There are 363,000 federal workers in the greater Washington, D.C., area. In the first week of September, history turned in the office of one of them. The intelligence analyst who blew the whistle on President Donald Trump had just gotten off the phone with the Inspector General’s office. One of a handful of people who had read the analyst’s report alleging that Trump had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election, the Inspector General had found the analyst’s concerns “urgent” and “credible.” But there was a problem: higher-ups in the intelligence community had spoken to the White House. Both were blocking the IG from sending the complaint to Congress.

There is a particular kind of silence in the offices of the intelligence community. The buildings have multipaned windows with special protective coatings that prevent eavesdropping so virtually all exterior noise is blocked. There are few conversations in the carpeted hallways—people mind their own business—and everyone ensures their phone calls cannot be overheard. Amid the ambient hum of HVAC systems and the occasional ringing of an elevator bell, the atmosphere is one of monastic isolation. Sitting alone in that silence, the analyst asked, “What do I do now?”

The law provides one answer. In 2014, Congress added a paragraph to the statute that created the role of intelligence community Inspector General. “An individual who has submitted a complaint or information to the Inspector General,” it reads, “may notify any member of either of the Congressional intelligence committees, or a staff member of either of such committees.”

For the analyst, it wasn’t an easy call. The attempt to block the complaint had upped the stakes. What would happen if the analyst came forward? Whistle-blowers are protected from retaliation by law, but President Trump had attacked government officials before, and his supporters were even more threatening. Congress was its own minefield. Republicans on the Hill had backed Trump on Russia, the analyst’s area of expertise. Democrats, for their part, were looking for an edge in the 2020 election and might turn a government employee, like the whistle-blower, into one.

But multiple people had told the analyst that during a July 25 phone call, the President had “sought to pressure” his Ukrainian counterpart to dig up dirt on political rivals and pursue a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. The analyst believed that Trump was using the sovereign power of the American presidency in an attempt to stay in office. It was an affront to democracy, the whistle-blower decided. There was only one ethical choice—going to Congress and telling the truth.

As it turned out, the analyst was not alone. For much of 2019, in different corners of America’s globe-spanning national-security apparatus, more than a dozen public servants reported concerns to their superiors about the President’s handling of Ukraine. They were diplomats and policy wonks, budget crunchers and combat veterans. Most had acted alone, largely unaware of what was happening elsewhere in government. None knew until much later how far things had gone. Each had played by the rules, putting professionalism and public service ahead of their own policy preference. Each had been ignored or quashed by political bosses up the chain of command.

The analyst’s actions helped launch a fast-moving congressional investigation that brought the dissent to light. The rush of revelations that has followed paints a damning portrait of the President’s use, and abuse, of power. The public servants who came forward provided the foundation for the articles of impeachment against Trump that are expected to be approved by the U.S. House of Representatives before Christmas. That vote would set up a Senate trial with the possibility, albeit remote, that Trump could become the first President removed from office for violating the Constitution and the law.

Yet how things play out for these once unknown federal employees may be as important, if not more so. Even before we had a Constitution, we had protections for public servants who report abuses of power. “It is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States,” the Continental Congress resolved on July 30, 1778, in the middle of the Revolution, “to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

As he fights back against impeachment, Trump is testing that principle, collapsing the space for dissent. Arguing that Congress is abusing its authority, Trump loyalists have continued their efforts to block the airing of public servants’ concerns. Recasting the balance of power that has existed between Congress and the White House since Watergate, Trump ordered all Executive Branch employees not to testify in the impeachment inquiry. For more than two months, he has attacked the public servants as “traitors” and “human scum.” At the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, he suggested the proper response to the whistle-blower’s complaint was the punishment historically reserved for “spies” and for “treason”: the death penalty.

The public servants came forward to tell their stories anyway. In Kyiv, the 33-year veteran diplomat Marie Yovanovitch, known as Masha, was one of the first to see Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, advancing what she would later conclude was a personal political mission for the President. After she was yanked from the job, her successor, Ambassador William Taylor, a Vietnam veteran with 50 years’ experience in government, questioned the efforts to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump’s potential opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden. At the White House, Trump’s top Russia expert, Fiona Hill, uncovered and then reported what she later realized was a “domestic political errand.” Hill’s Ukraine expert on the National Security Council (NSC), Lieut. Colonel Alexander Vindman, witnessed the July 25 call and raised alarms. In the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the fiscal boiler room of the federal government, 15-year senior civil servant Mark Sandy struggled to reconcile Congress’ lawful provision of military aid to Ukraine with Trump’s orders to withhold it, and raised legal concerns with his superior.

