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.
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