Trump supporters wrongly identified ex-Obama staffer as Ukraine whistleblower — resulting in death threats: report

President Donald Trump and many of his supporters have been calling for the outing of the Ukraine whistleblower. And one person who was wrongly identified by Trump supporters as the whistleblower, according to the Daily Beast, has received death threats.

The person wrongly identified, according to the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, is R. David Edelman — a former staffer in the Obama White House. Sommer quotes Edelman as saying that on Thursday, “There were people threatening real physical harm, alluding to the fact that I will not live very long. That was obviously upsetting for my family.”

Sommer reports that on Thursday, “tweets with photos of Edelman’s face surrounded by circles and arrows in a picture taken from his time at the White House were racking up tens of thousands of retweets.” That photo, according to Sommer, shows Obama White House staff feeling “dismayed” after learning of the 2016 presidential election results but was wrongly described on social media this week as “Obama staffers reacting to Trump’s first White House visit.”

Edelman explained, “It had my face circled, and it said something to the effect of, ‘Here is your alleged Ukraine whistleblower.”

But Edelman, according to Sommer, cannot possibly be the Ukraine whistleblower: he left the White House in January 2017 — which was two and one-half years before Trump’s now-infamous July 25 phone conservation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.