Was the Whistleblower Complaint Handled Correctly?

The stories about how the whistleblower’s complaint was handled have been dicey. Here’s a simple breakdown of what went down. For a more detailed discussion, I recommend a quick listen to “The Daily” podcast episode on it.

1. A few days after Trump’s conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, a CIA agent learns about it from concerned people in the White House. The agent reports it to the top CIA lawyers.
2. The CIA lawyer, as per protocol, reaches out to her counterpart in the White House to let them know about it.
3. The White House lawyer starts investigating, and interviews people in the White House who are aware of or heard the conversation. Some of these people are the same ones who told the CIA agent what went on.
4. The White House lawyers also bring the concern to top lawyers at the DOJ, who bring it to their boss, who happens to be Attorney General William Barr.
   UPDATE: We now know Barr has also been working on getting foreign governments to help Trump in exonerating Russia and implicating Biden.
5. The people at the White House who White House lawyers interviewed tell the CIA agent about it. They’re concerned that White House lawyers and not CIA lawyers are investigating.
6. This concerns the CIA agent because it’s like the fox guarding the henhouse; so he decides to go the whistleblower route and files a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general.
7. The Inspector general does his research and corroborates the whistleblower’s story. He finds the complaint credible and urgent. As per protocol, he forwards the information to the DNI (Director of National Intelligence), who is only there in an acting capacity and has been on the job for all of a hot minute.
8. The DNI is unclear about how to handle this because it involves the president, so he takes it to the DOJ, who (as we now know) has already gotten a heads up from the White House lawyers. The DOJ lawyers quash the complaint, saying it isn’t covered by intelligence community whistleblower protections,
9. And that’s how it ended up not going to Congress within the required timeframe.
10. The IG becomes concerned when he doesn’t hear anything, so he alerts Congress about the complaint.
11. The House Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to receive whistleblower information, is unable to obtain it, so the chair of the committee goes public.
12. The chair continues to have a hard time obtaining the document until public backlash forces the DOJ to turn it over.