I&I Editorial

The mainstream press has been oddly incurious about the identity of the “whistleblower” who got the Trump impeachment train rolling. Now we know the reason why.

Real Clear Investigations on Wednesday published a bombshell account by investigative reporter Paul Sperry, who says that the identity of the so-called whistleblower “has been an open secret inside the Beltway.” There’s even a 40-page research dossier floating around on him compiled by former colleagues.

It turns out that the person who wrote the second-hand, factually inaccurate account of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t just some careerist, non-partisan CIA official, or even, as Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson put it, a person with “some indicia of an arguable political bias.”

Eric Ciaramella is, as Sperry reveals, “a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia ‘collusion’ investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

What’s more, Ciaramella left his White House post in mid-2017 “amid concerns about negative leaks to the media.” Sperry reports that, according to that 40-page dossier, Ciaramella also helped generate the “Putin fired Comey” narrative.

Oh, and he worked “on Ukrainian policy issues for (Joe) Biden in 2015 and 2016, when the vice president was President Obama’s ‘point man’ for Ukraine.”

As partisan icing on the cake, before filing his complaint against Trump, Ciaramella met with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff – who is running the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry – for “guidance.”

This sounds like a whole lot more than an “indicia” or an “arguable” bias. In fact, it smacks of the very kind of Deep State that Trump has been talking about.

The press reaction to Sperry’s story? Complete and utter silence.

The only Washington publication to cover his revelations was the Washington Examiner, which has a conservative-leaning editorial board.

But that story, from the headline down, reeks of liberal bias. The reporter, Steven Nelson, spends the second paragraph of the story attacking Sperry, calling him “a partisan pro-Trump figure who … critics accuse of trading in disinformation and conspiracy theories.”

Well, we know Paul Sperry. He worked for Investor’s Business Daily for years, where the Issues & Insights team was before striking out on its own. (He’s written for us, as well.) Paul is a diligent reporter who has broken more stories than Steve Nelson could dream of. To brazenly malign Sperry using leftist tropes is journalistic malpractice at its worst.

Even more bizarrely, Nelson claims to have found “at least one significant factual inaccuracy in the report,” but never reveals what it is. This is the sort of sloppy, biased journalism we expect from the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN.

That aside, there’s another reason the mainstream press won’t touch Sperry’s story. If it did, it would have to admit that it’s known the “whistleblower’s” identity all along. And that it knows his biases. And that it’s under no obligation to protect his identity. And, finally, that it covered up his identity to keep the impeachment train rolling.

So the blackout holds. The only interest the Washington Post has shown in Ciaramella’s identity is to blast Republicans for trying to “unmask” him. The New York Times laughably claimed that it didn’t know his politics or his name.

It’s no surprise to us that the mainstream press is carrying water for Democrats on the impeachment story. But even we are sometimes surprised and dismayed by its cravenness.

— Written by the Issues & Insights Editorial Board

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