(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) For 13 years, the Harlem-based, charity-nonprofit National Action Network was stiffing its founder and figurehead out of more than a million dollars by underpaying him for his value.
So says that leader, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who retroactively gave himself a raise, according to the New York Post.
According to tax filings, Sharpton’s total compensation last year was $1,046,948, a substantial increase over 2017. Not only did he give himself a 32 percent raise–bringing his salary to $324,000, but he also received a bonus of $159,596 and reported “other compensation” of $563, 352.
It is unclear whether that compensation was related in part to the $531K Sharpton received last year for leasing the rights to his own life story to the charity should it wish to develop Sharpton’s tale into a movie. Also unclear: whether that movie would be a heist film.
On the plus side, after his years of being underpaid and receiving no bonus from NAN from 2004-2017, Sharpton seems to bear no ill-will toward his charity.
The two parties were in agreement that “he has now been fully compensated for all the years he was underpaid and received no bonus,” the Post reported.
Still, Sharpton seemed to suggest that perhaps the reason for his underpayment may have been related in some way to prejudice or racism.
“Fifteen years, you are talking about since 2004 when I came back after running for president,” he said. “For anybody else it would be laughable.”
He claimed the job required “several hours a day” with only one day off a week. Compared to other similar nonprofits and companies, “that’s the salary that they would get,” Sharpton said.
After forgoing a salary in 2008, Sharpton has made more than six figures from the charity in each successive year, the Post said.
Meanwhile, both NAN—which pulled in aroud $7.3 million last year—and Sharpton, individually, have been forced to pay off delinquent tax debts in recent years.
Sharpton last year paid off nearly $100K in state taxes to New York but still owes nearly $700K in taxes for three separate companies, the Post reported.
‘Maybe I knew that once and have forgotten, but I’m not familiar with that now…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) If President Richard Nixon’s Watergate investigation spawned a generation of sloppy, biased journalists, then House Democrats’ Ukraine affair may well do the same for the legal field.
On Friday, House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman took turns asking leading questions and peddling misinformation during the impeachment-probe testimony of former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
Among the disgraceful tactics deployed was an attempt to smear the president and his supporters by linking them to a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor whom the Obama administration had a likely hand in promoting—and who was responsible for dropping an investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
While Schiff claimed in his opening statement that Yovanovitch was “very direct, she made points very clearly and she was, indeed, tough on corruption”—citing the words of her replacement, acting Ambassador William Taylor—Yovanovitch herself came across as vague, tentative and noncommittal in her testimony.
She frequently seemed uninformed of the matters on which Goldman sought to solicit damaging sound-bytes in order to smear and undermine the decision-making of President Donald Trump.
“Maybe I knew that once and have forgotten, but I’m not familiar with that now,” she said after Goldman asked whether she was familiar with allegations Russian leader Vladimir Putin had made against Ukraine concerning interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Regarding allegations of corruption that involved Joe and Hunter Biden advocating for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while it was under investigation—and ultimately pressuring officials to fire if the investigating prosecutor, Viktor Shokin—Yovanovitch also pleaded ignorance to the high-level discussions being conducted on her watch by the Obama administration.
“There have been rumors out there about things like that, but there was nothing hard—at least nothing that I was aware of,” she claimed.
Biden admitted in a 2018 panel discussion with the Council on Foreign Relations that he had pressed for Shokin’s firing.
Other hard evidence—based on open records requests by Hill columnist John Solomon—has revealed that many high-level discussions took place between Burisma representatives and Obama’s State Department officials.
Those included meetings with Burisma board members Hunter Biden and Devin Archer—a former senior adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry—with top State officials including Kerry.
Rather than address this evidence in Friday’s hearing, Schiff and Goldman sought to smear the reporter and imply that it was part of an intimidation effort led by Trump.
Schiff—in what surely would have brought an objection in a court of law—asked Yovanovitch point-blank if she felt tweets by the president defending himself had been designed to intimidate her and other witnesses in the sham hearing.
“I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do, but I think the effect is to be intimidating,” she said.
….They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.
Both Goldman and Schiff also sought to exploit the public’s limited awareness of Ukrainian politics by conflating two former prosecutors-general.
Repeatedly, they invoked the name of Yuriy Lutsenko, seeking to link the Obama-backed prosecutor to Trump consigliere Rudy Giuliani.
Yuriy Lutsenko / IMAGE: Hromadske via Youtube
They attacked Lutsenko—who was installed during Yovanovitch’s tenure and largely overlapped with her time as Ukrainian ambassador—for his failure to prosecute corruption.
