Quick Takes

Charles McCullough, one of the attorneys representing the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment movement targeting President Donald Trump, worked for the Obama administration and reported directly to controversial former director of national intelligence James Clapper.

McCullough was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Intelligence Community Inspector General.

McCullough is one of three senior attorneys at the Compass Rose Legal Group, which is representing the central whistleblower on the matter of Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. The firm’s founder and managing partner, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed that his law firm is representing “multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.”

McCullough recently sent a letter to the Acting Director of National Intelligence setting forth conditions for the original whistleblower to testify before the House Intelligence Committee led by Rep. Adam Schiff. McCullough requested security clearance so that he could attend any hearing with the whistleblower.

McCullough was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Intelligence Community Inspector General. And his bio on the Compass Rose law firm’s relates that he reported directly to Clapper.

As Breitbart News reported, a search of the Twitter account for the law firm’s founder and managing partner, Bakaj, finds anti-Trump posts such as repeated advocacy for Trump cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution over competency issues. The amendment offers a path for the commander-in-chief’s removal if the “president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Mark Zaid, senior counsel with the Compass Rose Legal Group, has also been connected to advocacy for anti-Trump whistleblowers.

Missing from the avalanche of news media coverage about the so-called whistleblower clients of Bakaj and Zaid is that at the beginning of Trump’s presidency Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid. The group is heavily tied to far-left activist organizations and Democratic politics.

In his Twitter profile, Zaid describes himself as a “non-partisan” attorney “handling cases involving national security, security clearances, govt investigations, media, Freedom of Information Act, & whistleblowing.” Missing from Zaid’s twitter profile is that he 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 purported whistleblower’s defense.

Whistleblower Aid was founded in September 2017 in the wake of Trump’s presidency to encourage government whistleblowers to come forward.

The group did not sit around waiting for whistleblowers. Upon its founding, Whistleblower Aid actively sought to attract the attention of Trump administration government employees by reportedly blasting advertisements for its whistleblower services on Metro trains, using mobile billboards that circled government offices for 10 hours a day, and handing out whistles on street corners as a gimmick to gain attention.

When Whistleblower Aid was first formed, the main banner for the mission statement of its website contained clearly anti-Trump language. “Today our Republic is under threat. Whistleblower Aid is committed to protecting the rule of law in the United States and around the world,” read the previous statement which can still be viewed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. That part of the mission statement received attention in the conservative media.