There was never a genuine complaint. It wasn’t an opportunistic hit job either. It was something far more deliberate, a coordinated effort.
After seven long years, key documents surrounding the Ukraine impeachment saga have finally been released by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, following Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification. They include previously unreleased interview transcripts with the Inspector General as well as related materials. They tell a story many of us suspected at the time, but which now appears even more disturbing and more elaborate than originally understood.The newly released documents show a coordinated effort to frame President Trump over a phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. A manufactured narrative was elevated and then used by Congress in an attempt to overturn the outcome of an election and, effectively, shape the next one by pursuing impeachment over a routine diplomatic exchange.
Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who should have acted as a neutral gatekeeper, instead enabled the process by allowing a completely unverified, third-hand, and politically motivated complaint to move forward.
Of particular note is the timing. The call took place on July 25, 2019, the morning after the disastrous congressional testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which effectively collapsed the Russia collusion narrative. Many suspected at the time that this timing was not coincidental. It was as if one hoax had collapsed and another was needed to take its place. The new material strengthens that view.
What we previously knew was that a so-called whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, an Obama-era National Security Council staffer, filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Michael Atkinson, alleging that President Trump had attempted to interfere in the upcoming 2020 election during the call with Zelensky.
The newly released documents, specifically the interview notes from Congress’s classified interview with Atkinson, together with the so-called whistleblower complaint and its supporting materials, bear little resemblance to what actually happened when set against the official transcript of the call released publicly by Trump in 2019.
Ciaramella alleged that Trump was using the power of his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. elections” and was pushing Ukraine to investigate his “main political rival,” Joe Biden, who at the time was polling at around 26 percent in the Democratic primary. He further suggested that Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr were involved in the alleged scheme to interfere in the 2020 election.
In fact, the official call transcript contains no evidence of election interference. It shows, at most, that Trump referenced widely reported public information, specifically Joe Biden’s own 2018 Council on Foreign Relations admission in which he described leveraging U.S. taxpayer loan guarantees to secure the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor who was at that time investigating Hunter Biden’s firm, Burisma, and had already moved to seize assets connected to it.
As later emerged from material found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, there were emails from the chairman of Burisma’s board of directors explicitly describing the shutting down of the investigation as a required “deliverable” and demanding that Hunter Biden intervene to bring it to an end, shortly before Joe Biden took steps that did exactly that.
In other words, far from constituting election interference, Trump was raising matters that were already in the public domain and, on any reasonable view, within the scope of legitimate diplomatic discussion, given U.S. financial exposure and foreign policy interests. At minimum, it is entirely plausible that he was also probing the disposition of the newly elected Ukrainian president by testing his response to issues involving his predecessor.
Hearsay, Process Breakdown, and the Whistleblower Standard
The claims made by Ciaramella point directly to the issue at the heart of this process, namely the standard applied to whistleblower complaints. These mechanisms exist to prevent rumor chains and guard against the kind of distortion that arises from indirect reporting. Traditionally, such complaints were required to be based on first-hand knowledge. In this case, that standard was not met.
As originally reported by The Federalist in 2019, Atkinson eliminated the longstanding requirement for first-hand knowledge by changing the rules governing whistleblower complaints around the time Ciaramella’s complaint was filed, allowing second and third-hand information where first-hand knowledge had previously been required, and doing so secretly, without disclosing the change and later backdating it.
In the newly released documents, Atkinson characterizes the timing as coincidental, stating, “So the timing is unfortunate. It looks suspicious, I get that.” But the record shows he altered and effectively gutted its own internal standards at the exact moment a third-hand complaint about President Trump was emerging.
Even setting aside intent, the concealment of the change and its later backdating are difficult to reconcile with the idea that this was a coincidence.
Once you move away from first-hand reporting, you are effectively relying on a chain of hearsay. Even without assuming bad faith, the reliability of information degrades rapidly as it is passed along. In this case, the complaint was based on second, third, and even fourth-hand accounts. When compared to the official call transcript, the distortion is obvious.
On the morning of the call, President Trump spoke with President Zelensky. Multiple officials from the National Security Council were monitoring the call. One of those officials, identified as NSC#1, reportedly relayed a summary of the call to Ciaramella. Another NSC official, NSC#2, also provided information about the call, though he was not a participant and relied on a readout or transcript.
According to the newly released documents, NSC#2’s account became a significant source for the complaint. However, NSC#2 was not a participant in the call. He relied on a secondary document, apparently a transcript of the conversation, which he or she only briefly reviewed before returning it.
As a result, the information passed to Ciaramella was already detached from the original event, moving from the call itself to a transcript, then to NSC#2, then to Ciaramella, and finally to Atkinson. Even assuming no bad faith at any stage, which there is no reason to assume, this is a process almost guaranteed to produce distortion. At minimum, this is third-hand information. In practical terms, given the structure described in the documents, it is more likely fourth-hand hearsay. --->READ MORE HERE
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