‘Our lawsuits are designed to break through the unprecedented cover-up of his activities…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Judicial Watch said Thursday that it had filed suit against the Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency to discover what deep-state ties might link a CIA whistleblower in the Democrats’ ongoing impeachment saga to previous instances of corruption within the Obama intelligence community.
CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella—the presumed whistleblower used as a springboard to file impeachment articles against President Donald Trump—seems to have his prints on all things related to the chain of partisan efforts to undermine the Trump White House.
“There is significant public interest, thanks to the Obama Spygate scandal and the related abusive impeachment of President Trump, in what Eric Ciaramella was up to,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, in a press release.
“CIA operative Ciaramella is documented to be involved in the Russia collusion investigation, and was a key CIA operative on Ukraine in the both the Obama and Trump White Houses,” Fitton said. “Our lawsuits are designed to break through the unprecedented cover-up of his activities.”
A Web of Corruption…
Having worked directly with former national security advisers Susan Rice and H.R. McMaster, Ciaramella was able to spin an intricate web of deep-state ties, which Judicial Watch compiled from White House visitor logs.
Among others, the threads lead to former Vice President Joe Biden, Ukraine “dossier” operative Alexandra Chalupa, leftist mega-donor George Soros and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff. (Ciaramella is said to have a “bro-like” relationship with some of Schiff’s staffers, one of whom was reportedly hired the day after he filed his complaint.)
Add the whistleblower’s radical lawyers in the mix and those ties extend to the inspector general’s office, intersecting with the likes of Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and even biased FBI line-attorney Kevin Clinesmith.
In Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz‘s recent FISA investigation, Clinesmith was one of the only known criminal referrals due to his altering of a CIA email that would have exonerated Trump adviser Carter Page from accusations he was a Russian spy, likely ending the surveillance of Trump’s campaign.
But prior to his induction into ‘Le Resistance,” Clinesmith had worked closely with Intelligence Community IG Michael Atkinson, who happened to be the person with whom the whistleblower filed the formal complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In a breach of several agency protocols, Atkinson then relayed the complaint directly to the congressional intelligence committees—although there is good reason to believe Schiff already had a hand in it before that.
It comes as no surprise, thus, that conservative transparency advocates Judicial Watch are trying to learn what other cronyism and cross-departmental collusion might have played a role in the elaborate setup.
The Web Unravels…
While some of the shocking ties between key players in the FBI’s Russia hoax and the current Ukraine hoax have been well reported on by conservative media, other outlets patently refuse to so much as speculate about the whistleblower’s identity.
But Judicial Watch said it already had pieced together some surprising links between Ciaramella and the Russia conspiracy based on information found in the Mueller Report.
Ciaramella’s name appears there several times while recounting a series of key events surrounding the firing of FBI Director James Comey, whose departure precipitated Mueller’s appointment to what had been an FBI investigation.
That same week, Ciaramella acted as a liaison with then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in setting up a meeting between Trump and two high-level Russian foreign ministers.
A phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which they discussed setting up the meeting and touched on Comey’s firing, was later leaked to The New York Times, Judicial Watch noted.
Comey acknowledged that during his earliest meeting with Trump, rather than attempting to build rapport he was treating them as counterintelligence operations.
With the FBI director gone and the formal investigation in to Russia soon out of their hands, partisan conspirators at the FBI—and other intelligence agencies—desperately needed an inside man.
It doesn’t take a logical leap to conclude that Trump’s unabashed foes within the intelligence community likely installed Ciaramella in the White House specifically to eavesdrop on the president, just as they had previously with his campaign advisers.
Investigate the Investigators
In its lawsuits, the extension of unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests filed in November with the DOJ and the CIA, Judicial Watch is seeking the final missing link: Correspondence between Ciaramella and some of the key FBI players in the Russia hoax.
Specifically, it asked the DOJ for all of the FBI records pertaining to correspondence between Ciaramella and:
- former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok (who led the investigations into both Trump and Hillary Clinton)
- former FBI Attorney Lisa Page (who was also revealed to be having an affair with Strzok)
- former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (who became acting director following Comey’s departure, until fired for his own misconduct)
- the Special Counsel’s Office (for the Mueller investigation)
On the CIA side, the watchdog group requested all of Ciaramella’s emails between June 1, 2016 (shortly before the launch of the FBI’s probe into Trump) and Nov. 12, 2019, when the FOIA request was likely filed.
Whatever the outcome of Judicial Watch’s requests, should Ciaramella be linked with the Russia hoax, that information may likely surface in one of two other ways:
The first is an ongoing criminal investigation being led by special prosecutor John Durham within the Department of Justice.
The other would be if House articles of impeachment were sent to the Senate for trial. It is possible that Trump’s defense team may then subpoena Ciaramella and publicly expose his partisan ties in order to establish that Democrats repeatedly abused their power while engaged in an incessant crusade to impeach the president.