Ironically, it was Lutsenko who dismissed the investigation against Burisma. He was later cited by left-wing media such as Bloomberg—and by the official “whistleblower” complaint that triggered the investigation—as the source of claims that there was “no evidence” to support allegations against the Bidens.
Those claims have been widely repeated in the liberal media echo chamber, although there is a preponderance of evidence to contradict them.
Lutsenko—who does indeed have a long history of corruption linked to Ukraine’s liberal wing—later recanted his assertions but has continued to waiver on whether the Bidens were part of the official Burisma investigation.
Biden himself had high praise for Lutsenko in the same panel discussion where he admitted pressuring officials to fire Shokin.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden recalled. “Well, son of a b**ch, he got fired—and they put in place someone who was solid.”
President Trump, on the other hand, pressed for Lutsenko’s dismissal in the same July 25 phone call where he encouraged newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to beware of Yovanovitch. Lutsenko ultimately was ousted in August 2019.
Although Trump was unquestionably referring to Shokin in the July transcript as the fired prosecutor who was “treated very badly” by the Obama administration’s puppet Ukrainian government, during the Yovanovitch testimony, Goldman falsely suggested that it was Lutsenko—who was still in office then—whom Trump was rushing to defend.
As noted in the whistleblower document, Trump had previously praised Lutsenko during the short span of time that he acknowledged the Bidens were part of the investigation he had conducted into Burisma.
However, no evidence exists publicly to support the claim that he was working closely with Giuliani to smear Yovanovitch. Rather, contradictory evidence suggests that the corrupt prosecutor was largely allied with—and subject to pressure from—those supporting the Democrats’ efforts not to investigate Burisma.
‘This approach enforces the prejudice that the establishment press is run by a bunch of high-handed, hypocritical elites…’
Eric Ciaramella/IMAGE: via Twitter
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) For at least two weeks, presumed “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella‘s name has been widely circulated in conservative media outlets.
It’s been an open secret among Washington insiders and savvy internet sleuths for even longer.
And yet, with the exception of a few prominent figures—including Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Dan Bishop, R-NC—officials remain not only loath to name the partisan CIA informant, but even to acknowledge that his name has been made public.
In some cases, the result has been a farcical slapstick worthy of the Keystone Cops.
“While insisting that it is protecting the informant by withholding details that would put him at risk, the press has danced a sloppy burlesque, stripping off a feathered boa here, a slip skirt there to reveal most if not all of the whistleblower’s bare skin to careful readers,” observed Politico Senior Media Writer Jack Shafer in an opinion piece published Thursday.
In other cases, it has been brazenly outrageous, such as “Pinocchio” winner Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence chair currently leading the impeachment spectacle, who—despite having been called out for lying about his office’s early coordination with the whistleblower—continued to insist he did not know the identity during the kickoff to public hearings on Wednesday.
Schiff has long since reneged on his early assurance that the whistleblower would testify before Congress and has used the pretense of preserving anonymity as a ploy to exert strict control over the impeachment process, blocking Republicans from presenting their full defense.
More significantly—as many already deem the partisan House’s long-sought articles of impeachment a foregone conclusion—Schiff and others have exploited the leaky-faucet drip of information via media allies like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, in the hope of manipulating public perception and support for their efforts.
By feigning ignorance of the whistleblower—essentially failing to do their job as purveyors of information—under ethical auspices, these outlets have given themselves free rein to interpret any other information that may damage Democrats’ latest impeachment mulligan as a matter of duty rather than lazy neglect or bias.
“I’m not convinced his identity is important at this point, or at least important enough to put him at any risk, or to unmask someone who doesn’t want to be identified,” said New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, a notoriously unapologetic Trump-basher.
Rule No. 1 of the mainstream media’s Hypocritical Oath: First Do No Harm (to the Left’s Agenda).
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as in ‘All the President’s Men’ / IMAGE: Warner Bros. Publicity still
It also feeds directly into the Left’s talking points, helping to falsely support the contrived narrative parallels with Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which included in its cast of movie-ready characters the mysterious “Deep Throat” (later revealed as FBI associate director Mark Felt).
One key difference, of course, is that in Watergate, the reporters were protecting their own source and not abetting the opposition party’s ongoing attempts to leverage a political advantage of its own.
But as Shafer’s piece revealed Thursday, the cost to the media’s own credibility this time has brought the benefit of laying cover for Schiff and his associates to its tipping point.
“[T]he whistleblower’s identity has become a political issue, and all this press coyness—giving this much information and no more—puts the country’s top publications at risk of losing the trust of their readers,” Shafer acknowledged.
