According to recently obtained emails from former Vice President Joe Biden’s company, the “whistleblower” who sparked Donald Trump’s first prosecution was seriously involved in the social maneuverings behind the Biden-family business plans in Ukraine.
In 2019, therefore- National Intelligence Council scientist Eric Ciaramella touched off a political storm when he secretly accused Trump of linking military support for Ukraine to a demand for an investigation into reported Trump corruption in that country.
However, four years prior, Ciaramella was a near advisor to Vice President Joe Biden when Biden threatened to stop U.S. support to Ukraine without firing its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was looking into Ukraine-based Burisma Holdings, while working as a national security researcher with then-Vice President Joe Biden’s business. At the time, the fraud- filled energy giant was paying Biden’s child Hunter millions of dollars.
In 2019, as Ciaramella accused Trump of a dishonest quid pro quo, those payments, along with other evidence linking Joe Biden to his mother’s business dealings, received little media. Neither did following data indicating that Hunter Biden’s partners had identified Shokin as a “key goal”. These issues are currently a part of the President Biden House prosecution investigation.
” It now seems there was material facts that would have been used at the prosecution trial]to free Trump ]”, said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has testified as an expert witness in the continuing Trump impeachment investigation. Trump claimed that the Bidens had a conflict of interest, and that the data could have refuted Biden’s claim and established his father’s involvement in the Shokin firing.
Ciaramella’s part — including substantial- stage discussions with major Biden aides and Russian prosecutors— is only now coming to light thanks to the recent release of White House emails and photos from the National Archives.
Ciaramella wrote in the emails that he was shocked by Biden’s decision to withhold the$ 1 billion in aid from Kyiv, which represented a sudden change in U.S. policy. They also show he was drawn into White House communications over how to control adverse publicity from Hunter taking a lucrative seat on Burisma’s board.
Ciaramella has not provided any proof that he raised concerns about the dubious Biden business practices he first witnessed, which is in stark contrast to what we have seen in 2019. In that instance, he was galvanized into action after being told by White House colleague Alexander Vindman of an “improper” phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump contacted Zelensky to ask her about investigating Hunter Biden and Burisma’s connections to the business during the call.
Some former congressional investigators say Ciaramella effectively helped cover up a scandal far worse than what Trump was impeached over. In addition, he failed to disclose that he had a potential conflict of interest related to the matter that Zelensky requested to look into when he complained about Trump to Zelensky. RealClearInvestigations was the , first to identify , the then- 33- year- old Ciaramella as the anonymous impeachment “whistleblower”, something major media continue to keep under tight wraps.
When President Obama appointed Biden as his top point man on Ukraine in 2014, the same year that Burisma hired Hunter, Ciaramella held the position under the guidance of CIA Director John Brennan. The next year, the CIA detailed Ciaramella, a longtime advocate for aid to Ukraine, to the White House, where he worked closely with Biden and his staff as a top adviser on key Ukrainian policies. Even though he is a Democrat, Biden served as an analyst on Trump’s National Security Council as a Ukrainian and Russian citizen until mid-2017. Co- workers there accused him of trying to sabotage Trump, including allegedly leaking sensitive information to the press.
More than 2, 000 pages of newly disclosed archived emails from the former vice president’s office in relation to Ukraine, of which more than 160 made references to Ciaramella, have been reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. They reveal that his role advising Biden’s office potentially intersects with the current impeachment inquiry in several areas. Ciaramella’s focus was on aid to Ukraine and anti-corruption reforms in the nation. In that capacity, he:
- Hosted, cleared into the White House, and met with senior Ukrainian prosecutors there face-to-face.
- Gave a “readout” of the meeting to his superiors, who in turn pushed for Shokin’s firing.
- Biden and Biden traveled to Kyiv in 2015, where Biden pleaded for Shokin’s dismissal.
- Wrote media “talking points” for Ukrainian officials.
