Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley is endorsing her home-state senator Elizabeth Warren for president, breaking with her other high-profile freshmen female colleagues who have come to be known as “the squad.”

“The American people deserve to be represented by elected officials who see them, who listen to them, and who fight for them,” Pressley says in a video posted by Warren’s campaign. “I have seen Elizabeth in small church basements and in packed gymnasiums, and she is consistent. She never loses sight of the people.”

Pressley praises Warren for “fighting for fundamental change” and for understanding that “power belongs in the hands of the people.”

Pressley’s endorsement could help Warren win over black voters — with whom Warren has struggled to gain strength, compared with former Vice President Joe Biden. Pressley, a former Boston city councilwoman, was elected to Congress last year after upsetting a Democratic incumbent in the primary, making her the first African American woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts.

Part of a historic and diverse class of freshmen women, Pressley has aligned herself with other vocal progressive women, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Last month, those three all endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for president.

In recent days, President Trump and his allies have amplified their calls for the whistleblower who sparked the impeachment inquiry to be identified, presenting the question of whether it would be a crime for the president to unmask the anonymous whistleblower.

According to four former top federal government officials who worked in intelligence and national security, the answer is no.

“If Trump thinks he knows the name, he can come out and say it, and he’s probably as protected as anyone is,” said Robert Litt, former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama.

Litt and several other legal experts who talked to NPR said Trump uttering or tweeting the name could in theory trigger an article of impeachment for retaliating against a whistleblower, but it would not run afoul of any federal criminal statutes.

Similarly, if a news outlet, member of Congress or member of the public outed the whistleblower, legal experts said, no criminal law would be violated.

“There is no overarching protection for the identity of the whistleblower under federal law,” said Dan Meyer, a lawyer and the former executive director of the intelligence community whistleblower program. “Congress has never provided that protection.”

But that is not the same as saying there would be no repercussions for identifying the person whose complaint over Trump’s dealings with Ukraine catalyzed the House impeachment investigation.

A member of Congress who reveals the whistleblower’s identity could be removed from committees or face other legislative sanctions; a member of the public risks a civil lawsuit from the whistleblower’s legal team, which has threatened to hold anyone who reveals the name personally liable if the disclosure results in harm to the whistleblower or the person’s family.

Workplace retaliation against the whistleblower following disclosure would constitute a federal crime. But the act of unmasking itself is not unlawful, unless the person is a covert agent.

John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA, said part of the reason why federal laws do not prohibit the president from outing a whistleblower is that the concept was never considered within the realm of possibility before Trump took office.

McLaughlin said there is a longstanding deference to the protection of whistleblowers who risk their jobs to expose corruption, waste and abuse that has largely prevented federal government officials from naming them.

“But as with so many of our supposed laws, compliance depends largely on a sense of integrity and voluntary compliance,” McLaughlin said. “You just have to expect people to obey the law and the established practices, which of course in this administration has not always been the case.”

Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta said a presidential unmasking of the whistleblower would mark a historic event.

“The whole purpose of that law was to allow people to be able to speak to fraud or crimes they see within their jobs and without having to pay a price for vengeance and retribution,” said Panetta, adding that having a president publicly reveal a whistleblower’s name would be “unprecedented in history.”

Whistleblower law “provides no protection”

There is a patchwork of whistleblower protections under federal law. The specific framework that applies to the whistleblower who filed a complaint against Trump is outlined in the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998.

The law bans retaliation against an employee for blowing the whistle on perceived wrongdoing. It requires the inspector general to keep the lid on the whistleblower’s name, but it does not stop a member of Congress, a president or anyone else from identifying a whistleblower.

“[The Whistleblower Protection Act] provides no protection. It’s the worst-named statute Congress has ever passed,” Meyer said.

But, as Litt points out, if naming a whistleblower causes a chain reaction leading to a demotion or firing, or if the whistleblower is threatened with violence or is physically harmed, the legal situation could drastically change.

“Anybody who is thinking about outing the whistleblower has to take into account the possibility that if something happens to the whistleblower, there would be some civil liability for causing that to happen,” Litt said. “And while disclosing the identity of the whistleblower isn’t necessarily unlawful, creating a hostile work environment might be viewed as retaliation.”

Trump naming the whistleblower seen as “an existential issue”

One legal expert pushed back on the consensus view that identifying the whistleblower by itself is not a crime.

Stephen Kohn, a lawyer who has represented whistleblowers for more than 30 years and is the author of The New Whistleblower’s Handbook, points to a 2014 law that spells out intelligence community whistleblower protections.

Under the statute, an agency cannot launch a reprisal against an intelligence community whistleblower. The prohibition is to be enforced by the president, Kohn says. And so, he argues, Trump revealing the whistleblower, or allowing the individual’s name to come out, should be viewed as a type of reprisal.

“Disclosing the name of a whistleblower is perhaps one of the worst forms of retaliation,” Kohn said. “Trump’s obligations are not just to protect this whistleblower’s identity. It only begins there. The law says he has to ensure that nobody in the executive branch leaks out his name.”

Kohn said Trump could be subject to what’s called a writ of mandamus, a court order to a government official to properly carry out his or her official duties. While no president in 215 years has been subject to a mandamus, Kohn says it should be on the table.

“These questions go to the heart of democracy and the rule of law,” Kohn said. “This is an existential issue because you have the person with the legal responsibility to enforce and protect turning around and using that very authority to destroy.”

A newly surfaced video of an ABC News anchor’s unguarded remarks about the network’s coverage of the late Jeffrey Epstein has thrown ABC on the defensive.