“This approach enforces the prejudice that the establishment press is run by a bunch of high-handed, hypocritical elites,” he continued. “It also surrenders a newsworthy story to elements of the right-wing press unencumbered by the Times’ ethical sensibilities when it comes to revealing supposed names of Trump critics and publishing their names.”
Thus, tellingly, the publication that built its brand on insider knowledge of the DC swamp—while continuing to defend the subterfuge as “ethical”—may abandon the effort if only to avoid giving a competitive advantage to the conservative press, which it snobbishly declares inferior for running the name of an anti-Trump operative it was helping to conceal.
Every moment spent not uttering Ciaramella’s name is a moment lost to spinning positive narratives about him that might counter the reporting on his litany of deep-state connections and history of partisan activism.
“The establishment press’ self-censorship—its view that the whistleblower’s identity is forbidden knowledge and shall not be spoken—has ceded a major, newsworthy story to right-wingers who might not be the greatest journalists but at least have the sense to ask the right questions,” the former Slate and SF Weekly reporter opined derisively.
Also, tellingly, however, is that Shafer’s article still refused to name him, insisting that it had yet to “independently verify” the information.
Given the outlet’s history of vetting its reporting with Democratic insiders like Hillary Clinton‘s campaign chief, John Podesta, it seems somewhat implausible that such confirmation would be difficult to come by.
Shafer fretted, moreover, about the fact that outlets like The Washington Post were shooting themselves in the foot by not only refusing to utter the name, but by then covering the conservative outlets that were running with Ciaramella’s identity in an effort to delegitimize them.
Rather, “[b]y alerting its readers to the conservative news sites and sources that were publishing the name, the Post became complicit in the effort to expose the whistleblower,” he said. “It did not publish his name, but it might as well have.”
‘I have been in those depositions, and I can tell you there is contradictory information…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC, one of President Donald Trump’s staunchest congressional allies, shredded a CBS reporter‘s claim that all of the witnesses from secretive House impeachment hearings had supported Democrat allegations of a quid-pro-quo with Ukraine.
“That’s not correct. You–your characterization is so inherently wrong and—and biased—I can tell you,” Meadows told CBS congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes during a break from Wednesday’s public hearing.
Rep. Mark Meadows blasts CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes
Cordes: “I have read all the depositions”
Meadows: “You have not read all the transcripts”
Cordes: “Yes, I have”
Meadows: “I beg to differ because they haven’t all been released so there’s no way you read them all” pic.twitter.com/u9vowgMDxd
Cordes had tried to press Meadows on the claims by saying “every single witness who has testified, more than a dozen of them would have to be either lying” in order to debunk the Democrats.
The framing of the question itself—the presumption that Trump’s desire for a Ukrainian investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged misconduct is inherently criminal—raises a major point of contention in the narrative that Democrats and their media allies have sought to craft.
On top of that, however, Meadows said it did not align with the facts, which Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and others have carefully curated in a desperate bid to sway public sentiment.
Many have speculated that the episode in political theater is more about influencing the 2020 election than about conducting serious oversight that could lead to removal of the president from office.
Meadows told Cordes that it was impossible for her to have read all the transcripts since Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had only selectively released those that favored the Democrats’ argument.
Mark Meadows/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
Congressional Democrats have imposed tight restrictions on their political adversaries’ ability to call and interrogate witnesses, with Schiff exerting final authority in most cases.
He has claimed that he is doing so to protect the identity of a CIA whistleblower, although the informant has been named by many media as Eric Ciaramello, who has a history of partisan activism and connections with many of the key players involved in an interwoven series of strategies to smear Trump.
Meadows hinted that some of the information Schiff had suppressed told a much different story, which is likely to emerge in the public hearings and subsequent Senate trial, should the House pass articles of impeachment as anticipated.
“I have been in those depositions, and I can tell you there is contradictory information,” Meadows told Cordes. “This president had not put any condition on the aid, and certainly when we talk about impeachment why are we doing this?”
‘People in this country are really upset by what’s happening. They’re pissed off……’
Eric Trump / IMAGE: Fox Business via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) On a conference call with national media outlets, Eric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump, said Democrats had failed to anticipate the “long game” in their current impeachment spectacle.
“They haven’t thought through that we have the majority of the Senate,” he said. “… Not only are they totally gonna fail, they’re gonna be embarrassed.”
Eric Trump said that despite the efforts of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, both California Democrats, to carefully control and manipulate the optics surrounding their latest “partisan witch hunt,” GOP leadership in the Senate would have no trouble shifting the narrative in their favor.
“What [Democrats] haven’t figured out is that if this goes to the senate it’s gonna be [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s turn, and guess who he gets to call— he gets to call Barack Obama.”
