‘New York Times’ Outs Whistleblower As CIA Officer Soon After Donald Trump Hints ‘Spy’ Should Be Executed

Less than an hour after the same paper reported that Donald Trump had privately spoken to United States staff at the mission to the United Nations about his still-unidentified whistleblower, The New York Times published a significant clue pertaining to that individual’s identity. This came after Trump allegedly said the whistleblower who filed a complaint against him was “close to a spy” and hinted that they should be executed.

According to the second New York Times report, the whistleblower “is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point.” The paper cited “three people familiar with his identity” as its sources for the information.

However, the CIA officer has since resumed his position at the agency. According to the NYT report, a reading of details contained in the whistleblower complaint suggests that the person is an analyst — rather than a field agent — who is deeply versed in U.S. foreign policy toward Europe. It is also suggested that the individual has a “sophisticated understanding” of politics in Ukraine, specifically.

The whistleblower’s complaint details a phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 in which, they say, the U.S. president pressured Zelensky to launch a bogus investigation on leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden. This was supposedly done in an attempt to force Ukraine to get involved in the U.S. election, as The Inquisitr reported.

The Times report outing the whistleblower blower as a CIA agent, however, seemed ominous in light of a previous New York Times report — published about an hour earlier on Thursday. In that earlier report, Times reporter Maggie Haberman revealed that in a private speech on Thursday morning, Trump appeared to threaten the lives of anyone who provided information to the whistleblower — and presumably the whistleblower themselves.

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Trump reportedly told a gathering of U.S. United Nations staff.

The president went on to say that “in the old days,” the U.S. was “smart with spies and treason.”

“We used to handle it a little differently than we do now,” Trump said.

The Los Angeles Times obtained audio of Trump’s remarks.

The punishment for espionage that remains on the books in federal law is the death penalty. But the last Americans to be executed under that law were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who died in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, on June 19, 1953.

The Rosenbergs were accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets and sending them to the Soviet Union, according to an account by History.com. After their conviction on the espionage charges, a judge was given a choice of sentencing the pair to 30 years in prison — or death. The judge chose execution.