Mike Giglio writes:

On his first day in office, in January 2017, Donald Trump paid a visit to the CIA. He stood before its Memorial Wall, which then had 117 stars commemorating those who lost their lives in the line of duty. “I want to just let you know, I am so behind you,” Trump told the crowd of intelligence officials who’d gathered to hear him speak. “And I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted, and you’re going to get so much backing,” he said, just days after comparing U.S. intelligence agencies to Nazis.

Then Trump joked about asking for a show of hands to see who in the room had voted for him. He went on a diatribe about the news media. He repeated lies, at length, about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. The blowback was swift. Former CIA directors were angered and concerned. One U.S. official called the visit “uncomfortable,” saying that it had “made relations with the intelligence community even worse.”

The relationship became even more strained after Trump’s CIA visit. He repeatedly cast doubt on the conclusion by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win. The Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was a “witch hunt.” FBI members who looked into the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia were partisan and possibly part of a conspiracy. Besides Russia, Trump also disagreed with U.S. intelligence assessments on North Korea and Iran. He faced a constant threat of sabotage from leakers. In Trump’s narrative, members of the intelligence community worked to undermine Trump from the shadows, the cloak-and-dagger henchmen of the “deep state.”

In the end, though, it was someone playing by the rules who triggered perhaps the greatest reckoning of Trump’s presidency.

The intelligence official who brought Trump’s misconduct in the Ukraine scandal to light—a CIA member who was detailed to the White House, according to a report in The New York Times—didn’t do it via press leaks, or by passing it to a sympathetic lawmaker. The whistle-blower went instead through the relatively straightforward and unexciting bureaucratic process of filing a complaint with the office of the intelligence community’s inspector general.

Filing the complaint ensured that classified information would be protected, national-security concerns would be evaluated, and ultimately, the information would reach the proper authorities. This candid and somewhat mundane process, while flawed, was surprisingly effective at holding Trump to account.

“The complaint process compels you to specify how you know what you know,” Brian Katz, a former CIA analyst who recently joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies as an intelligence fellow, told me. “When you’re an intelligence analyst, you’re going to deliver truth to power in the most effective manner you can.”

The key was its simplicity: By channeling the details of Trump’s misconduct into a formal complaint and then feeding it into the intelligence community’s system, the whistle-blower has thrown a wrench into Trump’s heretofore insurmountable deflect-by-chaos machine. As the scandal escalates, Trump and his White House seem to be in increasing disarray. [Continue reading…]