He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.
I can see where it might sound that way if you haven't watched the testimony.
"I provided this classified information under oath to the inspector general" is not an avoidance tactic but a direction where to locate classified info.
"I'll tell you later" on the surface might sound like an avoidance tactic, but when he was asked when he could provide it the answer was "immediately after today's session." In other words, no stalling at all, he just preferred not getting arrested for sharing top-secret info publicly.
Willing to get arrested would be a huge signal that he's an actual whistleblower and not full of shit!
There's almost no chance he'd face any consequences given the topic and the amount of support he'd have the from the public, and even then, Daniel Hale's sentence for disclosing dozens of classified documents to reporters was ~3.5yrs in jail. The LARPers pretending like he'd be sent to gitmo are completely in lala land.
We only have one life, nobody wants to sacrifice 3 years of it. Just because you and I consider potential alien life disclosures to be important doesn't mean we have the right to demand someone with that knowledge sacrifice their own life for us to have it.
If I had hardcore proof of definite alien life on earth but by revealing it I'd spend time in prison, would I do it? Or would I be content to know that in the 4-billion year scope of life on Earth, people will probably eventually figure it out without me anyway, and that I could let go of my particular contribution to the arc of history for a simple, peaceful life with family? Maybe the latter...
If you wanted the latter, you wouldn't repeatedly go on national TV claiming a giant conspiracy and then testify in front of congress.. In any case, I'm not "demanding" that he do something that could result in jail time but rather pointing out that based on his own telling of his own story, he should be happy to do so. That he's not is strongly indicative that he's full of shit.
So the President doesn't know about it, but this random FBI dork does -- and it's such a well-kept secret that we're willing to extrajudicially imprison Americans who reveal details about the program -- but only if they do so in open testimony and not in a SCIF?
And he'll go to Gitmo, but only if the details are specific, because the people who will extrajudicially imprison the whistleblower for revealing details of the program are following the laws we have about classification?
He doesn't come off that way.
He testified under oath. Every time he was asked for specifics, he said he had them, had already provided them, or in some cases would provide them immediately after because they were classified--which is the proper response if you don't want to go to jail.
If he's a nut, you'd expect evasion, contradiction, waffling and avoidance when asked for specifics. I didn't see any of that. He is already providing data that will be verifiable. An attention-seeking con would work hard to avoid providing anything he can be called out on. I have no idea what's going on, and this is all nuts, but that certainly didn't fit the mold I was expecting.