Editorial of The New York Sun:
“…Talk about Democracy dying in darkness. It’s looking more and more as if the Democrats really are going to try to overturn the 2016 election based on testimony from an unnamed individual they won’t let the Americans see. That’s what we take from a bombshell report that House Democrats are considering masking the whistleblower when he testifies before the impeachment caucus.
The scoop is in the Washington Post, which has made the business about democracy dying in darkness its very slogan. It describes the steps House Democrats are weighing as “extraordinary.” We agree. The idea that some schlepper from the CIA could be brought before Congress with a mask over his head to testify in an effort to bring down a sitting president is gobsmacking.
The idea, according to the Post, is to “prevent President Trump’s congressional allies from exposing the individual.” It attributes that to “three officials familiar with the deliberations,” but the Post won’t disclose their names either. Under consideration, it quotes the three officials as saying, is “having the whistleblower testify from a remote location and obscuring the individual’s appearance and voice.”
“Kafka couldn’t make this up,” we noted when we first touched on the possibility of impeaching a president based on the tidings of an anonymous accuser. That editorial was headlined “Who Is the Whistleblower?” We recognize, we said, that the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation applies only to criminal prosecutions, not politics. Even so, the Sixth is a marker of fairness and due process…”