Nancy Pelosi proclaimed Thursday that the party-line impeachment vote in the House of Representatives was about protecting “democracy.” Madame Speaker was actually close to speaking the truth for once, because what the impeachment circus is about is protecting Democrats, particularly the Obama administration officials who sought to sabotage President Trump both during the 2016 election campaign and after Trump won. The vote Thursday — 232 to 196, with all but two Democrats in favor and all Republicans voting “no” — followed several days of secret testimony in deranged California Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, conducted prior to any authorizing vote on the House floor. Now that Democrats have formally voted to climb aboard the “Ukrainegate” impeachment train, however, Pelosi and her party have signed a sort of suicide pact. They must destroy the president in a desperate effort to prevent Americans from learning what Obama, the Democratic Party, and “deep state” bureaucrats did to Trump.

It was perhaps symbolic that this House vote happened on Halloween, inspiring the president to remark on Twitter: “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!”

Finding the truth about the “Russian collusion” hoax, which the Obama administration used as an excuse to conduct surveillance against the Trump campaign, is a job that Attorney General William Barr has assigned to John Durham, U.S. attorney for Connecticut. As our esteemed editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. has noted, “The Bell Is About to Toll.” Durham’s investigation may soon begin indicting the people responsible for the Russia hoax. Meanwhile, we will soon see from Michael Horowitz, inspector general for the Department of Justice, a report detailing who did what (and on whose orders) in the elaborate anti-Trump operation that indisputably involved the FBI and almost certainly also implicates the CIA. Speaking of which …

A protégé of former CIA Director John Brennan has been identified by Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations as the so-called “whistleblower” whose claims were the proximate cause of the Schiff–Pelosi impeachment proceeding against Trump. Eric Ciaramella, the son of a bank executive and a 2008 Yale graduate, was evidently handpicked by Brennan in 2015 for the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine policy. At the White House, Ciaramella worked closely with Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, and also with Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden. Perhaps the most troubling revelation in Sperry’s article was that Ciaramella also worked closely with Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic National Committee operative who, in 2016, left her DNC job to pursue her own “investigation” of the Trump campaign (See “Former DNC Official Partnered With Convicted Bomb Maker To Investigate Trump,” Daily Caller, March 21, 2017). For weeks, Schiff and other Democrats have insisted that the identity of the “whistleblower” is a closely guarded secret, but sources told Sperry that Ciaramella’s identity was in fact widely known:

“Everyone knows who he is. CNN knows. The Washington Post knows. The New York Times knows. Congress knows. The White House knows. Even the president knows who he is,” said Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and national security adviser to Trump, who has fielded dozens of calls from the media.

Why was Ciaramella’s identity known to everyone in the media? Perhaps because, according to Sperry, Brennan’s hand-picked CIA agent inside the White House had been a source of leaks to reporters during the first six months of Trump’s presidency. It was conservative journalist Mike Cernovich who, in June 2017, blew the whistle on Ciaramella’s sabotage operation. “Ciaramella helped draft Susan Rice’s anti-Trump talking points before the Inauguration,” Cernovich reported:

In fall of 2016 as Obama’s director for Ukraine on the NSC, Ciaramella was the main force pushing Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. Some suspect Ciaramella was one of the original leakers who told the media about classified conversations Trump had with Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov.

Not long after that report, and perhaps because of it, Ciaramella was purged from the White House, reassigned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This explains why, if Ciaramella is indeed the “whistleblower” whose identity Democrats have sought to conceal, he had only secondhand knowledge of Trump’s July 25 phone conversation with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Because Trump did not hesitate to release the transcript of that call, however, why was it necessary for Schiff to hold secret hearings about this? Anyone could read the transcript and agree with what National Security Council official Tim Morrison told Schiff’s committee: “I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed.” Yet Schiff apparently wished to create the impression that he is privy to scandalous secrets that justify an impeachment proceeding, and why?

We are scarcely a year away from the 2020 election, and if Democrats can win next November, Trump’s policies vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia would then become irrelevant. The field of Democratic presidential contenders, however, doesn’t seem likely to yield a winner — Trump’s poll numbers have actually improved since Schiff began his inquiry — and then there is the problem of the bells that are about to toll, as Bob Tyrrell has warned. If the soon-to-be-released Horowitz report is the bombshell we have been told to expect, and if Durham’s investigation turns up incontrovertible proof of anti-Trump skullduggery under Obama’s watch, Democrats are going to be in big trouble, and some former officials might even go to federal prison.

On the one hand, then, the “Ukrainegate” impeachment project is about distracting Americans from what we will soon learn about the origins of the “Russian collusion” hoax, and, on the other hand, it’s an attempt to derail Durham’s investigation of potential crimes committed by the perpetrators of that hoax. Many eyes have focused on former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (see Jed Babbin’s October 28 article “Clapper’s Nuremberg Defense”) as well as on Brennan (see George Neumayr’s October 24 article “The Case for Indicting John Brennan”). Given the role that Brennan’s protégé Ciaramella has reportedly played in Schiff’s probe, we have to ask: Is this “Ukrainegate” impeachment a continuation of the former CIA director’s effort to cover up what he did to sabotage Trump’s presidency?

Nearly 63 million Americans voted to elect Donald Trump, a result that Brennan and other “deep state” bureaucrats in Washington apparently did everything in their power to prevent. When Brennan & Co. failed to stop Trump from becoming president, however, it seems these soi-disant “public servants” tried to undo the results of the 2016 election, to undermine Trump’s authority and hinder his ability to conduct foreign policy. Nancy Pelosi says she’s defending “democracy,” but in fact she’s trying to defend the anti-democratic activities by which “deep state” operatives have sought to maintain their unelected power and continue the policies that Americans rejected three years ago when they voted against Hillary Clinton.