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The impeachment trial in which President Trump is defending himself against false accusations of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress might well be the result of a four-man conspiracy.
Paul Sperry of Real Clear Investigations reports that ballyhooed CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella and Sean Misko, a legman for House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, leader of the impeachment prosecution team, said they must “take out” Trump when they worked at the White House.
But Misko began working for Schiff the day that Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman leaked the substance of Trump’s now-famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to Ciaramella, who in turn filed the complaint with Schiff that began the impeachment.
Sperry based his lengthy report on conversations with White House officials who overheard Misko and Ciaramella discuss their desire to remove the president, along with employment records that track Misko’s move to Schiff’s staff.
The obvious conclusion: Misko, Ciaramella, and Vindmann didn’t like Trump’s foreign policy and connected with Schiff to stage a coup.
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The Conversations
A hard-left, hate-Trump Democrat, “whistleblower” Ciaramella filed the original complaint about Trump’s phone call of July 25 with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked Zelensky to help probe the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme.
Ciaramella’s lengthy hearsay account of August 12 became the cornerstone of Schiff’s Ahab-like pursuit of the president. Ciaramella knew nothing about the call, but that didn’t matter to Schiff, whose office, it turned out, helped the intelligence bureaucrat prepare his phony report.
Sperry’s latest report is the first to uncover an open conversation between two conspirators:
“Just days after [Trump] was sworn in [Misko and Ciaramella] were already talking about trying to get rid of him,” said a White House colleague 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.”…
“They didn’t like his policies,” another former White House official said. “They had a political vendetta against him from Day One.”…
An Obama holdover and registered Democrat, Ciaramella in early 2017 expressed hostility toward the newly elected president during White House meetings, his co-workers said in interviews with RealClearInvestigations. They added that Ciaramella sought to have Trump removed from office long before the filing of the whistleblower complaint.
The coworkers overheard the pair utter “anti-Trump remarks” at a “staff-wide NSC meeting called by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, where they sat together in the south auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex,” Sperry reported.
“They were popping off about how they were going to remove Trump from office. No joke,” said one ex-colleague, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
A military staffer detailed to the NSC, who was seated directly in front of Ciaramella and Misko during the meeting, confirmed hearing them talk about toppling Trump during their private conversation, which the source said lasted about one minute. The crowd was preparing to get up to leave the room at the time.
“After Flynn briefed [the staff] about what ‘America first’ foreign policy means, Ciaramella turned to Misko and commented, ‘We need to take him out,’” the staffer recalled. “And Misko replied, ‘Yeah, we need to do everything we can to take out the president.’”…
He said he also overheard Ciaramella telling Misko, referring to Trump: “We can’t let him enact this foreign policy.”
“Thick as Thieves”
A former supervisor of the pair told Sperry they were “very tight” and “both paranoid about Trump.” They were “thick as thieves” and “buddies outside the White House.”
Both men were accused of leaking anti-Trump material to the media, but their real chance to “take out” the president came when Lt. Col. Vindman, who listened to Trump’s conversation with Zelensky, “leaked what he’d heard to Ciaramella by phone that afternoon, the sources said. In their conversation, which lasted a few minutes, he described Trump’s call as ‘crazy,’ and speculated he had ‘committed a criminal act.’”
Presented as a super-patriot war hero when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee hearings, Vindmann “openly expressed his disdain for Trump whose foreign policy was often at odds” with Deep State priorities, the NSC sources told Sperry.
But Vindman was no impartial observer just doing his duty, Sperry disclosed:
Before he was detailed to the White House, Vindman served in the U.S. Army, where he once received a reprimand from a superior officer for badmouthing and ridiculing America in front of Russian soldiers his unit was training with during a joint 2012 exercise in Germany.
His commanding officer, Army Lt. Col. Jim Hickman, complained that Vindman, then a major, “was apologetic of American culture, laughed about Americans not being educated or worldly and really talked up Obama and globalism to the point of [it being] uncomfortable.”
“Vindman was a partisan Democrat at least as far back as 2012,” Hickman, now retired, asserted. “Do not let the uniform fool you. He is a political activist in uniform.”
But that’s not all, Sperry reported. Misko went straight from the White House to work for Schiff, where “sources say he offered ‘guidance’ to the whistleblower…. Misko then helped run the impeachment inquiry based on that complaint as a top investigator for congressional Democrats.”
July 26 was also the day that Schiff hired Misko to head up the investigation of Trump, congressional employment records show. Misko, in turn, secretly huddled with the whistleblower prior to filing his Aug. 12 complaint.
So Trump spoke with Zelensky on July 25, and Vindmann leaked the call to Ciaramella on July 26, the day Misko went to work for Schiff.
Question: Was Schiff working with the hate-Trump troika all along to build the phony impeachment case?
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