- gathered with Michael Carpenter, Victoria Nuland, Geoffrey Pyatt, Bridget Brink, and other top Biden officials involved in the$ 1 billion aid package.
- Corresponded with Biden officials coordinating responses to negative media reports about Hunter’s cushy and controversial Burisma job.
Former Obama-Biden administration officials have confirmed in recent congressional testimony that Ciaramella was a significant component of Biden’s strategy for implementing policies in Ukraine. In 2016, for instance, a White House photo shows him taking notes at a White House meeting Biden held with then- Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to discuss Ukraine’s anti- corruption reforms and other issues.
Ciaramella also collaborated directly with senior diplomats from the Obama and Biden administrations in Ukraine, including Victoria Nuland, a senior State Department official. ” Eric was regularly the clearing authority to get me into the White House for interagency meetings on Ukraine”, Nuland revealed in a 2020 Senate deposition. When asked if she had ever spoken with Ciaramella about Shokin and Ukraine policy, Nuland replied,” Of course, I did. He was part of the interagency process. He also served on my negotiation team for the six, seven rounds of negotiations I conducted with the Russians regarding the disputed Ukraine region in the Donbass.
Ciaramella was directly involved in talks concerning the massive U. S. aid package to Ukraine that Biden conditioned on the removal of Shokin, who at the time had seized the assets of the corrupt Burisma oligarch employing Hunter Biden. Additionally, he organized and participated in White House meetings with Shokin’s office’s Ukrainian prosecutors.
White House visitor logs confirm Ciaramella escorted Shokin’s deputy prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, into the White House for a January 2016 meeting. Ciaramella is designated as the “point of contact” for the Ukrainian delegation according to a White House agenda for the meeting. He also checked in Andriy Telizhenko, the Ukrainian Embassy official who says they discussed Burisma and Hunter Biden during the meeting and struggled to understand why his U. S. counterparts were suddenly hostile to Shokin after praising him in earlier talks.
According to emails from the time, Ciaramella appeared unprepared to learn about the connection between Shokin’s dismissal and the$ 1 billion loan to Ukraine. Though Biden maintains he insisted Kyiv oust Shokin because he was too soft on weeding out fraud in entities that included Burisma, Ciaramella suggested he did n’t share the view that Shokin was corrupt. We had a two-hour discussion of their priorities and the challenges they face, Ciaramella continued,” and we were super impressed with the group.”
On Jan. 21, U. S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt , emailed , Ciaramella and other White House aides an article from the Ukrainian press—” U. S. loan guarantee conditional on Shokin’s dismissal”.
” Yikes. I do n’t recall this coming up in our meeting with them”, Ciaramella , replied, referring to the White House meeting he hosted with top Ukrainian prosecutors.
However, Pyatt sounded doubtful that Ciaramella was aware of the decision in a closed-door 2020 , deposition  before the Senate. ” I think you have to ask Eric what he meant by ‘ Yikes,'” Pyatt , told , Senate investigators. He claimed that he thought the idea of conditioning Shokin’s removal’s loan guarantee “obviously came up in those meetings” Ciaramella hosted, suggesting that Biden’s adviser was aware of the quid pro quo prior to Pyatt’s publication of an article about it in the Ukrainian press.
The day before he hosted the Ukraine prosecutors, Ciaramella received an agenda from a State Department official that asked him to “note the importance of appointing a new PG]prosecutor general], reiterating that Shokin is an obstacle to reform”, according to emails. Additionally, the agenda directed Ciaramella to “ask the del [Ukrainian delegation ] what high-level cases are on the docket for prosecution,” which raises questions in some circles about how Biden’s advisers were looking for information about Shokin’s plans to prosecute Burisma oligarchs, something Hunter Biden had been asked to find out.
In a Jan. 21 email, Pyatt told Ciaramella to “buckle in” because, as he later explained to Senate investigators, the deal was a “difficult issue” and” there was going to be political controversy around this]news ]”.
