“Where is the Whistleblower," Donald Trump queried in a tweet Friday morning, "and why did he or she write such a fictitious and incorrect account of my phone call with the Ukrainian President?”
At least Trump wrote a partially accurate tweet in noting that America doesn't know the identity of the whistleblower, whose complaint has subsequently been substantiated by every new witness and piece of information turned up about Trump's call. It stands to reason, then, that there is in fact no reason to learn the whistleblower’s identity when people with much closer proximity to all the critical matters have come forward from that State Department, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and elsewhere to provide firsthand accounts.
"Much of what has been disclosed since the release of our client’s complaint actually exceeds the whistleblower’s knowledge of what transpired at the time the complaint was submitted," wrote the whistleblower's lawyers, Andrew Bakaj and Mark Zaid, in an op-ed Friday. "Because our client has no additional information about the president’s call, there is no justification for exposing their identity and all the risks that would follow."
Though the whistleblower’s attorneys have said they would answer written questions under oath, Democrats, who originally thought the whistleblower's testimony might be important, now agree that it's no longer necessary or relevant.
“I think it’s quite clear we have a surfeit of evidence that corroborates in full every aspect of what happened and the policy they were pursuing,” Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, a member of the Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, told the Washington Post.
But the more the evidence against Trump piles up, the more desperate Republicans grow for a villain they can drag into the public square and crucify to satisfy Trump's cultists. Republicans, who have been reduced down to trying to criticize how House Democrats are handling the inquiry, would love nothing more than to turn their fire on an individual who, in the course of serving their country, actually placed their oath of office over their own well-being.
“Why don’t we know who the person is who started this whole charade?” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.
There are, in fact, several very good reasons why we don't know who put themselves on the line for the good of our country. Foremost among those reasons are the facts that the whistleblower has a right to be protected from retaliation and that their testimony will provide little if any value to the mountain of accumulating evidence against Trump. But the most delicious of the reasons to never identify the whistleblower is that it is absolutely driving Republicans crazy as they engage in endless rounds of shadow boxing.