Why isn’t the whistle blower outed since the background is the continuation of the Russia probe which was the removal of the President by the Obama Democrats, which is a coup?

A victim, the President, should be able to face his accuser.  It isn’t any different than the Democrats refusal to allow the President any representation during the House investigation.

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Whistleblowers
Court Cases and Trials

Impeachment

How can a whistleblower stay anonymous if there is an impeachment trial? Doesn’t the 6th Amendment “confrontation clause” allow for the accused to face his accuser?

Mark Pollot, J.D. Constitutional Law & Civil Rights, University of San Diego School of Law (1986)
Answered Nov 11, 2019
Yes, the Sixth Amendment must apply to impeachment proceedings, claims that it doesn’t apply notwithstanding. That anti-Sixth Amendment argument simply does not work. If one actually reads the Constitution (not a favorite sport of House Democrats) we see that it provides that the House has the “sole power of impeachment”. It would be ridiculous to say that the House has the sole power of impeachment and then go on to say that the Senate is part of the impeachment process. One may as well say that a Federal District Court is part of the grand jury process.

What this means, obviously, is that once the House adopts articles of impeachment, impeachment is over and the House has no further role to play. All control passes to the Senate. This in turn means that any argument that impeachment is a political process and is therefore unreviewable by the courts is irrelevant. Before discussing what this means for this question we must recognize that, regardless of whether impeachment is a political process or a legal one, due process still applies. It applies to every governmental action. If it didn’t it would be difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the constitutionality of government actions and statutes, however arbitrary they might be.

Once the matter moves to the Senate, things are different, just as in the case of a criminal trial vs the adoption of the charging document. There must be a trial on the articles of impeachment. It must be presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who presumably is not just there as decoration. He would have the same obligations and powers as any other judge presiding over a trial, which would include, among other things, management of the process and deciding questions of law such including but not limited to, the admissibility of evidence and the constitutionality and legal adequacy of the complaint/articles of impeachment.

Otherwise he is mere window dressing. The Senators, who act as a jury, are obliged to take a special oath, just as jurors must. The proceedings must be open to public view and due process and other constitutional protections must be observed. In short, the Senate trial is a legal process in every aspect, whatever the impeachment process may be, and an accused must have every protection any criminal defendant would be entitled to.

In fact, given the stakes of impeachment for the country, adherence to the Sixth Amendment other constitutionally relevant protections is even more important.

In the case of an ordinary criminal matters, once a complaint or indictment is filed, a defendant has the right to challenge the legal adequacy of the complaint or indictment. He or she is free to challenge whether the complaint alleges an actual crime. He or she has the right to argue that, even if the complaint or indictment properly alleges a violation of an existing statute, the law in question is unconstitutional. This is not a challenge to indictment or charging process. It is a challenge to the indictment/complaint Itself. The articles of impeachment stand on the same footing. Democrats themselves like to analogize the impeachment process as a grand jury process. This is not entirely correct. No analogy is. Unlike grand juries, where members are chosen from the same pool of potential voters that trial juries come from and screened to get as unbiased and disinterested a jury as possible, Impeachment proceedings are chock full of self interested and biased individuals. Nevertheless, he who lives by the analogy dies by the analogy. Even when the process can’t be challenged, the product of the process can be.

What do appellate court do (and the Supreme Court is an appellate court for most purposes)? They determine questions of law, the fairness and adequacy of the trial process, and the sufficiency of the evidence. They defer to the trial court’s determination of fact unless there is inadequate evidence to support the findings of fact, but legal questions are decided de novo (as though never ruled on by the trial court). Both the trial judge and the appellate court may determine the legal adequacy of a complaint or indictment (i.e. the charging document). That is, they have jurisdiction (power) to determine whether a charging document charges an actual crime and whether the facts alleged in the charging document, assuming them to be true, support the charge. If one or both of these are deficient the charges may be dismissed. There is no reason to suppose this power is lacking simply because the court involved is the entire Senate.

Does anyone doubt, for example, that the Supreme Court would hear the case if, say, the Senate acted on articles of impeachment and decided to remove the president from office without having a trial presided over by the Chief Justice? Of course it would.

In the case of impeachment the Constitution permits impeachment only for high crimes and misdemeanors. The fact that impeachment is a ““political process”, if indeed it is, gives the House no more authority to make up its own crimes on the spot than a prosecutor has the power to make up new crimes in an indictment or a criminal complaint. There is no such thing as federal common law so, to be a crime, it must be enshrined in a statute. Furthermore, an attempt in a political process to make up a crime to apply to prior actions would, in my professional opinion, run afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto crimes as well as the requirement that new crimes must be passed by both houses of Congress and presented to the President for his or her signature. Articles of impeachment that fail to state high crimes and misdemeanors should be as reviewable by the Supreme Court as any other constitutional question. For the Court to do otherwise would, in my estimation, be a dereliction of duty, especially in a process that was specifically designed to minimize the ability for it to be used as a political tool.

In practical terms the Senate has the ability and the right to hear from every witness that Schiff and company denied and the President is entitled to call witnesses for his defense subject to the rules of evidence. Once the matter is turned over to the Senate the House becomes irrelevant and without power to affect the Senate proceedings in any way.

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