# Joseph Maguire **Joseph Maguire** is a retired U.S. Navy vice admiral and career Navy SEAL who, as **Acting Director of National Intelligence** from August 2019 to February 2020, withheld the Ukraine whistleblower complaint from the congressional intelligence committees — the act of suppression that turned an internal complaint into the [[Trump First Impeachment]]. He retired from the Navy in 2010 after thirty-six years of service, having commanded at every level of Naval Special Warfare, and served as Director of the [[National Counterterrorism Center]] from December 2018 until August 2019. Trump announced his elevation to acting DNI by tweet on August 8, 2019; he took the office on August 15, 2019. ## The complaint he did not forward An intelligence community officer filed a formal whistleblower complaint on August 12, 2019 concerning Trump's July 25 call with [[Volodymyr Zelensky]]. [[Michael Atkinson]], Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, determined the complaint **credible** and a matter of **urgent concern** — a finding that, under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, obliged the Director of National Intelligence to transmit it to the House and Senate intelligence committees within seven days. Maguire did not. [[ODNI]] consulted the Justice Department — then headed by [[William Barr]], who was himself named in the call record — and withheld the complaint on a claim of confidential and potentially privileged communications. Atkinson notified the committees on September 9, 2019 that the complaint existed and was being withheld contrary to statute. On **September 13, 2019**, [[Adam Schiff]], chair of the [[House Intelligence Committee]], issued a subpoena to Maguire with an accompanying letter stating that the committee "can only conclude" that the misconduct at issue involved the president or senior White House officials. The subpoena demanded the complaint and any ODNI correspondence with [[The White House]] by September 17, on pain of an open hearing. The complaint was released publicly on September 26, 2019. Trump replaced Maguire in February 2020 with Richard Grenell. ## Why he is in this vault Maguire is the vault's cleanest case of the **acting-official gap**: a statutory transmission duty that ran to a Senate-confirmed DNI, discharged instead by an acting appointee serving at the president's pleasure, who routed the question to a Justice Department the complaint implicated. The structural point is not his motive — CNN's contemporaneous profile described him as a career officer rather than a loyalist — but that the safeguard assumed an officeholder insulated by confirmation and found one who was not. See [[Whistleblower Suppression Arc]] and [[Inspector General Oversight Tree]]. ## See Also - [[Trump First Impeachment]] · [[Trump-Ukraine Scandal]] · [[Michael Atkinson]] - [[Adam Schiff]] · [[House Intelligence Committee]] · [[ODNI]] - [[Inspector General]] · [[Whistleblower Suppression Arc]]