From the beginning, the 2019 impeachment coup against President Donald Trump was a hoax riddled with Democrat collusion and deep state deception. Newly released transcripts of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s closed-door interviews of then-Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (ICIG) Michael Atkinson give even more details about how intelligence officials and anti-Trump politicians worked together in an attempt to charge the sitting president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The testimonies, recorded in September and October 2019 respectively, show Atkinson and his office bypassed normal credibility and bias assessments of a firsthand witness in favor of hearsay from the whistleblower who submitted the original complaint alleging corruption.
As Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland noted in her breaking news column on Monday, “the transcripts released Monday also highlight the politicization of the FBI that continued under Trump 1.0 after Director James Comey’s firing.” Atkinson testified that an FBI division, which he refused to name, tried to reopen the investigation into Trump even after the Department of Justice “concluded the matter.”
It’s been a long six and a half years since Democrats and the deep state managed to pull their first sham impeachment of Trump together, but the story isn’t over. Here are six key facts that you need to know about the coup, as reported by The Federalist.
Complaint Laden With Lies and Gossip
In a July 25, 2019, phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump mentioned concerns about Biden family corruption in Ukraine — concerns that future reporting would prove to be legitimate. Weeks later, in August, a Democrat operative posing as a whistleblower misrepresented the content of the call to falsely accuse Trump of weaponizing the call as a quid pro quo.
The complaint alleging that Trump engaged in corruption and crimes in his phone conversation relied largely on “open-source information” such as gossip, corporate media articles, and even Twitter posts instead of the witness or firsthand evidence required for further investigation.
As Federalist CEO Sean Davis noted at the time, the complaint “follows the same template used in the infamous and debunked Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier.”
The whistleblower admitted “I was not a direct witness to most of the events” and instead cited conversations with “more than half a dozen U.S. officials,” who remain unnamed, to falsely assert that Trump demanded Zelensky turn over “servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)” and keep a certain prosecutor general “in his position.”
IG Likely Assisted Whistleblower
In her Sept. 30, 2019, article, Cleveland demonstrated that “members of the intelligence community inspector general’s office were likely providing an assist in the attempt to bury Trump.” The whistleblower, she contended, knew the “Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998” did not apply and selectively quoted the law to ensure the complaint received attention from the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s office.
Additionally, the ICIG modified its forms between May 2018 and August 2019 to accommodate complaints from whistleblowers who wanted their concerns heard by Congress but did not “have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.” This relaxed policy opened the door for the anonymous person fueling the Trump impeachment scandal to ramp up the investigation despite filing an “outdated report” and pretending to have firsthand knowledge of the situation.
IG Took Whistleblower’s Word for It
The ICIG’s form change scandal, which Atkinson spent pages of a press release attempting to downplay as part of an ongoing form update procedure, was already a shocking and notable twist in the impeachment saga. Atkinson’s confession that he never reviewed Trump’s call with Zelensky before deeming the whistleblower’s lie-riddled complaint as “credible” only added to the mess.
“I decided that access to records of the telephone call was not necessary to make my determination that the complaint relating to the urgent concern ‘appears credible,’” Atkinson claimed.
As Federalist contributor Matt Bebee noted in October 2019, the ICIG apparently “bought into the allegations in the whistleblower’s complaint so completely that he didn’t even afford the president the presumption of innocence and appropriate due process.”
Adam Schiff Colluded With Whistleblower
Another October 2019 bombshell reported in The Federalist revealed that the anonymous whistleblower secretly worked with Rep. Adam Schiff’s office before submitting his official grievance on Aug. 12, 2019. The discovery prompted Democrats, including Schiff, to rescind their calls for the complainant to testify to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Whistleblower Revealed as Anti-Trump
In October 2019, reporting revealed that the whistleblower responsible for jumpstarting the Trump impeachment worked in the Obama administration with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan. Before Eric Ciaramella left his National Security Council post, he hosted at least one meeting with a DNC operative whose goal was “to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia.”
To make it worse, Ciaramella was a national security analyst attached to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office who knew of Biden’s demands that Ukraine drop its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Biden took issue with Shokin’s investigation of energy giant Burisma Holdings, which shelled out millions of dollars to the Biden family via Hunter Biden.
Vindman Was the Real Culprit
While Ciaramella played a key role, the real driving force behind impeachment was National Security Council’s Lt. Col. Alex Vindman. According to a year’s worth of reporting that broke in 2020, Vindman complained about the call to several people, including “only two people outside the NSC.” One was disclosed to be a State Department official named George Kent. The other remained an unnamed member of the “intelligence community.”
As Federalist Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway noted in September 2020, “every time that [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] members asked about the second non-NSC person Vindman disclosed the call to, Schiff and other Democrats would direct the witness to not answer in order to ‘protect the whistleblower.’”
Vindman also aided in the creation of the White House’s rough transcript of the call, which, Hemingway noted, “repeated Vindman’s unique interpretation of the call as seeking foreign interference in a campaign.”
