The Washington Post published an in-depth but stomach-churning account of the CIA analyst who blew the whistle on Donald Trump’s blackmailing of Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky. That eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment, followed by a partisan acquittal. The overall message of the article is that the good guy lost and has paid a big price while bad guy Trump became emboldened.

That’s disturbing enough. But the details also paint a picture of how Trump used his position to get others to go along, either unwittingly or not, and enabled him to get away with it.

If there’s one thing the whistleblower’s story reveals, it’s how ill-equipped our American institutions were and probably still are to withstand bad-faith efforts of anti-democratic crooks like Donald Trump and his henchpeople.

Notice how The Hill and Fox News each had a hand in the Trump plot:

The analyst had been back at the agency for nearly two years, assigned to its Ukraine team, when he spotted an article in the Hill newspaper that accused senior Ukrainian officials of interfering in the 2016 election to hurt Trump. Another maintained that Biden, while serving as vice president, had bribed the Ukrainians to drop an investigation into an energy company with ties to his son.

The articles were being amplified by Giuliani on social media and Fox News. The analyst knew from his time working on Ukraine that they were baseless. A review of the stories by the Hill found that they relied on unreliable sources and contained significant inaccuracies.

WaPo details the steps the analyst took after he learned about Trump’s effort to blackmail Zelensky by withholding American aid in order to get the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on his future election opponent, Joe Biden. None of the people in power sought out by the analyst seemed to know what to do. Or maybe they just didn’t want to:

The CIA lawyers seemed “at a loss” about what to do, the analyst said. He hoped they would notify Congress. Instead, they informed the NSC’s top lawyer that a CIA employee was raising concerns about the president’s conduct. White House officials hurriedly moved the call transcript to a server set aside for highly classified information and warned NSC officials not to talk about Trump’s call with anyone.

“Years later, [the analyst] would ponder why he was the person who chose to act, while others, far more senior, remained silent,” The Post reported. It’s a good question. Regardless of the answer, it’s an ill omen for any checks on corruption or treason in a second Trump presidency.

It’s well known that the Democratic House went on to impeach Trump over the Ukraine matter. Also, that Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator who voted to convict. We did not know that when a right-wing activist vowed to reveal the whistleblowers name, “A CIA security detail drove him to his home, handed him two black plastic garbage bags and told him he had 10 minutes to stuff them with everything he would need for the foreseeable future. They bought him a burner phone and began moving him every few days to a new hotel room.”

Then this happened:

Two weeks later, Trump replaced Maguire as director of national intelligence with Richard Grenell, a combative loyalist. The next to go was Atkinson [the intelligence community’s inspector general], whom Trump fired in April 2020. Trump called him a “total disgrace.” Of the whistleblower, Trump fumed: “Somebody ought to sue his ass off.”

I hope there’s a book written and a movie made about the whistleblower. What his story reveals is at least as important, even if not more impactful, than what Woodward and Bernstein revealed.

The Post article concludes with the analyst considering what he may have accomplished by blowing the whistle. “It was, he concluded, still too soon to know.”

We already know that Trump used his office to enrich himself, rip off American taxpayers, steal top secret documents, and to try to steal the 2020 election. He couldn’t have done it without a lot of cooperation from those who, at best, looked the other way. Now, he could be on his way back for more – unless we stop him.