When asked if conditioning the$ 1 billion on Shokin’s firing was Biden’s idea or originated from his office, the former ambassador shrugged. ” It was the — our interagency policy”, he testified, adding,” I do n’t remember when the vice president would have weighed in on this”.
Pyatt acknowledged, however, that it was a sudden change in policy. ” At the beginning”, he said, “it was not our expectation that Shokin’s removal would be necessary”. In fact, a note from October 1, 2015, which summarized the Interagency Policy Committee’s recommendation for Ukraine stated that “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its ]anti-corruption ] reform agenda to justify a third [loan ] guarantee.” Ciaramella was a member of the IPC task force, which monitored Shokin’s office. Additionally, the task force drafted a loan guarantee agreement the following month that did not call for Shokin’s removal. Then, in December, Joe Biden flew to Kyiv to demand his ouster.
If what Ciaramella said in his email, which he knew would be included in White House correspondence, was a legitimate response, then Vice President Biden may have rejected the advice of one of his top NSC advisors regarding Ukraine. If Ciaramella were genuinely alarmed, he might have blown the whistle on his boss like he did on Trump, but he stayed mum. If, on the other hand, Ciaramella had” a direct conflict,” according to Derek Harvey, the former congressional investigator involved in the first impeachment, if he were a party to the quid-pro-quo discussions, as Pyatt suggests. Either way, Ciaramella clearly found himself in the middle of a major controversy.
White House documents reveal that Ciaramella and Biden shared an Air Force Two flight in December 2015 that the vice president flew to Kyiv after threatening Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to ax Shokin. Republicans have accused Biden of pushing Shokin’s ouster to block scrutiny of his son’s actions.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer bragged about withholding a U.S. loan guarantee if Ukraine did n’t fire the prosecutor [ Shokin ] and “biden called an audible and changed U.S. policy toward Ukraine to benefit his son on the plane ride to Ukraine.”
Biden and his supporters have repeatedly claimed Shokin had to go because he was n’t cracking down on corruption and that everyone else in the administration, as well as Europe, agreed Shokin should be fired. This is still the dominant narrative in major American media. But around that time, Shokin had conducted a raid of Burisma oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky’s home, seizing his house, cars, and other assets.
In emails sent between Hunter and Burisma officials in November 2015, the month before Biden traveled to Ukraine, the IRS Special Agent Joseph Ziegler claimed Shokin was a “key target” in the emails that were exchanged, “key target” and “key target,” as part of his investigation into Hunter’s tax evasion. Just days before Biden arrived in Kyiv in early December 2015 to demand Shokin’s ouster, Hunter allegedly called his father from Dubai following a meeting there with Burisma official Vadym Pozharskyi, who asked him to pressure his father to shut down Shokin’s investigation. Following a dinner organized by Hunter at the Cafe Milano in Washington, Vice President Biden was aware of Pozharskyi. He first met with him in April 2015.
” The unstated goal was to have the Ukrainian prosecutor removed in an effort to close the criminal case against] Burisma founder ] Zlochevsky”, Ziegler said in recent testimony before the House impeachment inquiry. The Burisma investigation dried up after Shokin was forced to step down.
Ciaramella tried to marshal a defense for Biden in the whistleblower complaint he sent to Rep. Adam Schiff in August 2019. At the time of the tragic July phone call, he mentioned that former Vice President Biden had pressured Poroshenko to fire Shokin in order to halt a alleged criminal probe into Burisma Holdings as one of Trump’s worries. But Ciaramella attempted to pour cold water on the notion by referencing a Bloomberg News article that quoted a “former senior Ukrainian prosecutor” who falsely claimed” that Mr. Shokin in fact was not investigating Burisma at the time of his removal in 2016″.
White House emails reveal Ciaramella was ingested into messages sent by Biden’s communications team, who were concerned Hunter Biden’s appointment on corrupt Burisma’s board would result in unseemly optics and undermine their boss’s effort to end corruption in Ukraine.
