“Yikes.”

That’s how Eric Ciaramella began his email response in January 2016 to the news Biden had tied the $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine with the firing of prosecutor Viktor Shokin.  Apparently, he could recognize a quid pro quo when he saw one.  “I don’t recall this coming up in our meeting on Tuesday…”

U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt had emailed Ciaramella and other White House aides and attached an article from the Ukrainian press: “U.S. loan guarantee conditional on Shokin’s dismissal.”  Uh-oh.

Recall that Ciaramella was identified in numerous reports as the “anonymous whistleblower” who filed a complaint about Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy that dared to suggest looking into the Bidens’ business activities in Ukraine.  It was Ciaramella’s complaint that got President Trump impeached.

Quoting investigative reporter Paul Sperry: “In a Jan. 21 email, Pyatt told Ciaramella to ‘buckle in’ because, as he later explained to Senate investigators, the deal was a ‘difficult issue’ and “there was going to be political controversy around this [news].”

Ciaramella, a national security analyst, was a member of the Interagency Policy Committee on Ukraine, which monitored Shokin’s office.  In October-November 2015, the agency recommended that “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its [anti-corruption] agenda to justify a third [loan] guarantee.”  The task force drafted a loan guarantee agreement that was not dependent on Shokin’s being fired.

Then, in December 2015, then-VP Biden flew to Ukraine, where he demanded Shokin’s ouster, using the $1 billion guarantee as leverage.  White House photos show that Ciaramella accompanied Biden on that trip.  Biden’s son Hunter, as you know, was on the board of directors of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which was under investigation by Shokin.

Ciaramella was a close aide to Biden at the time Biden made the threat.  Sperry makes the point that if he were genuinely alarmed (“Yikes!”) at what Biden was doing with this quid pro quo, he could have blown the whistle then, just as he did later on Trump.  But he quietly went along.  Then, four years later, when Trump was President, he complained to Congress about Trump’s phone call to Zelenskyy while KNOWING FULL WELL that Trump was onto something.

We see that Ciaramella was kept in the loop by the White House communications team, who worried that Hunter’s being on the board of corrupt Burisma created “unseemly optics” and undercut Joe Biden’s mission to address the corruption in Ukraine.  Again, Ciaramella kept a lid on it at the time, later choosing to go after Trump (!) for trying to expose it.

When Ciaramella was at the White House, he visited with Ukrainian embassy official Andriy Telizhenko, who says they discussed Hunter and Burisma as Telizhenko struggled to understand why his U.S. counterparts were suddenly hostile to Shokin after praising him in earlier talks.  As we see now, Ciaramella knew good and well why.

Not that the news media didn’t help in maintaining the desired narrative, as they always do.  For as long as they could, the media said that Shokin had been walking on thin ice, already under consideration to be fired because he wasn’t sufficiently ferreting out corruption.  But in reality, he had been on it.  He had even conducted a raid on Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevky’s home, seizing the home, his cars and other assets.  (Recall that Zlochevsky is the one reported by FBI source Alexander Smirnov to have said he “paid $5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden.”  It seems he needed to have Joe Biden call off the dogs.)

In the month before Biden made that flight to Ukraine, Shokin was identified as a “key target” in emails between Hunter and Burisma officials.  (We learned this through the testimony of IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler.)  And just days before dad’s trip to Ukraine, Hunter allegedly called him from Dubai, following a meeting there during which Vadym Pozharskiyi (whom Joe had previously met in person) had asked Hunter to pressure Joe to shut down the investigation.

“After Shokin was pushed out of office,” Sperry writes, “the Burisma investigation dried up.”

Sperry reports some new details of the deal Hunter had with Burisma:  Hunter was paid $1 million essentially to lend his name to the board, it’s true that he had no energy sector experience at all, and he never traveled to Ukraine for a single meeting in the five years he “served” on the board.  I guess Air Force Two wasn’t going his way at those particular times.  According to Sperry, “Republicans suspect Biden got the prosecutor ousted to keep the money flowing from Burisma to the Biden family.”

State Department officials in Ukraine led by George Kent at the U.S. embassy tried to get Biden’s aides to talk to their boss about the issue of family conflicts.  But Biden never took that one step that would’ve put their concerns to rest and given him great “optics”:  asking Hunter to step down from the Burisma board.  “For all his talk about fighting corruption in Ukraine,” Sperry says, “Biden failed to distance himself from one of the most corrupt oligarchs in the country.”

The Biden impeachment inquiry in the House should call Ciaramella to testify.  One complication, though:  he’s no longer covered by whistleblower protection laws, as he has left the government.  He now works as a senior fellow focusing on Ukraine and Russia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC.  As things typically go in DC, though, he still consults with White House officials --- of course he does! --- and pushes for billions more in Ukraine aid.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, who is running the Biden impeachment inquiry in Congress, has described that first impeachment of Trump as “a cover-up operation for the alleged Biden blackmail scheme in Ukraine involving U.S. aid and the Burisma corruption probe.”  If that’s the case, Ciaramella undoubtedly would have a lot to add.  Ironically, this started with the impeachment of Trump but carries over into the impeachment of Biden.

(Double Irony: Recall that Democrats called Trump’s concern about genuine Biden family corruption an impeachable offense and falsely painted ut as an attempt at election interference by siccing the law on his political opponent. Guess they’ve warmed to that idea since.)

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/04/17/impeachment_whistleblower_was_in_the_loop_of_biden-ukraine_affairs_that_trump_wanted_probed_1024937.html

Dan Bongino spoke about this story on Thursday, noting that some who know about it, especially the Brennan/CIA connection we’re about to get into, are afraid to bring it up. We won’t be intimidated, though, and never have been, as we long ago identified Ciaramella by name, as soon as his identity was verified beyond a reasonable doubt, as they say.  Anyone who wants to bully us out of discussing the facts as we know them can go whistle up a rope.

And here’s something new:  Did you know that at the time Obama made Biden his “point man” on Ukraine and Burisma hired Hunter (2014), Ciaramella worked under then-CIA Director John Brennan?  (Yikes!)  The next year, Brennan put Ciaramella on White House detail, where he worked closely with VP Biden and his staff on key Ukrainian policies.

Bongino explains what happened after Trump won in 2016: “And it looks like, once Trump got elected, they slid Ciaramella...back into the White House and made sure nobody asked any questions about what they were up to.”  That was Brennan’s doing.

“They knew,” Bongino says.  “The same people who took out Trump were trying to hide the deal Hunter Biden and his dad had with Ukraine.”

Btu right now, hardly anyone wants to talk about this story.  Mollie Hemingway is on “X” with it, and, of course, there’s our newsletter.  We did find another piece from REDSTATE…

https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/04/18/trump-impeachment-figure-eric-ciaramella-may-have-starring-role-in-biden-impeachment-inquiry-n2172964

This write-up mentions only in passing that Ciaramella was a CIA analyst later kept in the Trump White House by Brennan, which we would think is THE biggest part of the story.  But it does say that “the emails quoted in Sperry's story imply that Ciaramella was involved in Biden's scheme to prevent a criminal probe of Burisma and actively covered up the truth.  His role in Shokin's firing also reveals his leak of the Trump phone call as a ruse to distract from the real issue.”

For when you have time, if you’d like a trip down memory lane with the former CIA director (Ciaramella figures in this story, too), here’s what Paul Sperry reported about him in 2020.  The deceitful Brennan has always had his hand in.  Back then, even though evidence showed Putin favored Hillary to win in 2016, Brennan --- and thus, the media --- insisted on pushing the Russia Hoax against Trump.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_cias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_hillary_125315.html#!