Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul named Eric Ciaramella, a man identified as the whistleblower by Real Clear Investigations, on the Senate floor Tuesday as the impeachment trial kicked off by the whistleblower’s anonymous complaint wraps up.
During last week’s proceedings, Paul tried to have the name read out loud via Chief Justice John Roberts who was presiding over the trial in a question that Roberts twice refused to ask the House impeachment managers.
“During the proceedings, I asked a question that was disallowed, and I’m going to ask that question again this morning,” Paul declared.
My exact question was: are you aware that House intelligence committee staffer Shawn Misko had a close relationship with Eric Ciaramella while at the National Security Council together, and are you aware and how do you respond to reports that Ciaramella and Misko may have worked together to plot impeaching the president before there were formal House impeachment proceedings.
This is a based Rand Paul speech that everyone needs to see
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 4, 2020
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Before reading the question on the Senate floor, Paul made clear that the question itself did not accuse anyone of being a whistleblower.
“My question did not talk about anybody who was a whistleblower,” Paul said. “I simply named two peoples’ names because I think it’s very important to know what happened.”
Paul stressed the importance of the question in light of the recent earth-shattering intelligence community inspector general report released in December exposing the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign as a deep-state operation meant to take down the president.
“We’re now finding out that the FISA investigation was predicated upon 17 lies by the FBI by people at high levels who were biased against the president,” Paul said. “It turns out it was an illegitimate investigation. Everything they did about investigating the president was untrue and abused government to do something they never should have done in the first place.”
While the inspector general’s December report found that the authorization of four FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign in the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” operation was not a result of political bias, the report’s own findings contradict it’s primary conclusion. The report notes for example, that the spy campaign would not have been opened without the widely discredited DNC-funded Steele Dossier.
Last month, a secret court ruling made public deemed two of the warrants authorized as illegal, one of which was signed off by former FBI Director James Comey and the other signed by the agency’s former deputy director Andrew McCabe.
The impeachment proceedings have been a continuation of inside government forces attempting to bring down Trump for the crime of winning the 2016 election.
House Democrats kicked off an impeachment investigation in September after reports of an anonymous whistleblower complaint alleging Trump conspired with the Ukrainian president to interfere in the upcoming presidential elections. The complaint was declared both “credible” and “urgent” by the intelligence community inspector general but not by the Department of National Intelligence. Democrats however, seized on the opportunity to resurrect their hopes of impeachment following the spectacular collapse of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory last spring.
After months of rushed proceedings in the House, including testimony from 17 Democrat-called witnesses and a three-week trial in the Senate finding no incriminating evidence against the president, the whistleblower, identified as Eric Ciaramella by Real Clear Investigations which has not been confirmed by The Federalist, did not testify before lawmakers at any point.