For each, the decision to step forward came at a cost. None expected to become household names or to find their faces on televisions across the country night after night. And though each followed the rules and used the proper channels, some have found themselves vilified online, their decades of government service impugned and their background questioned. Several have been assailed publicly by the President.

At first, none would speak with TIME for this article, citing a mix of fear of retribution and a reluctance to be seen as glory seekers. Eventually some agreed to share their stories in interviews, either directly or through intermediaries. Several became emotional when speaking about what they described as the most difficult weeks of their careers. Some expressed concern about the impact on their families and colleagues; some fear for their own safety. The story that emerges—based on scores of interviews in Washington and Kyiv, and a review of thousands of pages of depositions, communications and other documents—provides an inside view of the historic events that unfolded this year.

In shouldering the 241-year principle of speaking truth before the American people, each performed a duty. The first day on the job, every federal employee takes an oath, swearing to the same promise the President-elect pledges on the West Front of the Capitol-: to defend the Constitution. The courage they summoned was not to break the law, but to follow it.

***

It was a Wednesday night in April at the Kyiv residence of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, a brick and stucco mansion that sits close enough to the Orthodox church next door that you could hear the choir. Guests passed through the columns of the portico to greet America’s top diplomat in the country, Marie Yovanovitch. She was hosting an event to honor a young anticorruption activist killed last year in an attack with sulfuric acid. But even as she greeted top members of the newly elected government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, she kept getting calls urging her to return immediately to the embassy to talk to the State Department in Washington on a secure line.

Slipping out of the event at 9 p.m. while the guests were still mingling, she made the 30-minute drive to her office in the walled embassy compound. After being told to stand by for important news in a first call with Washington, she worked at her desk until she received a second at 1 a.m. Her urgent, unexplained orders: take the next flight back to Washington. The order was so abrupt that Yovanovitch did not have time to organize the trip home for her then 90-year-old mother, who had been living with her at the residence in Kyiv.

A veteran diplomat who had served from Mogadishu to Moscow, Yovanovitch had known something murky was afoot. In February, a senior Ukrainian official had told her he had been rebuffing repeated attempts by Giuliani to discuss investigations into Democrats and the 2016 election. At some point, Giuliani and his associates decided Yovanovitch was also an obstacle to those aims. The official, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, told her two Giuliani associates were telling people that she should be replaced and warned her to watch her back. Other Ukrainian officials seemed to be starting to treat Giuliani, not Yovanovitch, as the U.S. representative in Ukraine.

By March, the campaign against her had broken into the open. Ukraine’s then Prosecutor General, Yuriy Lutsenko, had alleged in an interview with a U.S. publication that Yovanovitch had given him a “do not prosecute” list during their first meeting in 2016. Lutsenko later retracted the claim, but Trump himself promoted the story on social media. In late March, Donald Trump Jr. attacked her on Twitter, calling her a “joker.”

Concerned that her credibility was being undermined, Yovanovitch sent an email on the State Department’s classified system. She told her bosses about Giuliani’s shadow negotiations with Ukrainian officials and the smear campaign against her, and urged a statement of support. It never came. Less than a month later, she was on a plane back to the U.S.

In Washington, there was at least one person Yovanovitch trusted enough to tell about her mysterious recall: her potential replacement, Ambassador William Taylor, a decorated veteran and mentor to a generation of foreign-service officers. When they met in his office overlooking the Lincoln Memorial, Taylor closed the interior blinds of the glass-walled room to let Yovanovitch talk freely, eyes welling with tears as she told the story. One of her deepest regrets was the way she had been forced to leave the embassy staff without really saying goodbye or explaining the reasons for her sudden departure, she told people close to her.

