President Trump said he fired Michael Atkinson, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, on Friday because he did a “terrible” job by passing a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on to Congress. The report later became the basis for impeachment proceedings and Atkinson, a Trump appointee, was required as part of his job to forward whistleblower reports he deemed credible. Trump said Saturday that Atkinson should have looked at the complaint, seen that the phone call between Trump and Zelensky was “a perfect conversation” and known not to take it seriously. He complained that Atkinson never came to see him about the complaint either. “That man is a disgrace to inspector generals. He’s a total disgrace,” Trump said, adding that the whistleblower report was “fake.” He also made the bizarre suggestion that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was the whistleblowers’ source and then said the anonymous tipster—who raised concerns that Trump might have withheld aid in exchange for help from Ukraine to investigate political rivals—was “a fake whistleblower. And frankly, someone ought to sue his ass off.”
