Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants Congress to subpoena the whistleblower, who was reported to be linked to former Vice President Joe Biden.
Linking to the recent report, which allegedly revealed the whistleblower’s identity, Paul argued the person should be brought before the House and questioned.
“It is being reported that the whistleblower was Joe Biden’s point man on Ukraine,” Paul wrote in a statement on Twitter this week. “It is imperative the whistleblower is subpoenaed and asked under oath about Hunter Biden and corruption.”
While vice president in 2016, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid from Ukraine unless then-President Petro Poroshenko ousted Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor who was probing the energy company Burisma.
Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma from 2014 to 2019, making tens of thousands of dollars a month, in addition to conducting business in China while his father was in office.
President Donald Trump asked new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July to “look into” what happened with the Bidens in the past, a request Democrats have said amounts to asking to probe a political rival because Joe Biden is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Shortly after the whistleblower complaint was reported on, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced an impeachment inquiry against Trump, prompting the president to release a transcript of the phone call. He has repeatedly asserted his request was not improper.
Trump is among the other Republicans who have said the whistleblower should be identified and questioned.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was also saying for a period of time that his committee would bring the whistleblower in but later reversed course after it was revealed at least one staffer of the committee met with the whistleblower prior to the complaint being filed.
Schiff, who expressed regret for misleading the public on his team’s contact with the whistleblower, said he feels it’s no longer necessary to bring the whistleblower in for questioning since the transcript was made public.
Mark Zaid and Andrew Bakaj, who are representing the whistleblower, made the same argument in an op-ed last week.
“Over the past month, we have all learned more facts—from the White House’s summarized transcript of the July call with Ukraine’s president, from text messages provided to the House of Representatives by the former U.S. special representative for Ukraine, and from congressional testimony by people intimately involved with the circumstances the whistleblower first raised concern about,” they wrote.
“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. 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.”