That would likely mean pressing the former president on his knowledge and approval of ethically questionable conduct in Ukraine during his administration which would have justified Trump pressing the former Soviet satellite to investigate further.
While much of the Left’s case rests on the supposition that Trump sought a “quid pro quo” arrangement, many have dismissed the notion that there was anything out of the ordinary about his request.
“They’re trying to orchestrate baggage that doesn’t exist,” said Eric Trump during the media call.
The current Ukraine controversy—stemming from a July 25 phone call—began almost immediately after Democrats failed in their efforts to smear the president with allegations of Russian collusion.
“I’ve seen this movie before and it’s never worked out,” said Eric Trump. “… They’ve always fallen flat on their face.”
Supporters maintain that Trump’s concerns of Ukrainian corruption were valid—that the country’s embassy sought to interfere in the 2016 election and that its leadership was closely aligned with Democratic 2020 front-runner Joe Biden.
Biden’s son Hunter was on the board of an influential energy company, Burisma, until April of this year.
After Burisma lobbied high-level State Department officials, Joe Biden, while serving as Obama’s vice president, threatened to withdraw a billion-dollar loan if Ukrainian officials did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company.
Democratic Senators have cautioned that Republicans’ declared plans to place Biden and his son Hunter on the stand could backfire.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who holds the seat long occupied by the elder Biden during his 36-year congressional career, said forcing him to testify “would be literally rolling a grenade down the aisle of the Senate.”
But Republican supporters of the president, including his second son, say that the damage to congressional bipartisanship has already been done after Democrats initiated the sham process along party lines.
“This is a beltway charade and these people are totally estranged from real Americans,” said Eric Trump.
He said said the other side had “lost tremendous credibility” after the Russia hoax and prior efforts to smear Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation last year.
“People in this country are really upset by what’s happening,” Trump said. “They’re pissed off…”
His father’s campaign had benefited tremendously from the impeachment debacle by bringing in massive fundraising totals, he added.
During the call, Rick Gorka, the deputy communications director for the Republican National Committee, broke the news to participating journalists that the campaign had raised more than $3 million in small donations over the last 24 hours since public impeachment hearings began in the House.
When Dems & media go nuts @realDonaldTrump’s campaign gets stronger!
Meanwhile, Eric Trump said impeachment was the Left’s “Hail Mary” effort to compensate for the inadequacies of its declared pool of 2020 contenders.
While successful candidates—including his father and former presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama—all exuded a charismatic quality that bolstered voter enthusiasm into campaign momentum, the current flock of Democrat hopefuls lack the sort of broad appeal needed to pose serious competition to the incumbent president.
“They don’t have their all-star lineup,” said Eric Trump.
‘I’d like to congratulate you for passing the Democrats’ star-chamber auditions… It seems you agreed, witting or unwittingly, to participate in a drama…’
Adam Schiff and Devin Nunes / IMAGE: CSPAN via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As impeachment proceedings went public on Wednesday, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee promptly denounced the testimony of two witnesses as scripted “theatrics” orchestrated by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
They pushed back against Schiff’s efforts to craft a narrative about U.S.–Ukrainian relations during the Trump administration that was scrubbed of all context involving Democrats’ own corruption: in Ukraine, in the 2016 election, and in their past and present efforts to impeach Trump on false pretenses.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the ranking GOP minority member on the Intelligence Committee, said the answers to those questions—which collectively provided the backdrop for President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, were crucial to understanding Trump’s motivations and intent—on which hung all the accusations made by House Democrats.
“In the blink of an eye, we’re asked to simply forget about Democrats on this committee falsely claiming they had more than circumstantial evidence of collusion between President Trump and Russians … and forget about countless other deceptions, large and small, that make them the last people on earth with the credibility to hurl more preposterous accusations at their political opponents,” Nunes said in his opening statement.
“And yet, now, here we are,” he continued. “We’re supposed to take these people at face value when they try and trot out a new batch of allegations, but anyone familiar with the Democrats’ scorched-earth war against President Trump would not be surprised to see all the typical signs that this is a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign.”
Televised Theatrics
Nunes proceeded to outline the repeated examples of bad faith that Schiff and other Democrats had put on display during the “cult-like” closed hearings, which have taken place since September in the basement of the U.S. Capitol.
“The witnesses deemed suitable for television by the Democrats were put through a closed-door audition process,” Nunes said, noting that Republicans had been prevented from calling witnesses and, in some cases, from interrogating those who were called.
