WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and the Justice Department learned about a CIA officer’s concerns about President Donald Trump around the same time the individual filed a whistleblower complaint that is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry, according to a U.S. official and another person familiar with the matter.
The new details help flesh out the timeline of how alarm bells about Trump’s call with the Ukraine leader, in which he pressed for an investigation of a political rival, reverberated across the U.S. government and inside the upper ranks of its intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The details are fueling objections by Democratic lawmakers that the administration stonewalled them for weeks about the phone call and took extraordinary measures to suppress it from becoming public.
The intelligence official initially filed a complaint about Trump’s Ukraine dealings with the CIA, which then alerted the White House and the Justice Department. On Aug. 12, the official raised a separate flag, this time with the intelligence community’s inspector general, a process that granted the individual more legal “whistleblower” protection.