Republicans want Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to confirm the identity of the Ukraine whistleblower after the previously anonymous CIA officer’s name was reportedly exposed on Wednesday.
For weeks, Schiff has sought to keep the whistleblower hidden, even as his party seeks to impeach the president based on the informant’s accusations that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. But a new report identified the whistleblower as 33-year old Eric Ciaramella, a CIA officer from the Obama administration with connections to Biden and John Brennan, top enemies of Trump.
“We do not know if that is the whistleblower. Only one member knows and that’s Adam Schiff,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner.
Dems say whistleblower not relevant
After initially saying that the whistleblower’s testimony was crucial to their impeachment effort, Democrats have reversed course in recent days, saying that that the whistleblower is no longer relevant now that a stream of witnesses have corroborated his account. Republicans have hammered Democrats over the pivot, accusing them of wanting to hide the whistleblower only after it was revealed that Schiff had foreknowledge of the that person’s complaint and subsequently lied about the fact.
Republicans have pointed to the whistleblower’s contacts with Schiff as just one reason to question his credibility and motives. But there’s more where that came from after RealClearInvestigations purported to unmask the whistleblower as an anti-Trump registered Democrat and a hold-over from the Obama administration.
The whistleblower reportedly worked for John Brennan, the former CIA chief under President Obama and a sworn enemy of Trump. The former National Security Council staffer also once worked for Joe Biden on Ukraine policy, when Biden was Obama’s “point man” for Kiev and left his NSC position in 2017 amid “passionate” disagreements with President Trump’s foreign policy on Russia and Ukraine.
The whistleblower’s Democrat-linked lawyers, who have repeatedly compared efforts to identify the whistleblower to inciting violence, slammed the report naming the officer as the “pinnacle of irresponsibility” and refused to verify his identity. Republicans are refusing to say whether the report is accurate, calling on Schiff to confirm the whistleblower’s identity.
Schiff blocks unmasking efforts
Trump has repeatedly pressed Democrats to identify the whistleblower in recent days, but Democrats have ignored his grievances as they continue to depose witnesses in the Capitol basement. Republicans pressed Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, a former member of Trump’s National Security Council (and Ciaramella’s apparent successor) to name the whistleblower during a closed-door hearing Tuesday, but Schiff blocked their efforts.
Republicans scolded Schiff in a letter last week demanding that the whistleblower be identified “to fully assess the sources and credibility of the employee.” They also stormed the secure facility where Schiff has been holding secret hearings in protest of the “Soviet” process Democrats have been running.
Democrats finally voted to “authorize” procedures for their impeachment inquiry Thursday, in an apparent effort to neutralize Republican complaints about the process. However, Republicans have continued to insist that the inquiry is a sham and that the vote is tantamount to putting lipstick on a pig.
If the report about the whistleblower is true, then it’s no wonder that Schiff and his fellow Democrats wanted to hide him. The Democrats need to maintain some plausible deniability that they are really impeaching Trump out of patriotic duty, rather than a transparent political motive to influence the 2020 election.
Democrats were prepared to move forward with impeaching a sitting president while doing everything possible to obscure the identity and possible motives of the anonymous bureaucrat who started this whole proceeding. But it looks like their efforts to conceal their agenda may finally be unraveling.
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