Instead, Nunes said, Schiff relied upon a “flood of misleading and one-sided leaks” to his left-wing media allies in order to spin the case for impeachment, “and later, selectively released transcripts in a highly staged manner.”
George Kent and William Taylor / IMAGE: CSPAN via Youtube
Nunes cast aspersions on the two witnesses scheduled to testify during the day, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and current Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor.
“I’d like to congratulate you for passing the Democrats’ star-chamber auditions, held for the last weeks in the basement of the Capitol,” Nunes told Kent and Taylor.
“It seems you agreed, witting or unwittingly, to participate in a drama,” he continued. “But the main performance, the Russia hoax, has ended, and you’ve been cast in the low-rent, Ukrainian sequel.”
Both witnesses later spoke in their testimony to the existence of parallel policy-making teams in Ukraine—the legitimate one led by Taylor and State Department officials, and an illegitimate one led by Rudy Giuliani, along with a host of Trump allies, that sought to uncover political activity designed to damage the president and benefit his opponents.
As Schiff noted, many of the facts presented by the two loyal civil servants, who claimed to be nonpartisan, have not been disputed.
Nonetheless, as Nunes observed, the devil is in the details—notably, the omission of any acknowledgment that U.S. and Ukrainian officials may have colluded to interfere in the 2016 election and to undermine the Trump presidency.
Such revelations would validate the underlying concerns that informed the president’s Ukrainian approach and his insistence on some form of assurance that Zelenskiy would make good on his anti-corruption campaign promises.
Paraphrasing Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, Schiff said, “President Trump is a businessman. … [and] when a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”
More ‘Pinocchios’ for Schiff?
Republicans sought early on to point out Schiff’s lack of credibility, which he appeared to compound with several patently false statements during the morning proceedings.
At one point in his opening remarks, Schiff misleadingly claimed that Trump had not met with Zelenskiy, although the two met during a U.N. General Assembly session in September.
That meeting came only days after Democrats first lobbed their accusations about a July 25 phone call that became the subject of a whistleblower complaint, presumed to have been filed by partisan deep-state operative Eric Ciaramella.
Adam Schiff / IMAGE: CSPAN via Youtube
Perhaps Schiff’s biggest whopper, however, came after members of the committee—including Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, whom House GOP leaders recently moved to the Intelligence Committee specially for the impeachment hearings—moved to deposition the whistleblower.
As with many of the obvious pieces of information Democrats have sought to suppress from the official record, members of Congress have been largely prohibited from mentioning Ciaramella’s name or even acknowledging an awareness of the likely whistleblower’s identity during the proceedings.
“Do you anticipate when we might vote on the ability to have the whistleblower in front of us,” asked Jordan, following a motion by Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, to subpoena the anonymous individual.
“Of the 435 members of Congress, you are the only member who knows who that individual is,” Jordan told Schiff, “and your staff is the only staff of any member who’s had a chance to talk with that individual.”
Schiff, who already received four “Pinocchios” from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler for publicly lying about his staff’s interactions with the whistleblower, then appeared to repeat the brazen claim.
“First, as the gentleman knows, that’s a false statement,” he said. “I do not know the identity of the whistleblower, and I’m determined to make sure that identity is protected.”
‘He’s not Voldemort. And he’s not a bona fide whistleblower…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The newest member of Congress became the first member to utter publicly the name of presumed CIA ‘whistleblower’ Eric Ciaramella, whose complaint about President Donald Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy triggered House Democrats’ latest impeachment effort.
Rep. Dan Bishop, R-NC, who won a special election in September to fill North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, mocked those who insisted Ciaramella’s widely circulated name was verboten, likening him to the Harry Potter antagonist “who must not be named.”
100%. I refuse to cower before the authoritarian intimidation campaign.
He’s not Voldemort. And he’s not a bona fide whistleblower. Even if he were, he wouldn’t be entitled to secrecy.
Eric Ciamarella is a deep state conspirator. He needs to testify now. https://t.co/JOxhEOOJiA
While Bishop has not officially aligned himself with the House Freedom Caucus, comprising some of Trump’s staunchest congressional allies, he was an outspoken supporter of Trump’s on the campaign trail and, in turn, received the president’s endorsement.
Bishop’s win over challenger Dan McCready, who had the benefit of a two year campaign and ample outside funding from mega-donors on the Left, disrupted Democrats’ hopes of crafting a narrative that suburban voters were turning against Trump en masse.
However, the new incumbent has already begun his re-election campaign for next year as members of the House serve only a two-year term.
Facebook and Youtube are among those who have refused to name the so-called whistleblower—citing, without evidence, the potential for harm.
