This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 1st, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

The rules governing whistleblowers are set by statute and the legal

requirements for whistleblowers simply haven't changed recently.

The contrary claim in the Federalist quickly made the rounds this week promoted

by Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and the president himself.

To be clear, the claim that whistleblowers recently were required to have firsthand information

of wrongdoing was false. Cato's Julian Sanchez provides the details.

As everybody gets fired up about this whistleblower who has made some fairly specific and we've since learned corroborated in some ways

claims about the president of the United States bringing pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt or launch

investigations into the former Vice President Joe Biden and his son

Hunter Biden. There has been this kerfuffle relating to a form that is used by the

intelligence agencies to allow people to report what they believe is illegal or unconstitutional

conduct within the federal government of the United States of America.

And part of the problem that has been pointed out in particular by the Federalist,

but has been since picked up by Fox News, and even the President of the United States has tweeted out references to

this claim. It is that the claim, the form, the relevant form, which may or may not have been used by this whistleblower.

We're not, as you and I discussed this, it's not clear that he made use of that.

Was changed a very brief time before this whistleblower complaint was actually filed.

So if you could, and as clearly as you can, detail what that is, what that means to you.

So I want to bracket that for a moment and just say, in a sense,

it's a little absurd that we're talking about this.

We have at this point now, if not a verbatim transcript, a detailed summary of the controversial conversation, phone

...