Yahoo! News reported Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has been seeking to interview the whistleblower who triggered the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
It is unclear whether the FBI wants to interview the whistleblower to find out about something he or she did, or to find out about what something someone else did — whether their sources in the White House, or the president himself.
Yahoo!’s Michael Isikoff and Zach Dorfman report:
The FBI recently sought to question the CIA whistleblower who filed a complaint over President Trump’s July 25 Ukraine call — a move that came after a vigorous internal debate within the bureau over how to respond to some of the issues raised by the complaint’s allegations and whether they needed to be more thoroughly investigated, according to sources familiar with the matter.
An FBI agent in the Washington field office in October reached out to one of the lawyers representing the whistleblower and asked to question the CIA analyst who triggered the congressional inquiry into the president’s conduct, one of the sources said.
But no interview has yet to be scheduled. It is unclear what the intended scope of the interview would be or whether the whistleblower’s lawyers will agree to it. Mark Zaid, one of the lawyers for the whistleblower, said he and his co-counsel would have no comment. An FBI spokesperson also declined comment.
Democrats, who once insisted the whistleblower testify, have refused to allow Republicans to bring the whistleblower to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.
A RealClearInvestigations report identified the alleged whistleblower, who the New York Times already revealed to be a CIA employee, and whom the Intelligence Community Inspector General said had a political bias in favor of one of the Democratic candidates for president.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.