complaint.

Maguire’s decision to withhold the complaint from Congress “does not appear to be consistent with past practice,” the letter said.

The lawyers wouldn’t show Bakaj the letter, but he knew exactly what it was about. He was more shocked than anything. Just a week earlier he was not expecting there to be too much news or drama coming out of the complaint. And he definitely was not expecting the complaint to be blocked from reaching the Hill. But now, at basically the same exact time, both he and the inspector general were running to the House Intelligence Committee to highlight what they saw as a massive cover-up.

As he drove home that afternoon, it dawned on him that the complaint might have a far greater impact than he originally believed. He was one of the few people in the world who knew what was in it. And when it came out, it could transform Washington. But Congress still did not have the complaint, and it was unclear how that would happen.

Four days later, Congressman Schiff sent a subpoena to Maguire asking for the complaint. Given the investigation fatigue in the wake of the Mueller report and the fact that it was unclear whom the complaint was related to, it received little attention in the media. But that changed days later when the media reported that the complaint had been filed against the president.

The story created another massive scandal for Trump. As the allegations made in the complaint came into focus, and the gravity of the charges became clear, Congress and the country were tempest tossed yet again. During the Russia investigation and after the Mueller report, as several members of her caucus agitated to impeach the president, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stood firmly against the idea. Let the election sort it out. Any impeachment that could be seen as political would not be good for the country, she thought. But then the whistleblower complaint exploded into the news, and like a dam bursting, the Ukraine scandal inundated Washington. And soon the Speaker, who had been so resolved against putting the country through an impeachment, realized that the House of Representatives would likely have no choice, whatever the political consequences may be. Regardless of the politics. Either the Constitution meant something and was worth defending, or it wasn’t, Pelosi contended. The Senate would almost certainly not convict, but that wasn’t the point. This was for the record and for history.