Richard Nixon is still the only US president to step down. But he almost could have held himself in office: In spite of the Watergate scandal in 1972 he was even re-elected. His fall, two years later, is mainly due to a - long anonymous - informants from Nixon's own ranks.
This informant provided the "Washington Post" reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward with explosive internals, in return for giving him the code name "Deep Throat." His identity remained a secret for decades. Only in 2005 was revealed that it was the then FBI Vice Director Mark Felt.
A similar feverish guesswork as then, Washington is moving again: who is the mysterious whistleblower who denounced US President Donald Trump's alleged abuse of power with an internal complaint - almost single-handedly allowing for impeachment?
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Journalists, lawmakers and lawyers begin a hunt for the identity of the informant who allegedly works for the CIA. Congress wants to interrogate him. But even US intelligence chief Joseph Maguire said he did not know who the whistleblower was - maybe it could be a woman, he said.
He wanted to know who that person was, and who of his people worked with her, Trump also scolded: "Because, that's pretty close to espionage, you know what we did earlier, when we were smart. Spies and betrayals, we used to do that differently than today. "
That should mean: execution by a firing squad. At least.
On the one hand, this is just the rage of a man who leads the White House as once his private corporation: Who does not spurt, whose head rolls. On the other hand, Trump's tirade represented a rhetorical escalation: Trump suggests that he endorses violence against critics.
Trump's threat is "dangerous" and undermines "the integrity of the government," said Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic spokeswoman for the US House of Representatives, on CNN. But, "The president does that almost every day."
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Whistleblower's complaint about Trump (pdf) PDF size: 4 MB
Trump, alien to democratic norms, does not seem to know what a whistleblower really is. Because those are actually protected in the US from punishment: Anyone who notes in an organization unethical or illegal behavior and wants to report, without risking his safety, can do so on the anonymous service.
For the US government, such complaints are even regulated by law: with the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which authorizes and shields informants at the same time. Thus, government employees can discreetly turn to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a central Ombudsman, if they want to detect crimes, mismanagement, wastage, abuse of power, or other issues at work.
That's exactly what the whistleblower did in Ukraine's scandal weeks ago: his nine-page report to the OSC bears the date August 12, 2019.
The anonymous informant has a long tradition - whistleblowers in the US often have very different fates.
Daniel Ellsberg, who launched the "Pentagon Papers" on the Vietnam War in 1971, was accused of being a spy, but the case exploded. Frank Serpico, who revealed corruption to the New York police that same year, later became a movie hero, played by Al Pacino. Karen Silkwood uncovered maladies in the nuclear industry in 1974 and then died at only 28 in a mysterious car crash.
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Exiled: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden
Jeffrey Wigand brought to light 1996 dubious machinations of the tobacco industry, he received death threats. Linda Tripp, who in 1998 divulged the affair of Bill Clinton with the intern Monica Lewinsky, became the ridicule of the nation.
It was Democratic President Barack Obama who tightened the government's crackdown on whistleblowers. Chelsea Manning, who promulgated compromising military action in 2010, has been in detention for seven years for failing to follow the whistleblower procedure. Edward Snowden, who unveiled the NSA's dubious spy programs in 2013, is still living in exile in Moscow.
How long the Ukrainian whistleblower remains anonymous will soon become apparent. The "New York Times" has already published the first details of his identity to justify, as editor-in-chief Dean Baquet justified, his credibility: The man works for the CIA and has since been stationed in the White House.
The publication of this information is "deeply disturbing and reckless," protested Andrew Bakaj, the lawyer of the informant. "The whistleblower has a right to anonymity."
