When Congress first put together a whistleblower process for employees of the intelligence community, lawmakers probably didn’t expect that it would be used to report potential misconduct by the president, but here we are. There’s a complaint by someone in the intelligence community that President Trump made some inappropriate promise to a foreign leader over a series of communications. So just how bizarre is this scenario and how is the whistleblower process supposed to work?

Welcome to Rabbit Hole. 

Untrodden territory: The whistleblowing process to report intelligence community employee concerns to Congress is used anywhere from four to 20 times a year, according to official reports. From what little we can tell from those reports, the intelligence community has never faced an issue remotely like the one raised by a complaint against Trump. The complaint, first filed on Aug. 12, reportedly involves Trump asking Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden’s son.