In January 2017, an “all-hands” National Security Council staff meeting was convened for the explicit purpose of scheming to “get rid” of then-President Trump.
Donald Trump, the duly elected president, was already in the midst of a Russia collusion hoax accusing him of high treason, which was orchestrated by defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
Trump’s political opponents weaponized the false accusation of Russian collusion using Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier. This had led to 2016 Trump campaign surveillance and the undermining of his first presidential term with the ensuing Mueller investigation. It was the consummate act of “election interference.”
This 2017 NSC meeting involved a figure that Americans would come to learn more about during the first impeachment imbroglio, based on hearsay that Donald Trump was attempting to procure “dirt” on future president Joe Biden from the Ukrainian president.
His name? The accused “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella.
A 2020 Real Clear Investigations article sets the scene:
Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella – the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous “whistleblower” who touched off Trump’s impeachment – was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues.
Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new “America First” foreign policy, a sea change from President Obama’s approach to international affairs.
“Just days after he was sworn in they were already talking about trying to get rid of him,” said a former White House official who overheard their conversation.
“They weren’t just bent on subverting his agenda,” the former official added. “They were plotting to actually have him removed from office.”
It is important to note here that both Ciaramella and Misko were implicated in the plot to remove Donald Trump in the first impeachment hearing.
Misko left the White House last summer to join House impeachment manager Adam Schiff’s committee, where sources say he offered “guidance” to the whistleblower, who has been officially identified only as an intelligence officer in a complaint against Trump filed under whistleblower laws. Misko then helped run the impeachment inquiry based on that complaint as a top investigator for congressional Democrats. […]
The coordination between the official believed to be the whistleblower and a key Democratic staffer, details of which are disclosed here for the first time, undercuts the narrative that impeachment developed spontaneously out of what Trump’s Democratic antagonists call the “patriotism” of an “apolitical civil servant.”
Two former co-workers said they overheard Ciaramella and Misko, close friends and Democrats, discussing how to “take out,” or remove, the new president from office within days of Trump’s inauguration. These co-workers said the president’s controversial Ukraine phone call in July 2019 provided the pretext they and their Democratic allies had been looking for.
“They didn’t like his policies,” another former White House official said. “They had a political vendetta against him from Day One.”
Furthermore, the documentation that shows how Rep. Adam Schiff’s office was contacted by the “whistleblower” was reported as being “Secret.”
The investigators say that details about how the whistleblower consulted with Schiff’s staff and perhaps misled Atkinson about those interactions are contained in the transcript of a closed-door briefing Atkinson gave to the House Intelligence Committee last October. However, Schiff has sealed the transcript from public view. It is the only impeachment witness transcript out of 18 that he has not released.
Schiff has classified the document “Secret,” preventing Republicans who attended the Atkinson briefing from quoting from it. Even impeachment investigators cannot view it outside a highly secured room, known as a “SCIF,” in the basement of the Capitol. Members must first get permission from Schiff, and they are forbidden from bringing phones into the SCIF or from taking notes from the document.
But a new Judicial Watch lawsuit seeks to uncover the documentation of the NSC meeting
Hellbound and Down 