The question that jumps out of the House Intelligence hearing is: Who is the whistleblower? It’s incredible, at least to us, that the vast machinery of the House and the Democratic Party is being cranked up to impeach a president based on an allegation from an individual who is anonymous. It seems that no one involved knows his name.

Wouldn’t it make sense, what with all the talk by Democrats about fealty to the Constitution, for Congress to disclose who the whistleblower is? The Bill of Rights, after all, establishes that an accused person shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. Yet here the President of America has no idea of who is accusing him.

Neither does America’s acting director of national intelligence, Vice Admiral Maguire. He’s the head of our entire intelligence apparatus, privy to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. Yet he’s forced to make an assessment of a poison pen letter from someone whose name and identity he doesn’t know. And who is in his own chain of command.

Kafka couldn’t make this up. It’s as bad as a hearing on a college campus. We understand that the Sixth Amendment does not apply to politics. It applies only to the all persons accused in criminal prosecutions. Yet it can be said that the Sixth — which grants confrontation — is the very soul of fairness in the American system.

We had just issued the first edition of this editorial when the New York Times reported that the whistleblower is a CIA officer who had been detailed to the White House but is back at the agency. The Times didn’t name the individual. It quoted his lawyer as calling publishing “any perceived identifying information” as “deeply concerning.”

Yet confrontation could well help the President, his lawyers, and Congress assess the accuser’s motive. That strikes us as relevant. The accuser was using the whistleblower procedure established to cover intelligence community individuals and intelligence operations. It is being used to attack a president on a matter other than intelligence.

How can we know the whistleblower’s motives were pure? An aversion to poison pen letters and anonymous sources is no passing concern here at the Sun. It’s baked into our core principles and marked in “The New York Sun Reporter’s Handbook and Manual of Style,” which says: “Unattributed negative quotes are not to be used in the Sun.”

Arrangements are reportedly being worked on that might permit the whistleblower against Mr. Trump to be questioned by the Intelligence Committee. Reports suggest such a meeting would take place behind closed doors, and it is not clear that the whistleblower’s identity would become known to the public, let alone the individual being accused

We understand that whistleblowers often fear that standing up in public invites repercussions; a dispatch on this head appears in Politico today. Requiring that whistles are blown in public might mean some wrong-doing goes unexposed. Then again, too, the right of confrontation in criminal trials means some guilty parties go unpunished.

It’s not our intention to gainsay the ideals of the whistleblower against Mr. Trump or attack his character. It is our intention to suggest that Americans are not going to understand fully what is happening in the impeachment proceeding until the whistleblower finds it within himself to come forward in person. That’s the American way.