Even before that, Taylor had concerns about taking over in Kyiv, where he had served as U.S. ambassador from 2006 to 2009. A strong believer in helping the country fight back against Russia, which had invaded it in 2014, he worried that President Trump “has a special place in his heart for Putin,” says one person familiar with Taylor’s thinking. As he observed Giuliani’s shadow diplomacy, Taylor decided to consult one of his mentors, Stephen Hadley, who served as National Security Adviser under President George W. Bush. Hadley told Taylor what he had told others weighing public service under the Trump Administration: only do it if you believe you can be effective. To know, Taylor needed to talk to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was pushing him to return.

On May 28, Taylor met with Pompeo in the Secretary’s antique-filled office on “Mahogany Row,” the seventh-floor sanctum of State Department leadership. Taylor “pointed out that the President did not like Ukraine,” according to two people who attended the meeting. To Taylor’s surprise, Pompeo agreed, but said he would attempt to change Trump’s feelings. Most important, he assured Taylor that U.S. policy in Ukraine would remain unchanged: America would back Ukraine with military and financial support and resolute opposition to Moscow. One of Pompeo’s top aides told Taylor, “Look, Bill, call me anytime if you’ve got questions or problems [and] I can check with the Secretary,” he testified.

Taylor’s wife Deborah, a biblical scholar, had serious doubts. She had known her husband’s idealism to shade, on occasion, into naiveté, and she had seen other officials unwittingly compromise themselves while in the service of the Trump Administration. She feared that in his eagerness to be effective in Ukraine, Taylor might also be pressured to cross a moral line that would embarrass and anger the people who loved him. Taylor accepted the job over Deborah’s objections.

He learned through media reports in May that Giuliani was asking to meet with the new Ukrainian administration and was urging Zelensky to launch investigations into Trump’s rivals. He became more alarmed after a June 28 conference call with Zelensky. Also on the call was Gordon Sondland, a hotelier and Trump donor the President had named U.S. ambassador to the European Union, who before the call told everyone on the line he “wanted to make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring” the conversation. Taylor testified that he “sensed something odd” when Sondland did not include the career officials back in Washington who would typically have been on such a call. Before Zelensky joined the line, Taylor also heard other political appointees discussing the need to relay that Trump wanted “cooperation on investigations to get to the bottom of things,” he told lawmakers.

Taylor repeatedly phoned the Pompeo aide who had urged him to get in touch if he had any questions for the Secretary, but did not get clarity from Washington. “I was starting to get suspicious,” Taylor later testified, so at the end of June he reached out to a colleague in Washington, George Kent, who urged him to write everything down. Taylor already was. His father, a former official at NASA, had taught his son the habit of taking meticulous notes. After every meeting or phone call, the diplomat would scrawl the details in tiny script inside his 3-by-5 in. notebooks, which he kept with him in a brown leather wallet.

***

Back in Washington, suspicions were also spreading. At the NSC, one of the first to raise alarms was Fiona Hill, Trump’s top expert on Russia and Europe. With a staff of overworked experts, Hill had been scrambling for two years to manage the chaos of Trump’s diplomacy. Random, high-profile people would call her at her ornate, high-ceilinged office across from the West Wing and sometimes show up at the White House, unannounced, with guests in tow. On far-right blogs, Hill had been called a mole for liberal billionaire George Soros or the anonymous aide responsible for a scathing anti-Trump op-ed in the New York Times. Her job seemed to entail constantly swimming upstream against an onrushing current of pending disasters.

In this environment, reports of Giuliani making mischief in Ukraine seemed like a sideshow, one of many weird subplots stirred up by Trumpworld’s fringe players. Then, on July 10, Sondland and several top Ukrainian diplomats met with Hill and her boss, National Security Adviser John Bolton, in Bolton’s corner office in the West Wing. Amid the choreographed talk of U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, Sondland, the E.U. ambassador, blurted out something off-script: the Ukrainians would get their White House meeting only if they opened the investigations Trump wanted. Bolton stiffened in his chair, checked his watch and called the meeting to a halt.

