Congress wants to ensure that former President Donald Trump’s attempted coercion of Ukraine in 2019 — and his effort to thwart and intimidate the official who disclosed it — never recur. But a new law aimed at doing that is insufficient, several whistleblower advocates contended.
That law, the fiscal 2022 omnibus spending measure, contains provisions that only partly address the abuses of power that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, the analysts told CQ Roll Call this week.
“We are disappointed that the negotiators substituted a baby step for a Senate mandate to systematically overhaul the rights of Intelligence Community whistleblowers,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, an organization that works with and advocates for whistleblowers, in an email. “We’ll be pressing all year to finish what just got started in this bill.”
In 2019, Trump temporarily withheld $400 million in weapons for Ukraine — even as it faced down Russian military incursions in the Donbass region — while Trump tried to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce that he was investigating Trump's then-rival for the presidency, Joe Biden. Trump and his allies then threatened the anonymous intelligence official who told Congress about Trump's pressure campaign and tried to publicly identify the person.
What's more, Trump’s acting inspector general of the intelligence community withheld the whistleblower’s complaint from Congress for a month,...
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Monday (April 6, 2026) accused Congress of unleashing a “foreign-influenced misinformation campaign” against him and his wife Riniki Bhuyan Sarma ahead ...