Although Facebook went so far as to scrub all references to Ciaramella, Twitter refused to do so, saying under its policy, information that was publicly available elsewhere was permitted.
Facebook has left open the possibility of reversing its policy should it become widely used among public officials.
Eric Ciaramella/IMAGE: via Twitter
Ciaramella’s name has been something of an “open secret” floating in DC inner-sanctums and on conservative investigative blogs for weeks.
The New York Times initially broke the story that the anonymous informant was a CIA agent, but the left-wing paper, which is reliant upon many anonymous deep-state leakers of its own, was criticized in other liberal media outlets.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and a campaign surrogate, caught flak in the media last week for retweeting a post that named Ciaramella, even though his name already had been featured by then on sites including the Drudge Report, which boasts millions of unique visitors.
Some have falsely claimed that unmasking his identity could lead to legal repercussions—including Ciaramella’s activist lawyers, who sent a cease-and-desist letter to the White House recently.
However, Breitbart noted that these claims were misinformation, with far-left network CNN even acknowledging that the law only prohibited the inspector general who received the complaint from revealing his name.
Former presidential hopeful Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., tweeted last week that he intended to propose legislation that would result in jail time for naming a whistleblower.
In the future, you will go to jail if you out a whistleblower. Legislation coming.
However, Democrats’ politicization and abuse of the anti-corruption safeguard in their current impeachment probe, much like their appropriation of intelligence agencies in the previous Russia collusion hoax, will likely result in greater skepticism should they seek further protections.
Much has been made of Ciaramella’s partisan ties to key players in both the Russia hoax and the current Ukraine conspiracy. Among those he allegedly maintained close ties with were former Vice President Joe Biden, whose own Ukraine misconduct is at the heart of the scandal; Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian activist who worked with the country’s embassy on an anti-Trump smear campaign during the 2016 race; and Victoria Nuland, a State Department official who also communicated directly with British spy Christopher Steele about his infamous dossier.
Donald Trump and Dan Bishop / PHOTO: Jackson A. Lanier via Wikimedia Commons
Bishop and his House GOP colleagues already have identified the (unnamed) whistleblower on the list of witnesses they intend to call, along with other figures like Biden’s son Hunter.
The younger Biden on the payroll of a Ukrainian company under investigation for corruption until his father coerced officials to fire the prosecutor by threatening to withdraw a billion-dollar loan.
However, Democrats’ recent resolution formalizing the impeachment probe gave sole discretion over the witness list to House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is unlikely to allow any testimony that would result in negative optics for the Left.
Schiff was discovered to have lied when claiming that he had no contact with Ciaramella prior to the filing of the whistleblower complaint. Republicans, as a result, have floated the possibility of calling him as a fact witness for his role in orchestrating the entire partisan operation.
Should Democrats vote—as expected—to impeach Trump, Senate Republicans will have their own opportunity to set the terms of a trial on whether to remove Trump from office.
‘This, frankly, is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless…’
Facebook/photo by Book Catalog (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After briefly falling from grace with the Left, one-time liberal darlings Facebook proved their allegiance again by forcibly scrubbing all references to so-called whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
With Google-owned YouTube joining the ‘resistance’ effort against outing the CIA operative—whose claims are central to House impeachment proceedings—Twitter has become Democrats’ latest corporate whipping-boy for maintaining that its policy permits the posting of Ciaramella’s name and photograph.
Twitter’s rules allow “sharing information that is publicly available elsewhere, in a non-abusive manner,” according to an article in The Washington Post.
Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough clarified, however, that posting information such as Ciaramella’s home address would not be permitted.
“Per our private information policy, any tweets that include personally identifiable information about any individual, including the alleged whistleblower, would be in violation of the Twitter Rules,” she said.
Nonetheless, Trump opponents have seethed over the leftist informant’s unmasking in the conservative press, claiming—without evidence—that exposing Ciaramella could subject him to potential danger.
They maintained that the unsupported concerns over “harm” to Ciaramella outweighed the public interest and First Amendment rights of allowing the information—ignoring the fact that concealing the whistleblower’s identity might also pose considerable harm to U.S. democracy and due process.
“Any mention of the potential whistleblower’s name violates our coordinating harm policy, which prohibits content ‘outing of witness, informant, or activist’” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone.
“We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in debate,” Stone said.
In truth, the greatest harm it poses is to the partisan impeachment narrative, which rests on the false pretense that House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has been serving the public good in his secretive probe.
Evidence points to Schiff having colluded with deep-state intelligence operatives to orchestrate the latest efforts to undermine—and possibly remove—President Donald Trump.