For Hill, it was a eureka moment. Giuliani’s political mischief-making and Sondland’s demand for investigations were part of a shadow foreign policy that subjugated America’s stated support for Ukraine to Trump’s 2020 interests. Bolton, a Russia hawk, was livid, Hill testified. Sondland moved to take the Ukrainian officials down to the Ward Room, a small windowless space in the basement of the West Wing near the Situation Room. Bolton pulled Hill aside and instructed her “to go downstairs, find out what was being discussed and to come right back up and report it to him,” Hill later recalled in her testimony.

As she walked into the Ward Room, Hill heard Sondland telling the Ukrainians that he had an agreement with Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, that would grant Zelensky a White House meeting in exchange for opening the investigations. Hill asked the Ukrainian officials to leave the room, then chastised Sondland for his “inappropriate” demands. She went back upstairs to report to Bolton. His instructions made such an impression that she recounted them to Congress from memory, months later: “You go and tell [the National Security Council’s top lawyer John] Eisenberg that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up on this.” Sondland and his lawyer declined to comment on the record.

Hill wasn’t the only one who reported Sondland’s offer. The NSC’s Ukraine expert, Vindman, had come forward too. Vindman had immigrated to the U.S. from the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1979, when he was 3, and had served in the U.S. Army for two decades, doing tours as an infantry officer in South Korea, Germany and Iraq, where he was wounded by a roadside bomb and awarded the Purple Heart. Vindman felt it was his responsibility to tell Eisenberg what he had seen. “I was reporting something to the chain of command,” he told lawmakers Oct. 29. “What he did with that information is probably above my pay grade.” Eisenberg took notes and told him to bring any future concerns to him.

Two weeks later, Vindman did. Around 9:03 a.m. on July 25, Trump began his now infamous call with Zelensky. Vindman and Jennifer Williams, Vice President Mike Pence’s adviser on Europe and Russia, were official note takers on the call, and they and around four other officials were listening in from the Situation Room as Trump dialed in from the residence. Almost as soon as Trump started talking, Vindman became uneasy.

Vindman had drafted the President’s talking points, but as he scribbled furiously in one of the government-issue notebooks he regularly used, he could hear Trump going off script. Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor,” and then launched into a list of troubling requests. The President asked Zelensky to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in the 2016 U.S. election. “The other thing,” Trump said. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution.” He asked Zelensky to look into it.

Like Hill, Vindman had a eureka moment. It was suddenly clear to him that rather than support an ally in a shooting war against Russia, Trump was using Kyiv’s desperate position to pressure Zelensky to smear a possible 2020 opponent. Vindman brought his notebook to Eisenberg, the NSC lawyer, and read him through the call, underscoring the points where Trump appeared to solicit interference in the 2020 campaign. Eisenberg took everything down on a yellow notepad. Later that week, Eisenberg came back to Vindman and told him “not to talk to anybody else” about the matter, he testified. An NSC spokesperson declined to comment.

The day after Trump’s call with Zelensky, Sondland took three embassy staffers, including counselor on political affairs David Holmes, to lunch at an upscale Kyiv restaurant known for its appetizer of black caviar on thin savory pancakes. Sitting on the terrace within earshot of the street, Sondland ordered a steak with red wine as the group shared a dish of Ukrainian dumplings. Sondland kept looking at his watch. At 6:30 a.m., D.C. time, he reached for his phone, tapped its screen and said, “-Gordon Sondland, calling for the President.”

When the President came on, Sondland said, in a big, booming voice, “Good morning, Mr. President.” Sondland winced and held the phone as the President responded equally loudly. “So, he’s going to do the investigations?” Trump said. “Oh, yeah, he’s going to do it,” Sondland responded. “He’ll do anything you ask him to do.” Across the table, Holmes took out his own phone and began to tap out notes on the conversation.

After hanging up, Sondland declared to the table that Trump “did not give a sh-t about Ukraine,” but only about “big stuff” like “the Biden investigation that Mr. Giuliani was pushing,” Holmes later testified. Holmes told his supervisor later that day about what he had overheard. Inside the embassy word began to spread: the President was pressing for a Biden investigation before he would help the new Ukrainian government.

***

And the Ukrainians were growing desperate. Since 2014, when Russia invaded and illegally annexed the peninsula of Crimea, more than 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in Europe’s only active war. Kyiv had come to rely on the roughly $1.5 billion in security assistance and military aid and equipment provided by the U.S. since the start of the war. The support had evolved from armored vehicles, night vision and radar equipment under President Barack Obama to grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles under Trump.

