Ted Lieu And Whistleblowers
Rep. Ted W. Lieu, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee helping to lead the impeachment process, previously used his Congressional position to promote Whistleblower Aid, a small nonprofit started by the attorney for the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment claims.
Upon its founding in September 2017 in the wake of Trump’s presidency, Whistleblower Aid blasted advertisements around D.C. actively seeking whistleblowers during the Trump administration.
The week that Whistleblower Aid commenced operations, Lieu promoted the group using language clearly meant to encourage anti-Trump whistleblowers.
“Now, more than ever, we need patriots to step forward and inform the public of any unlawful or inappropriate activity by government officials,” Lieu said in a statement about Whistleblower Aid issued from his office and posted on his Congressional website.
“Whistleblower Aid is exactly the type of organization the American people need to make sure government is held accountable,” Lieu continued.
Mark Zaid is the attorney representing the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment movement investigating President Trump.
Largely missing from the avalanche of news media coverage about Zaid’s anonymous client rocking the nation’s capital is that at the beginning of Trump’s presidency Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid. That detail is also not mentioned in Zaid’s bio on his attorney website.
This even though Whistleblower Aid has been actively helping the first whistleblower also being represented by Zaid by setting up a GoFundMe page seeking to raise funds for the whistleblower’s defense. The page already brought in some $222,900 with a goal of raising $300,000.
Zaid is representing the whistleblower as an attorney for the small Compass Rose Legal Group. The firm’s founder, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed that his law firm is also representing “multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.”
Breitbart News reported that a search of Bakaj’s Twitter account finds anti-Trump posts such as repeated advocacy for Trump cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to remove Trump as president over claimed competency issues.
Zaid, meanwhile, doubles as Executive Director and founder of the James Madison Project, which says it seeks to promote government accountability. The Project features on its four-person advisory board John Podesta, who led Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, served as Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton and founded the Center for American Progress pushing a progressive agenda.