Jordan requested Tristan Leavitt further explain from a Congressional perspective, what constitutes a whistleblower:

In light of all these obstacles for FBI whistleblowers, you think Congress would do everything that it could to welcome their disclosures here. But FBI employees coming to Congress have unfortunately been shamefully treated by Democrats on this committee. It’s one thing to hear allegations and find them unpersuasive or even distasteful. An office can even ignore the allegations if they choose, that is their prerogative. But to go out and actively smear the individuals making disclosures, is far worse. That’s what the Democrats on this committee did when they released the March 2nd report entitled, “GOP Witnesses: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the State of the Republican Investigations.”

That report was inaccurate, both on the law and on the facts. The law doesn’t define the term “whistleblower.” Instead, it protects from retaliation individuals who engage in protected activity. For over a century, simply making disclosures of any information to Congress has been a protected activity. Furthermore, an appropriations rider in effect at this time prohibits money from paying the salary of any federal employee who prohibits or prevents any other federal employee such as FBI whistleblowers from communicating with Congress. The Democrats’ report denied whistleblower status to individuals engaged in the precise activity the legislative branch has considered protected since 1912. The report’s reliance on evidence for whistleblower status is also misplaced. Simply communicating a reasonable belief of misconduct is protected whistleblower activity under the law. This applies regardless of whether the whistleblower produces evidence at that time backing up their allegations. Only protecting whistleblowers disclosures accompanied by conclusive evidence, as the Democrats seem to require, would have disastrous consequences for retaliation throughout the federal government. My experience working for Congress was that whistleblowers brought allegations, and where the committees found those allegations worthy of further follow-up and congressional action, we conducted investigations.

No one expects a private citizen to investigate a crime before going to the police. And we didn’t expect the whistleblower to investigate their own agency.

It’s also essentially how the law for remedying retaliation through the MSBP is set up. Where making a non-frivolous allegation, leads to discovery, interviews, and more. Simply put, the burden isn’t on the whistleblower to produce the evidence at the outset. That’s why there’s an investigative process.