Zelensky raised the issue during the July 25 call, and his exchange with Trump had been pleasant. But across the river at the Pentagon that day, in the office in charge of Ukraine policy, led by 20-year civil servant Laura Cooper, they were fielding concerned emails. Ukrainian officials wanted to know why military aid approved by Congress had been frozen. Zelensky took these concerns all the way up to Pence roughly six weeks later during a meeting in Warsaw.

“We honestly said, ‘O.K., that’s bad. What’s going on here?’” recalls Andriy Yermak, the adviser Zelensky entrusted to deal with the Americans. “We were told that they would figure it out,” Yermak says. But no one at either the State or Defense Departments could provide clarity.

The answer lay inside the keeper of the federal government’s purse strings, the OMB. While top political appointees get fancy offices like Hill’s across from the West Wing, many civil servants, including those in OMB’s National Security Division, are up the street in a hulking ’60s-era brick and glass New Executive Office Building. The drab accommodations belie the high-stakes work that happens there: moving the money that pays for the entirety of the $700 billion U.S. military, parceling out black-budget dollars for covert operations and funding numerous lower-profile programs, including military aid to Ukraine. The division is headed by Mark Sandy, a graduate of Oxford and the Naval War College, 21-year Navy reservist and veteran of a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

On July 18, a Trump political appointee informed Sandy that the President had put a hold on nearly $400 million in aid that Congress had committed to providing Ukraine in fiscal year 2019. When he asked why, Sandy couldn’t get an answer, but word from higher-ups was that the order came from the President himself. OMB officials pride themselves on nonpartisanship, and Sandy’s division set about making the directive happen.

The first challenge was that Pentagon lawyers said holding up the aid could be legally problematic. Congress required that the money be spent before the end of September, and the process of getting it out the door could take many weeks. Sandy found a way to stall for time by adding a footnote to the spending order that temporarily paused payment. He explained the need for the workaround to his chain of command, signaling that there could be legal issues and urging them to consult the OMB’s lawyers. Then, on July 30, the Trump political appointee took over control of the aid himself: something no one in the division remembers happening before. By mid-August, as the end of the fiscal year approached, the Pentagon lawyers were growing increasingly concerned about how to lawfully implement a lengthy hold.

In the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, officials grew baffled too. During a secure teleconference on July 18, an OMB official made clear to embassy staff that the aid was frozen. Taylor and his aides sat in astonishment. Eight days later, Taylor traveled to the war zone in eastern Ukraine. A local commander showed him a damaged bridge stretching across the front line toward Russian forces, close enough to see the glint of their binoculars. It happened to be the commander’s birthday, and he thanked his American guest for the aid that had been so vital in deterring a Russian attack. Embarrassed and uncomfortable, Taylor thought to himself, “More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance.”

The following month, Taylor did something he had never done in his half-century in government service: send a cable directly to the Secretary of State. The diplomat described “the ‘folly’ I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine at a time when hostilities were still active in the east and when Russia was watching closely to gauge the level of American support for the Ukrainian government.” He never received a reply. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

At the White House, the dissent was beginning to be felt. Eisenberg had fielded complaints from at least four national-security officers alleging that the President was leveraging Ukraine policy in potentially illegal ways. White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s office had learned of the intelligence analyst’s concerns soon after Trump’s July 25 call. In late August, Eisenberg and Cipollone met with Trump about the whistle-blower’s complaint. There is no public account of the meeting, and the White House declined to provide comment. But one thing is clear: Trump did not back down.

Neither did the public servants. On Sept. 9, soon after the analyst’s phone call with the Inspector General’s office, a lawyer for the analyst, Andrew Bakaj, hand-delivered the letter informing the House Intelligence Committee of the complaint’s existence. The next day, the committee’s Democratic chairman, Adam Schiff, wrote the Acting Director of National Intelligence, demanding he release the complaint, and was rebuffed. The Director of National Intelligence later testified that the White House counsel had told him he could not release the whistle-blower’s complaint to Congress because it was covered by executive privilege. Schiff went public. Facing a subpoena, the DNI finally released the complaint to Congress on Sept. 25.

