I would guess because they want to put fear into anyone else who gets the idea in their head to come forward. One can surmise that the level of lawlessness apparent in the Trump admin covers ground that has yet to be known outside of the admin. From stock market manipulation to the Khashoggi murder to who knows what else, these guys are in deep and dirty.
Well maybe Mafia like since there is no mention of a hit.
The villagers greet WB at the airport.

They need a person for a smear to hold.
To use as a shiny object to point to, so Trump’s base doesnt look at the substance
I wish it would come so we could finally get rid of these assholes.
It always has been coming very soon.
How can you Tweet nasty things about someone you know nothing about?
Trump needs to know who it is so they can lie about their honor.
If it is someone who has served our country and has a sterling reputation they have to be anti Trump and pro constitution and a pox on Trump’s country.
TPM,
This is click bait, right?
C’mon, make a guess as to why Trump wants this person’s name made public.
And yet quite a few people successfully grift off a rapture that was supposed to happen 200 years ago. Funny how that works.
The point is to intimidate the next whistleblower into shutting up.
He wants to invite him to the White House for McDonald’s hamburgers (or is that hamberders?)
This is all about Trump retaining his base…they need to paint the WB as a Democratic operative and part of the Deep State in order to taint the entire impeachment inquiry. It’s the same strategy they are trying to use against Schiff. That will get the base to reject anything they hear about impeachment, so that the evidence just slides off the screen (or gets ignored completely in conservative media), and hopefully enough people fall for the “both sides” argument and decide it’s just one more political fight instead of the attack on the Constitution it really is.
It’s a real question if they will succeed…I think it’s a foregone conclusion at this point that the Senate will refuse to convict Trump, so they need to do everything they can now to control the narrative, so there is enough doubt with the base for them to get away with leaving Trump in office. If they don’t control the narrative, then enough Americans will realize what a complete travesty of justice the Republicans have wrought, and then will lose badly (as they really should). The Republicans look like fools to those of us getting the whole set of facts, but the majority of Americans don’t follow this, or get the facts, the way we do, so it’s really an open question whether justice will prevail.
Standard response from a guilty person accused of a crime. Instead of denying it, they demand to know “Who told you that?”
These Republican’s are soo spineless. Paul at the rally urging the press to reveal the whistleblower’s identity. Well some GOP members are saying they know who it is… If they know Paul knows correct? Why doesn’t mister Trump ally reveal the whistleblower’s id? This whole thing is about intimidating witnesses.
Looks like the Steele Dossier playbook. Discredit the source and claim the origins were nefarious so you can claim the entire exercise illegitimate. I predict Trump and the republicans will not mount a defense, they will simply claim that impeachment is a sham and refuse recognize the authority of the house to conduct oversight that is based on a partisan conspiracy.
How can Barr and Durham investigate the origins of the impeachment probe without knowing the identity of the WB?
“It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.” – Fielding Melish
The whistleblower serves an administrative or organizational check, not a judicial one. He related credible belief that a phone conversation the president conducted with a foreign leader, of which he had second- or third-hand knowledge, very likely constituted abuse of power and seems to have engendered a cover up of that abuse. His job was done. He made an anonymous denunciation. It then fell on IGs and the DoJ, and failing that, congress, to pursue judicial recourse. Which the first and third have done. (That the DoJ hasn’t is likely more evidence of the coverup.) The facts check out. Follow the facts. It couldn’t be simpler, unless you really want it to be much more complicated. Or muddied. As Republicans do.
This is about intimidating other potential whistleblowers. There’s some simple revenge mixed in, sure, but this move is to preempt any other potential witnesses. Remember there was some talk about other whistleblowers coming forward back in the early days, but none have shown up. Not an accident.