WASHINGTON — Michael Atkinson says he did what the law required, nothing more.
“I did what I had to do,” he said. “If I had kept quiet, I would have spent the last year, probably the rest of my life, not sure I could live with myself.”
Atkinson can trace his test of conscience to a precise moment: just before noon on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019, at his L-shaped desk in a nondescript office overlooking a highway in northern Virginia. That’s when he stopped dead at the second paragraph of a whistleblower’s complaint: “The president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
If true, Atkinson thought, this is a constitutional forest fire.
What happened next in those pre-coronavirus days seems ancient, if familiar, history, with the complaint sparking a congressional investigation and President Donald Trump’s impeachment, an action Democrats are threatening to duplicate in the wake of pro-Trump extremists storming the U.S. Capitol last week.
But now, speaking for the first time, Atkinson described the behind-the-scenes story of how the complaint became public. At the time, he served as the intelligence community’s internal watchdog and was plunged into a universal crucible of the Trump presidency: being forced to chose between political expediency and duty.