***

Fiona Hill first heard the news at the airport in Newark after arriving from an extended visit to her native England, a long-awaited break after her previously scheduled July 19 departure from the White House. Her flight had no wi-fi, and as she scrolled through news stories that noted Congress wanted to hear from “current and former” Administration officials involved in the Ukraine matter, she knew her brief respite from the chaos of the Trump Administration was over.

During the following weeks, key House committees set out on an official impeachment inquiry, requesting testimony from officials ranging from Vindman and Sandy to Pompeo, Mulvaney and Sondland. Trump’s political appointees fought back. In an Oct. 1 letter, Pompeo called Democrats’ requests to depose five current and former State officials “an attempt to intimidate, bully, and treat improperly, the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.” When the committees sought testimony from Laura Cooper, one of the Defense Department officials who had grappled with Trump’s suspension of military aid, one of her political bosses sent a note reminding her of the Administration-wide direction that Executive Branch personnel “cannot participate in [the impeachment] inquiry under these circumstances.”

The public servants made up their own minds. One of the remarkable aspects about their efforts—from Ukraine hands like Marie Yovanovitch and Bill Taylor to more obscure government employees like the analyst or Mark Sandy—is that as deeply as they may have felt about the dangers of the President’s actions, they observed their duty as nonpartisan members of the Executive Branch. None of them broke the rules to try to counter him.

But the whistle-blower’s decision to bring the facts to Congress transformed a battle over the legality and propriety of Trump’s actions into a clash of checks and balances. Presidents have long negotiated with investigators over their subpoenas. The Trump White House was using the fight over Ukraine to try and shift the balance of power back to where it was before Congress forced Richard Nixon from office.

The Watergate scandal, and the morass of illegal activities it uncovered in government, also spurred expanded federal protections for government employees who speak up about wrongdoing. With the Inspector General Act of 1978 and subsequent amendments, Congress created “permanent, nonpartisan and independent offices in more than 70 federal agencies” whose job is to “combat waste, fraud and abuse.” The 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act protects government officials from retaliation if they disclose evidence of government wrongdoing, including to Inspectors General. Members of the intelligence community were not provided a legal method of submitting whistle-blower complaints until 1998.

Massive leaks of secrets prompted updates. In 2010, Chelsea Manning uploaded to WikiLeaks a vast trove of classified documents. Three years later, Edward Snowden downloaded and leaked information about the National Security Agency’s expansive eavesdropping techniques. Afterward, the U.S. government attempted to increase the penalties for those who leaked classified documents directly to the public—while also increasing protections for those who play by the rules. “That’s what’s so significant about the Ukrainian case,” says whistle-blower attorney Stephen Kohn. “Congress specifically said, If you want to be protected under this law, you raise your concerns this way.”

So what are the stakes of the Ukraine affair? Whether America still provides safeguards for lawful dissent, in an era when the President seems to mistake public servants for personal employees, and cozies up to the leaders of countries where dissent itself is illegal. If events go badly for the analyst, future whistle-blowers may not dare to come forward. Meanwhile, the question of whether or not to testify has placed the public servants at nothing less than the fulcrum on which the balance of power between Congress and the White House will rest in the post-Trump era.

Sitting in TIME’s Washington bureau not far from the White House, one official, on the verge of tears, called the past few weeks the most difficult of a long career, with the scrutiny affecting family and colleagues. Others aren’t through it yet. Jennifer Williams, the career foreign-service officer detailed to Vice President Pence’s office, remains embroiled in the congressional investigation. Democrats, seeking evidence the Trump Administration tried to cover up the Ukraine gambit, want to know about a call between Pence and Zelensky on Sept. 18. Williams is cooperating against the White House’s wishes.

Several of the career officials who spoke to TIME said they had agonized over the decision to testify, even behind closed doors, where the Intelligence Committee first heard witnesses. These officials had served both Republican and Democratic Administrations and wanted to continue to do so. Though called to establish facts, they worried they would be seen as partisan and perhaps damage their careers and those of their staff.

