The House Intelligence Committee will get “unfiltered testimony” from the whistleblower on the Donald Trump Ukraine call “very soon,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s chair, told ABC News on Sunday. “We are taking all the precautions we can to make sure that we do so -- we allow that testimony to go forward in a way to protect the whistleblower's identity,” Schiff pledged. “Because as you can imagine with the president issuing threats like we ought to treat these people who expose my wrongdoing as we used to treat traitors and spies and we used to execute traitors and spies, you can imagine the security concerns here.”
Mark Zaid, one of the whistleblower’s attorneys, issued a statement confirming that they are negotiating an appearance and highlighting that “protecting the whistleblower’s identity is paramount.”
The Intelligence Committee, along with the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, are due to hear from some other witnesses this week. All three are due to get depositions from former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, about whom Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that “she’s going to go through some things,” and from Kurt Volker, the newly resigned special representative for Ukraine whose text messages Rudy Giuliani was brandishing in public last week.
Intelligence will also have a closed-door hearing with the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, on Friday. Atkinson investigated the whistleblower complaint and found it credible and of urgent concern.
While House Democrats move forward with what Speaker Nancy Pelosi described as a “prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution” investigation, Trump and Giuliani and congressional Republicans are trying to turn the whole thing into a circus and then set the circus tent on fire.
