FACT CHECK: Trump echoes debunked claim from conservative media on whistleblower rules via thedailybeast
From Donald Trump on down, prominent Republicans used part of their weekend to falsely accuse Trump’s hand-picked intelligence community inspector general of secretly changing the requirements for intelligence workers to submit whistleblower tips as part of a “deep state” plot to clear the way for the Aug. 12 complaint about Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine.
“Whistleblowers were required to provide direct, first-hand knowledge of allegations,” reads a Saturday tweet by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “But just days before the Ukraine whistleblower came forward, the IC secretly removed that requirement from the complaint form.” The kernel of fact near the center of the conspiracy theory is that there is, indeed, a new version of Form 401 dated August 2019.
There’s a reason the form has allowed secondhand reports all along. The requirement for firsthand whistleblowing only is completely made up. The Federalist and supporters of the Atkinson smear also point to a two-page information sheet distributed as part of the May 2018 version of the form but not the August 2019 version. It’s unclear when it was dropped, but a paragraph in that now-excised preamble was headed, “First-Hand Information Required,” seemingly contradicting the form itself. “In order to find an ‘urgent’ concern credible, the IC IG must be in possession of reliable, first-hand information,” the text read in part.
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