Trump quest to expose whistleblower hard to pull off

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump says his impeachment trial should deliver on a goal he’s nurtured for months: unmasking the whistle-blower who started it all. But that would pose legal and ethical challenges that would be hard to overcome.
Federal laws promise anonymity for workers who step forward with alleged wrongdoing. In this case, a government employee — reportedly a CIA analyst — challenged the propriety of Trump’s request to Ukraine’s new president to investigate Joe Biden and other Democrats.
A Senate demand that the whistle-blower testify would probably be challenged in court as a violation of the law’s protections, and as a move that could put the unidentified person at risk while extracting only secondhand evidence of limited value. Lawmakers of both parties may share those concerns.
On top of that, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made clear he’d like to dispatch quickly with the House’s articles of impeachment, ideally without calling any witnesses.
Trump may try to change McConnell’s mind. As recently as last week, the president said, “I wouldn’t mind a long process, because I’d like to see the whistle-blower, who’s a fraud.” He complained in a six-page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the day before his impeachment by the House, that his lawyers weren’t allowed to “call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax.”
Experts on whistle-blower laws say disclosing the person’s identify, as Trump desires, would clash with protections from reprisal under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998.
“Everyone knows that the whistle-blower’s career will be devastated” if identified publicly, said Stephen M. Kohn, who has represented whistle-blowers for more than three decades. “There is no doubt that this whistle-blower will be attacked on social media vigorously and for years to come.” Andrew Bakaj, a lawyer for the whistle-blower, went further, saying in November that Trump’s attacks put his client “in physical danger.”

Closed-Door Testimony
If the whistle-blower is subpoenaed by the Senate, Kohn said, lawyers could ask a federal judge for a protective order limiting the testimony. That could mean the witness would be questioned behind closed doors, producing a transcript for the Senate that’s stripped of the person’s name and other identifying information. Ironically, a strong legal argument for barring the whistle-blower from testifying is one of Trump’s biggest criticisms: that the complaint is hearsay.
Kohn noted that confidential informants are rarely called to testify in court over tips that they didn’t have firsthand knowledge about because it would be legally inadmissible hearsay.
Trump claims the whistle-blower, working with Democrats, misrepresented the tenor of his “perfect” conversation with Ukraine’s new leader.
But the main facts asserted by the whistle-blower were confirmed when Trump released a partial transcript of the July 25 phone call in which he asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” and look into Biden and a discredited theory that Ukraine — not Russia— interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Democrat Hillary Clinton.