In a leaked video posted Tuesday by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas, news anchor Amy Robach expresses her frustration to a colleague over ABC’s failure to broadcast her interview with a key accuser of Epstein.

Robach complains that the network “quashed” her interview, suggesting that ABC had yielded to threats from powerful forces, including Buckingham Palace. Prince Andrew is among those men whom the accuser alleges Epstein trafficked her to for sex. The prince’s representatives have denied that claim.

ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast.

“We would never run away from that,” Chris Vlasto, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015, when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

Robach’s comments in late August 2019 came just two days after an NPR story disclosed the existence of Giuffre’s interview and ABC’s failure to broadcast it. In the video, Robach is sitting on a chair at a studio set for ABC’s Good Morning America, at times swinging back and forth while speaking remotely through her microphone with an unseen colleague. It appears to be the early morning hours before broadcast or during advertising breaks.

“I’ve had the story for three years,” Robach says in the video. “We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told, ‘Who was Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.’ Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”

Robach goes on to say that Giuffre alluded to others in the interview, including former President Bill Clinton, Harvard University law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre has made similar accusations against all of them also in court documents. (All deny any wrongdoing or involvement in Epstein’s sex trafficking.) Giuffre has said in court papers that she saw Clinton in Epstein’s presence but did not witness Clinton participate in any sexual activity.

“I tried for three years to get it out to no avail, and now these new revelations and — I freaking had all of it,” Robach says on the tape. “I’m so pissed right now. Like, every day I get more and more pissed, ’cause I’m just like, ‘Oh my God! It was — what we had, was unreal.’ “

Dershowitz, who served as one of Epstein’s legal advisers, told NPR in August that he had called ABC News in 2015 just before the interview was supposed to have been broadcast to dissuade the network from airing Giuffre’s allegations.

ABC said it never intended to broadcast her allegations against Dershowitz. Yet legal scholar Dershowitz said he had called primarily on his own behalf, not Epstein’s, to warn ABC against giving Giuffre a platform. “I did not want to see her credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz told NPR. He said he spoke to two producers and an attorney in a series of calls in a 24-hour period.

The first 64 seconds of Project Veritas’ video appear to be unedited, just a straight span of Robach speaking. ABC News and Robach confirmed that the video and her remarks are real. Yet in separate statements released by a spokeswoman for ABC News, they argue that Robach’s frustrations do not reflect any breakdown in journalistic acumen.

Instead, Robach and ABC say they were unable to corroborate elements of some of the key charges from Giuffre.

“As the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration. I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts [Giuffre] didn’t air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC’s editorial standards about her allegations,” Robach said in her statement. “The interview itself, while I was disappointed it didn’t air, didn’t meet our standards. In the years since no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story.”

“At the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we have never stopped investigating the story,” the ABC News statement says. “Ever since we’ve had a team on this investigation and substantial resources dedicated to it.” The network said it intended to run a two-hour documentary and launch a six-part podcast on Epstein in January 2020.

Project Veritas is led by the conservative provocateur James O’Keefe, who tells NPR that the tape was sent to him unbidden by an employee at ABC News. “It’s an entirely new model for Project Veritas,” O’Keefe says.

In the past, O’Keefe has published recordings of phony donors pitching to NPR fundraising executives, which led to the forced departure of the network’s CEO in 2011, even though the tapes as initially released proved to be deceptively edited. Other efforts to try to lure a female CNN correspondent on a boat with sex toys and another to get Washington Post reporters to bite on a fake accusation of rape against a Republican Senate candidate ran aground.

In the more recent past, O’Keefe has run a bunch of surreptitiously recorded conversations with staffers at The New York Times and CNN that have yielded modest revelations and have largely been ignored. He has typically arranged for the taping ahead of time, with one of his own staffers or volunteers, or an employee of the news outlet under scrutiny who is sympathetic to his ideological efforts, asking leading questions.

ABC now says it was stymied by a development in the spring of 2015, just 10 days before it flew Giuffre and her family from Colorado to New York City for the interview. Giuffre had leveled many of her accusations in court papers against Epstein; Maxwell, his former girlfriend; and others she accused of being enablers, including Dershowitz.

On April 6, 2015, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra ruled that Giuffre could join a legal action against federal prosecutors. She accused the federal government of acting illegally by striking a deal allowing Epstein to skirt federal criminal charges without informing her until after the fact.

Yet Marra also ruled that many of the specifics of Giuffre’s allegations — whom she accused Epstein of trafficking her to and for what sexual interactions — should be struck from the record.

According to a network executive, that put a far greater burden on ABC’s reporting team, led by investigative producer Jim Hill. When allegations are contained in court documents, they are generally considered “privileged” under libel law — giving journalists latitude to report accusations accurately, whether or not they have been substantiated out of court. Once those details were removed from the formal court record, ABC had to corroborate Giuffre’s claims more concretely, on its own authority, the executive said. And in subsequent court filings, Giuffre has amended some of her recollection of precise dates and details in her allegations of activities that occurred close to two decades ago.

“We would never kill a story about Bill Clinton. Or we would never kill a story about Prince Andrew. That’s what’s ridiculous on its face,” Vlasto, the ABC News investigations chief, tells NPR. “That’s a great story. So if we could do that story, we would have done it!”

In early July, a federal judge publicly released a huge batch of documents in the Epstein case, including previously sealed filings that contained many of Giuffre’s specific accusations.

An ABC executive says the network had been relaunched on the project six months earlier — at the start of 2019. Inspired by the success of ABC’s podcast on corporate fraud at Theranos and by the competition of The Miami Herald, Vlasto and Hill had already pointed their focus squarely back at Epstein, ABC says. They then had to scramble when federal authorities brought new charges against Epstein, and once more when he died.