Trump’s rhetoric will have a chilling effect on whistleblowing, legal experts say

It’s tough to be a whistleblower any day — but especially today, when the moment’s most prominent one hasn’t even been publicly identified, yet has already been ridiculed by the president of the United States and the country’s most-watched cable news network.

The intelligence official who lodged a complaint about President Trump’s conversation with a foreign leader is “a partisan person” carrying out a “political hack job,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Friday, offering no evidence and saying he didn’t know the person’s identity.

The whistleblower is “a punk, a punk who’s snitching out the president’s phone calls to a foreign leader,” said Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera on Friday’s episode of “Fox & Friends,” adding that the person is one of “these, you know, deep state people.”

View the complete September 20 article by Reis Thebault on The Washington Post website here.