‘Army Of Whistleblowers’ Now Reporting Trump Administration Wrongdoing, Secretly Working With Investigators

The Donald Trump administration is now under siege behind the scenes from what Atlantic Monthly called “a small army of whistleblowers,” in a report published online this week. The number of White House employees and insiders now actively working with investigators to report wrongdoing has “spiked” since Trump took office, Atlantic reported.

Only one such whistleblower, Tricia Newbold, has come forward to attach her name to a report of Trump administration malfeasance. Newbold reported that in at least 25 instances, high-ranking Trump administration officials granted security clearances to applicants who had been denied as potential national security risks in evaluations by career professionals, according to The New York Times.

One of the individuals who posed a possible risk to national security, but was given a clearance anyway, was Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, The Washington Post reported.

But Newbold is far from alone, according to a source who works as a top aide to the House Oversight Committee, The Atlantic reported. In fact, the number of insider informants now actively cooperating behind-the-scenes with the Oversight Committee and other investigative bodies numbers in the “dozens,” the source told the magazine, adding that whistleblowers inside the administration began coming forward as soon as Trump was inaugurated.

According to information supplied by the House Oversight Committee itself, it was a whistleblower who provided evidence that Trump’s then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn communicated with a business colleague just minutes after Trump took the oath of office, about a plan to work secretly with Russia building nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia.

The House Oversight Committee is the “main investigative committee” in the House of Representatives and had broad authority to investigate allegations of wrongdoing in almost any aspect of government operations.

In 2007, it was a U.S. Army whistleblower who told the House Oversight Committee that former NFL player Pat Tillman — who had quit professional football to join the Army and fight in Afghanistan — had been killed by “friendly fire,” and the Army had attempted to cover up the deadly debacle, according to a CNN report.

Sources who work for the Oversight Committee have reported that among the current “army” of whistleblowers alerting investigators to Trump administration wrongdoing, a “handful” work inside the White House itself, giving them additional access to the inner workings of Trump’s operation, according to a Salon report.

But unlike Newbold, most of the Trump administration whistleblowers provided information only on the condition that they remain anonymous, due to their fear of retribution from Trump and his top aides, who are more vengeful and ruthless than in previous administrations due to their paranoid belief that a so-called “deep state” conspiracy is out to topple Trump, according to The Atlantic.

“I’ve never seen this many whistle-blowers reporting waste, fraud, and abuse, and just general concern,” a committee source told The Atlantic. “I’ve also never seen whistle-blowers so afraid of what could happen to them if somebody finds out who they are.”