Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was working on regarding an Obama administration meeting in January 2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and mentioned the name of the CIA analyst believed to be the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings that led to two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Ingraham did not state the name of the alleged whistleblower — Fox News hosts are banned from doing so until the identity is confirmed — and blacked out the name when showing excerpts of documents. However, she likely was referring to Eric Ciaramella, who some Republicans and conservative media figures believe is the whistleblower.
In the email, Vogel wrote, “We are going to report that [State Department official] Elizabeth Zentos attended a meeting at the White House on 1/19/2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and embassy officials as well as … [redacted] from the NSC … the subjects discussed included efforts within the United State government to support prosecutions, in Ukraine and the United Kingdom, of Burisma Holdings, … and concerns that Hunter Biden’s position with the company could complicate such efforts.”
Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and other allies claim Joe Biden improperly used his role as vice president to pressure Ukraine to fire Shokin, who was widely seen as corrupt, in 2016 to protect his son from an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company at which Hunter Biden held a $50,000-per-month position on the board. But the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and other allies had the same objective, and Joe Biden was repeating U.S. policy that had been set out by Washington’s ambassador to Kyiv in the preceding months and was briefed by White House staff just ahead of the trip.
Joe Biden has dubbed the allegations as “false, debunked conspiracy theories” about him…
Why, of course they are, Gropey. Bizarrely, Honest Joe issued a more vehement and formal denial to his libmedia pals, urging them to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain:
Former vice president Joe Biden’s extraordinary campaign memo this week imploring U.S. news media to reject the allegations surrounding his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company makes several bold declarations.
The memo by Biden campaign aides Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken specifically warned reporters covering the impeachment trial they would be acting as “enablers of misinformation” if they repeated allegations that the former vice president forced the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden worked as a highly compensated board member.
Biden’s memo argues there is no evidence that the former vice president’s or Hunter Biden’s conduct raised any concern, and that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation was “dormant” when the vice president forced the prosecutor to be fired in Ukraine.
The memo calls the allegation a “conspiracy theory” (and, in full disclosure, blames my reporting for the allegations surfacing last year.)
Uh huh. Which would no doubt be why you so obnoxiously bragged about it later, I guess.
It is irrefutable, and not a conspiracy theory, that Joe Biden bragged in this 2018 speech to a foreign policy group that he threatened in March 2016 to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev if then-Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko didn’t immediately fire Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden told the 2018 audience in recounting what he told Poroshenko.
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event.
Yet more actual facts follow, every last word of which entirely damns Senile Uncle Gropey as precisely what he is and always has been: a wholly corrupt, dishonest, manipulative, and singularly incompetent political hack. Nick Arama poses the pertinent questions, saving the most important one for last:
Did someone squash it so as not to hurt Biden? Was this whole Ukraine call scam/whistleblower game cooked up to prevent all this from coming out because Trump had raised the issue of the case being possibly improperly shut down? And is it really not just to protect Biden but to protect the Obama administration in general from yet another scandal?
Oh, I think we can all guess the answers easily enough, thanks. The burning query at this point is simplicity itself: what, if anything, will be done about this?
Update! Hey, did somebody mention fake “whistleblower” and conniving Deep State grubworm Eric Ciaramella earlier?
Make no mistake. Although Democrats have tried mightily to convince America that their (fourth) impeachment effort developed spontaneously out of the patriotism of a career civil servant, the truth is, anti-Trump operatives in the president’s own NSC were already plotting to remove the president from office two weeks into his term. All they needed was a pretext to get the ball rolling. The Ukraine phone call in July 2019 provided the pretext they and their Democratic allies in the House had been waiting for.
As a former White House official told Sperry: “They had a political vendetta against him from Day One.”
I originally thought to include the meat ‘n’ potatoes of the Ciaramella revelation in the excerpt, but decided just to go with Heine’s closer instead. You’ll want to read all of it, though; it’s a veritable Who’s Who of Ogabe stay-behind saboteurs seeded throughout the FedGovCo permanent bureacracy, from shadow-government skulker Ciaramella to REMF doughboy Vindman, every last one of whom ought of right to be rockin’ orange for their acts of treason and sedition before too much more time passes.
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