Far from being a dispassionate observer, Ciaramella seems to have been a plant, left over from the Obama administration, with deep ties to key figures in the Ukraine conspiracy and the interlinked Russia hoax that preceded it.
Left-wing media outlets, meanwhile, have outdone themselves with their virtue-signaling attempts to suppress the widely circulated information, and Ciaramella’s lawyers have menacingly threatened legal repercussions to contain the spread.
“I am deeply troubled with Facebook seeking to profit from advertising that would place someone in harm’s way,” said Andrew Bakaj, one of the whistleblower attorneys. “This, frankly, is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless.”
Trump had asked Ukraine’s president to reopen investigations into the Bidens—the fact of which Ciaramella allegedly used as the basis of his formal whistleblower complaint, asserting that Trump sought a quid-pro-quo arrangement.
Although no evidence of such an arrangement exists in the transcript of the phone call, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has denied it, Democrats have continued to push the narrative while glossing over much worse evidence of their own corruption.
That poses a dilemma for media and social-media platforms, which must repeatedly flip–flop on their own policies as Democrats shift the goalposts on transparency to align with their political agenda du jour.
Ironically, the leftists now praising Facebook’s discretion had earlier attacked it for allowing the Biden ads while citing Twitter’s decision to refuse political ads.
Their previous campaign to boycott Facebook also criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for having met recently with conservative thought-leaders to allow them to voice their concerns—even though the billionaire had maintained close ties to the Obama administration with no objection.
‘What is most puzzling is how someone so young and so inexperienced as Ciaramella … could have gotten so close to powerful people in the Obama administration…’
While some have reacted with shock and indignation over the disclosure, mounting evidence shows that Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst who has been deeply involved with previous Trump smear efforts, was already raising alarms in 2017, when journalist Mike Cernovich identified some of his shady meetings with high-level officials.
In fact, in a piece profiling his campus activism while an undergraduate at Yale University, The American Spectator said that contrary to the Left’s characterization of Ciaramella as an “apolitical” civil servant, he has demonstrated a long history of partisanship.
That opens the door to far more questions about how this deep-state operative managed to fly under the radar and what else about this so-called whistleblower remains hidden from the public.
“What is most puzzling is how someone so young and so inexperienced as Ciaramella—whose history of radical politics is well documented—could have gotten so close to powerful people in the Obama administration,” American Spectator wrote. “… Worse, how is it that the Trump administration is still stuck with people like this?”
Red Flags Abound
Eric Ciaramella/IMAGE: via Twitter
Prior to his whistleblowing days, Ciaramella appears to have been a missing link between Ukrainian activists and State Department officials like Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, who was corresponding directly with fake-dossier author Christopher Steele.
Steele, in turn, was working with the firm Fusion GPS, whose reports—commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign—provided the basis for the launching of an FBI investigation into Trump.
Ciaramella, likewise, was involved in smear operations led by Democratic National Committee staffer Alexandra Chalupa, who worked with the Ukrainian Embassy during the 2016 election to promote false information to media outlets about Trump’s Russia ties, according to The Federalist.
On top of his connection to the Russian hoax, Ciaramella worked closely with former national security advisers Susan Rice and H.R. McMaster, who have both been implicated in efforts to spy, leak and undermine Trump’s presidency.
Ciaramella also reportedly worked with former Vice President Joe Biden on Ukrainian issues and was part of an e-mail chain celebrating the signing of a billion-dollar loan guarantee that Biden had earlier threatened to withdraw if officials did not fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company, according to Breitbart.
Circling the Wagons
With all the red flags pointing in his direction, the biggest surprise may be that it took as long as it did for Ciaramella’s name to emerge publicly.
However, the Left and its media allies have predictably circled the wagons.
After Don Trump Jr., the president’s son and campaign surrogate—who also happens to be a private citizen—retweeted the already widely reported name, he was attacked on “The View.”
Despite having allegedly leaked information themselves about the whistleblower to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Ciaramella’s lawyers, who have long track-records of working with leftists operatives, have gone so far as to send a cease-and desist letter to the White House.
Jake Tapper is very close with the whistleblower’s lawyer, @MarkSZaidEsq.
Zaid likely gave Tapper the story that the whistleblower is a registered Democrat: https://t.co/Nk1x7ykQmB
This was intended to HIDE the fact that the whistleblower worked for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) November 10, 2019
Such efforts mark a familiar pattern for conservative journalists pursuing the truth about the conspiracies to remove Trump from office while confronting the staggering hypocrisy of media attack-dogs who lay cover for nefarious Democrats by smearing the messenger.
