Intel Community Secretly Changed The Whistle-Blower Rules To Allow The Trump-Ukraine Complaint Just Days Before It Was Filed
The Federalist’s Sean Davis has discovered that the intel community secretly changed the rules governing whistle-blowers, including amending the required form, in order to allow 2nd hand information to suffice. This happened just days before the Trump-Ukraine whistle-blower filed his complaint.

Sean Davis
✔@seanmdav
BREAKING: The intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblower complaints contain only direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing allegations.
A new version of the complaint form allowing hearsay was secretly revised last month.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/ …

Intel Community Secretly Nixed Whistleblower Demand Of First-Hand Info
Federal records show the intel community secretly revised a whistleblower complaint form to eliminate the requirement of first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.
thefederalist.com
The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”
The internal properties of
the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed…
…A previous version of the whistleblower complaint document, which the ICIG and DNI until recently provided to potential whistleblowers, declared that any complaint must contain only first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing and that complaints that provide only hearsay, rumor, or gossip would be rejected.
“The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing,” the previous form stated under the bolded heading “FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.” “This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing.”
“If you think that wrongdoing took place, but can provide nothing more than second-hand or unsubstantiated assertions, [the Intelligence Community Inspector General] will not be able to process the complaint or information for submission as an ICWPA,” the form concluded.