WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump retweeted a post that included the alleged name of the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment by the House.
Trump retweeted the post just before midnight Friday. The president has backed efforts to unmask the whistleblower, although doing so could violate whistleblower protection laws. By Saturday morning, the post seemed to have disappeared on many users’ feeds, suggesting Trump had deleted it. The retweet then reappeared Saturday night.
Twitter told The Associated Press that an outage with one of its systems caused tweets on some accounts, including Trump’s, to be visible to some but not others.
The whistleblower filed a complaint in August about one of Trump’s telephone conversations with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other dealings with the Eastern European nation. The complaint prompted House Democrats to launch a probe that ended with Trump’s impeachment earlier this month. The matter now heads to the Senate, where the Republican majority is expected to acquit the president.
The central points from the whistleblower’s complaint were confirmed during the House impeachment hearings by a string of diplomats and other career officials, many of whom testified in public. The White House also released a transcript of Trump’s July 25 telephone call with Zelenskiy, in which he asks for help investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, his son and the Democratic National Committee.
Speculation about the whistleblower’s identity has been circulating in conservative media and on social media for months.