After the President’s public attacks on Yovanovitch and Taylor, others lived in fear of a Trump tweet. The official White House account posted a tweet questioning Vindman’s judgment. Hill received death threats ahead of her hearings. Taylor’s wife worried that a far-right extremist might show up at their home in Virginia with a gun.

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. It has dismissed the career civil servants as “radical unelected bureaucrats” engaged in a “coordinated smear campaign” with Democrats. Some Republicans spoke out on their behalf. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming was particularly vocal in her defense of Vindman.

For many Americans, the testimony of these public servants was a rare glimpse of the career officials Trump tends to deride as the “deep state.” In hearings this fall, the spotlight fell not just on steady ambassadors, but on previously anonymous analysts, bureaucrats and department aides, a group of women and men who personify public service.

Viewers saw Vindman, an immigrant in full military uniform, recount a remarkable life story that had led to the White House. “Dad, my sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected officials is proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family,” he said. “Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.”

They heard Yovanovitch describe being publicly smeared. They saw Taylor rebut misinformation with dates and facts preserved in his notebooks. And they saw Hill dismantle the notion that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election, as a “fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” Her commanding defense of U.S. policy led online fans to print T-shirts: Dr. Fiona Hill Fan Club: Fierce, Focused, Fearless.

As Congress proceeds, they are going about their lives. In Kyiv, Taylor, Holmes, Kent and another colleague who spoke out, Phil Reeker, are attempting to get U.S. policy back on track, even as Giuliani continues to meet with conspiracy theorists in Kyiv. Vindman goes to work every day at the Eisenhower building. Some, like OMB official Sandy, felt immense relief at getting through the ordeal, and just want to return to everyday business, a former colleague tells TIME. Others, like Hill and Yovanovitch, began to be recognized on the street. Hill was surprised to receive a flood of letters of support from across the country. Two days after testifying, Yovanovitch received a standing ovation after she was recognized at a Washington jazz club.

For the intelligence analyst, life is uneasy. The President continues to answer bad news about impeachment by tweeting, “Where’s the Whistleblower.” Initially, the analyst planned to testify in person, but as some Republicans backed the push to unmask their client, Bakaj and another lawyer on the case, Mark Zaid, advised against it. The identity of the analyst remains undisclosed, but some Trump supporters are issuing threats. Bakaj and Zaid declined to comment about the whistle-blower’s safety; both attorneys say they have themselves received death threats that are being investigated by the FBI. The return to work has been a solace for the analyst. There have been no signs of retaliation there. Colleagues who may speculate never mention it and, if anything, go out of their way to be solicitous.

The taxpayer-funded workplace is, in many ways, what the Ukraine crisis brought into the foreground. There are nearly 22 million federal, state and local government employees in America, and they provide windows into the people’s business. Consider the career Internal Revenue Service official who in July alleged that a political appointee at the Treasury Department made “inappropriate efforts to influence” the audit of either Mike Pence’s or Trump’s tax returns. Or the now former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer who refused to conduct asylum interviews under a new policy being challenged in court as a violation of migrants’ humanitarian protections.

They are part of a long tradition. In 2007, Marine Corps official Franz Gayl raised concerns about delivery delays of mine-resistant tactical vehicles to Iraq. In 1960, FDA drug reviewer Frances Kelsey saved thousands of American babies from birth defects by standing up to pharmaceutical companies to block the sale of thalidomide in the U.S. And in 1777, 10 American sailors and Marines accused the Continental Navy’s most powerful man, Esek Hopkins, of torturing British prisoners of war, only to be sued by him for libel and then defended by the framers of our democracy.

The idea that government can be dangerous is encoded in the DNA of America, and so is the remedy: a tradition of dissent that holds the powerful to account. In the Trump era, amid virulent partisanship and calls for blind loyalty, it can often seem the space for dissent is shrinking. The fate of the public servants caught up in the Ukraine saga remains uncertain. Whatever Congress does with impeachment, the treatment of those who kept their oath will answer one essential question, asked in offices around the country: “What do I do now?” —With reporting by Abigail Abrams and Leslie Dickstein/New York and Lissa August, Brian Bennett, Tessa Berenson, Abby Vesoulis and John Walcott/Washington

Photograph by John Reynolds; animation by Brobel Design