Wrongdoing by Donald Trump may be the subject of a whistleblower complaint from inside one of the United States intelligence agencies, but though that complaint was filed on August 12 and the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community labeled the whistleblower’s report “urgent,” the intelligence agencies have held the report back from Congress for more than a month, according to a statement posted online by the House Intelligence Committee .
In a letter on Friday to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, accompanying a subpoena to Maguire to produce the whistleblower report, Schiff told the Acting DNI that his refusal to hand over the document to the House Intelligence Committee marked “a stark break with the unbroken practice of previous Directors of National Intelligence.”
Maguire, in denying the whistleblower report to Congress, claimed that because the complaint involved people outside of the intelligence community, he was exempt from the legal requirement to turn it over, according to a report by Politico . Schiff said Maguire’s stonewalling raises “serious” concerns that the report was being kept secret “in order to cover up serious misconduct.”
That misconduct, Schiff believes, may have been committed by Trump himself, or people close to him.
“The Committee can only conclude, based on this remarkable confluence of factors, that the serious misconduct at issue involves the President of the United States and/or other senior White House or Administration officials,” Schiff wrote in his letter to Maguire.
Of course, the intelligence community has long held deep concerns about Trump’s behavior. As The Inquisitr reported, the CIA, in June of 2017, pulled one of its top Russian spies — who reportedly provided the information that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russia’s 2016 election interference campaign that was designed to help Trump win — out of Russia, at least in part because the Agency feared that Trump would expose the Kremlin mole’s identity to the Russians.
Maguire is claiming, according to Schiff, that the whistleblower report may be “privileged,” which led Schiff to conclude that the report involved Trump because presidents are permitted to keep certain documents secret if they involve presidential decision making, under a claim of “executive privilege.”
In the letter posted online by the House Intelligence Committee , Schiff tells Maguire that has was legally required to turn over the whistleblower report by September 2, but, “more than ten days since the Director was obligated to transmit the complaint to the intelligence committees, the Committee has still not received the disclosure from the Director, in violation of the law.”