Roger Kimball:
“…An unnamed “whistleblower” (personally, I think it is a protégé of John Brennan or possibly Michael Avenatti) cites various rumors he has overheard second- or third-hand, writes it up as an official complaint, and the whole stinking pile of malignant calumny is carefully fed into the Trump outrage machine and takes over the media narrative for a week or so.
It is impossible to overstate how preposterous the whole whistleblower gambit is. As Sean Davis has pointed out at The Federalist, the “intelligence community” (another phrase that has entered the lexicon of political malfeasance) recently, and secretly, changed the rule that “whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings.”
The new rules, which were made public only after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was released, “eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only heard about [wrongdoing] from others.” Interesting, what?
Impeachment frenzy cascaded over airwaves and displaced every competing story, even the exploitation of that sick child crusader Greta Thunberg, for about 48 hours. But the floodwaters are rapidly receding and the malodorous muck and detritus that has been left behind are already being subject to the sanitizing scrutiny of people who don’t like being lied to…”