Cernovich observed in a blog post on his website that such radicalized media efforts to conceal the truth rather than pursue it had prevented him from floating Ciaramella’s name sooner.
“His name was first given to me, although I didn’t run the story because the media would immediately lie about me to protect Ciaramella, as they have done before,” said the conservative investigative reporter.
Cernovich marveled over the fact that the same media sources who had threatened to dox a random civilian for creating a pro-Trump meme would wage war against one of their own for reporting on a corrupt CIA agent—even before he became a so-called whistleblower—in the face of clear partisan misconduct and leaking.
“It was all a media lie and smear campaign to shut down my reporting,” Cernovich said. “When I report on someone, It’s harassment! When the media reports on a meme maker, it’s journalism!”
He also mused over the frequent left-wing media trope of asserting that reporting which does not align with their narrative lacks evidence—while simultaneously doing all they can to suppress clear evidence when it is presented.
“I love that ‘with no evidence’ line,” Cernovitch said in reference to a hatchet piece against him by the left-wing, Washington Post-owned magazine Foreign Policy.
“I literally had deeply-sourced stores,” he continued. “Multiple stories of mine were confirmed by other outlets and also by current events.”
He said that the unfolding of the whistleblower saga had once again validated his reporting, putting on full display the Left’s lies and cover-up efforts as they ironically claim to be working in the public interest.
“Well now it’[s] alleged that Eric Ciaramella is a whistle blower. Which is a magical way of saying, yes he was leaking,” said Cernovich.
“Cerno’s stories were yet again confirmed,” he added.
‘Today’s report erroneously assigned a political context to a message meant only to remind students about … behaviors unbecoming of a University of Alabama student…’
President Donald Trump poses with Alabama head coach Nick Saban and members of the 2018 championship football team at the White House. / IMAGE: PBS NewsHour via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump has enjoyed a hero’s welcome on past visits to Alabama, but a fake news story on Wednesday suggested his reception at a major college football rivalry this weekend might make Crimson Tide fans look uglier than usual.
Naturally, there will be a lot of noise when the nation’s two best college teams—No. 2 Louisiana State University and the top-ranked University of Alabama meet in Tuscaloosa on Saturday.
Trump’s announcement Monday that he would be in attendance added yet another layer of hype to this super-charged SEC matchup.
On Wednesday, AL.com, a site affiliated with Alabama Media Group, posted a warning for rowdy students that no presidential heckling would be tolerated at Saturday’s game.
The site said that the University of Alabama’s Student Government Association had sent a letter signed by Jason Rothfarb, vice president of Student Affairs, advising students that any jeers could cost them their preferred seating for the remainder of the season.
From the University of Alabama SGA, ahead of President Trump’s visit to the game. Strange that in all the games in which drunken bacchanalia has been tolerated, if not celebrated and encouraged I’ve never once been warned to not be “disruptive” pic.twitter.com/1j87QlxSDr
Some in the liberal media’s echo chamber gleefully delighted in the school’s ultimatum, which came on the same day that political losses in Virginia and Kentucky stung Republicans hoping to shore up the South’s red firewall before next year’s re-election race.
Trump also retweeted the article, while withholding his usual commentary.
Although the original article and headline expressly linked the “disruptive behavior” referenced in the letter to Trump, Yellowhammer News reported that it actually was a reference to a series of recent fights that had broken out in the student block seating.
Rothfarb issued a clarification that was appended to the top of the original article.
“Some have misinterpreted my comment regarding ‘disruptive behavior,’” he said.
“… By disruptive behavior, we are asking students to be respectful to all students and staff and avoid altercations,” he continued. “My email has nothing do with anyone’s First Amendment rights and I am sorry for any confusion. Please express yourself and especially your pride for the Tide.”
The student government press secretary, Jackson Fuentes, reiterated that the original posting was not intended to be a slight at Trump, nor at his opponents.
“Today’s report erroneously assigned a political context to a message meant only to remind students about heightened security and the consequences of altercations or other behaviors unbecoming of a University of Alabama student,” Fuentes said.
Saturday’s game marks the second high-stakes SEC competition for Trump while president. He was generally well-received two seasons ago when he attended the January 2018 national championship game in Atlanta between ‘Bama and the University of Georgia.
The Atlanta Journal–Constitution reported afterward that “Trump was greeted with a booming chorus of cheers mixed with some boos as he took the field Monday for the national anthem,” followed by another wave as he left the field.
By contrast, at a recent World Series contest between Major League Baseball‘s Washington Nationals and Houston Astros—held in Washington, DC—the deep-state swamp-denizens who could afford the high-priced tickets were reported to have loudly booed Trump’s appearance.
