Lawfare

While the U.S. Senate ultimately acquitted Trump by a vote of 57-43 in early 2020, the stitch-up had by that stage sufficiently muddied the waters and buoyed Democrats’ false narrative in an especially heated election year.

‘It is always worse than we thought.’

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents on Monday revealing that hearsay and erroneous claims from a few politicized bad actors who lacked any firsthand knowledge of the phone call were used as the basis to impeach Trump and that elements of the intelligence community were not only aware but happy to advance the false narrative.

The documents — investigative materials used by former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who got the ball rolling on impeachment, and transcripts of his testimony released as the result of a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence vote last month — show that Atkinson skirted standard IG procedures and, embracing a kind of strategic myopia, leaned entirely on what the ODNI described as “politicized, manufactured narratives” without ever once bothering to access the transcript of Trump’s call.

Former Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson admitted under oath that he personally ordered a secret rewrite of the whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 that was used as the basis for a phony impeachment operation against President Donald Trump, going so far as to admit changing the form looked  “suspicious.”

Newly unveiled testimony from October of 2019 shows that Atkinson conceded the change he ordered to the whistleblower complaint form “looks suspicious” but said the timing was merely “unfortunate.”

“So the timing is unfortunate. It looks suspicious, I get that,” Atkinson testified. Atkinson said that after several media inquiries highlighted that the then-current form required first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing in order for a complaint to meet the urgency threshold to be sent to Congress, he ordered his staff to secretly change the rules so that second-hand hearsay complaints could be a legitimate basis for expedited processing.

“What I should have done was I should have explained when we changed the form why we were changing it,” he said. “I should have been more transparent about the reasons and the motivations for the change in the forms.”

A former inspector general fast-tracked an alleged whistleblower complaint that turned into the first Trump impeachment. The issue? That “whistleblower” met with top congressional Democrat Adam Schiff’s office before submitting his complaint and refused to disclose his contacts, according to RealClearInvestigations. As the cherry on top, the “whistleblower” was a registered Democrat, and yet Inspector General Michael Atkinson didn’t even question, let alone rigorously assess, either the honesty or motivations of the “whistleblower,” whom RCI named as Intel analyst Eric Ciaramella.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford released the newly declassified documents and commented in an April 13 press release, “There have been many questions and concerns about these Atkinson transcripts, which have been withheld from the American public for far too long.”

He added, “I hope that the release of these transcripts allows the American people to make their own determinations about their content. Thank you to Director Gabbard and her team for moving these so quickly through the declassification process and helping the Committee get them to the American people. I remain committed to executing on the Committee’s continued effort to balance the transparency the American people deserve and the need to protect sensitive national security information.”