In a Dec. 8, 2015,  , email, for example, Biden’s communications director, Kate Bedingfield, copied Ciaramella on a link to a New York Times article headlined,” The Knotty Ties Between Joe Biden, His Son and Ukraine”. Bedingfield is mentioned in the story, which is credited to James Risen as denying Hunter had traveled to Ukraine with his father in an effort to minimize his influence. She also said Ukrainian officials never raised his position on the Burisma board with Biden as an issue of concern. However, Risen was swayed on the matter of compensation for Hunter, claiming that it was” not out of the ordinary.”
At the time, Burisma was paying Hunter, who had no energy sector experience,$ 1 million a year just for lending his name to its board. Hunter sat on Burisma’s board for five years, and it turns out he never went there for a meeting. Republicans suspect Biden got the prosecutor ousted to keep the money flowing from Burisma to the Biden family.
Career State Department officials, led by George Kent, who was stationed in Ukraine at the time, attempted to contact Biden’s aides about potential family conflicts with the vice president. Despite their concerns, Biden never asked his son to step down from the Burisma board, which would have made all questions go away. And despite Hunter serving on his board and taking millions in payments from him, Biden himself never publicly acknowledged that Burisma founder Zlochevsky was a corrupt actor in Ukraine despite Kent and other officials naming him by name as a corrupt actor. For all his talk of fighting corruption in Ukraine, Biden failed to distance himself from one of the most corrupt oligarchs in the country.
According to Harvey, who worked for the Republican side of the House Intelligence Committee during the 2019 Trump impeachment hearings,” The]Biden ] impeachment inquiry should compel Ciaramella to testify because we now know he was involved in communications about Biden using the$ 1 billion in aid to extort Ukraine into firing Shokin.”
Harvey said Ciaramella would make a valuable material witness against Biden in the probe, which centers on whether Biden used his White House clout or political influence on behalf of his son’s foreign paymasters. According to White House surveillance photos, Ciaramella admitted notes to Biden, his staff, and Ukrainian officials during these meetings, which lawmakers could subpoena along with his testimony.
Another former staff investigator noted that Ciaramella is no longer protected by federal whistleblower laws. He has left the government and is currently employed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington as a senior fellow and a , focusing on Ukraine and Russia, where he consults with White House officials and advocates for billions of dollars in Ukrainian aid, including” a Marshall Plan for the Ukrainian military.” Through a spokesperson, Ciaramella declined to comment.
According to Jason Foster, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chief investigative counsel and whistleblower expert, “none of the whistleblower protections apply to this particular situation.” He also noted that the Whistleblower Protection Act does n’t shield whistleblowers from any other conduct they might have been involved in, including their own conduct. It also grants them a legal right to remain anonymous.
A spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee, which is leading the Biden impeachment inquiry, declined to say whether Ciaramella is on the witness list. Jessica Collins, the director of House Oversight Communications, said,” I do n’t have anything for you on this at this time.” However, Comer has publicly described the “whistleblower” impeachment of Trump as a” cover- up” operation for the alleged Biden blackmail scheme in Ukraine involving U. S. aid and the Burisma corruption probe.
What Ciaramella witnessed and what he recorded in notes taken at high-level Biden-Ukraine meetings might now be relevant for the President’s active impeachment inquiry. The House may have little choice but to hold the kind of hearings the Democrats blocked during the earlier impeachment by keeping Ciaramella’s identity — and his own potential conflict — secret.
Ciaramella might now be reluctant to testify against Biden in light of Trump’s impeachment.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Investigative journalist Paul Sperry regularly contributes to RealClearInvestigations and has written articles for the New York Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. His books include’ The Great American Bank Robbery ‘ ( 2011 ), and ‘ Crude Politics: How Bush’s Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism ‘ ( 2003 ).
