Below follows the second installment of a two-part excerpt from Just the News contributor Lee Smith's book "The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President": Robert Mueller's July 24, 2019 congressional testimony about his nearly two-year long investigation seemed to bring an end to the conspiracy theory holding that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
On July 25, Trump spoke with new Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky on the phone and asked him to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr.
In the afternoon, Alexander Vindman phoned Eric Ciaramella, who also worked on Ukraine and Russia issues.
"The president," Ciaramella wrote, "Did not raise security assistance." Just two days after the curtain dropped on the Mueller investigation, Ciaramella was rebooting the collusion narrative.
"In the course of my official duties," wrote Ciaramella, "I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. elections." He even replicated a key feature from Steele's memos that helped the FBI obtain the FISA warrant.
One, in exchange for the hack and release of DNC emails, the Trump team would sideline Ukraine as campaign issue.
HPSCI had always treated whistleblower's complaints with discretion - but the point of the Ciaramella dossier operation was to force the complaint into the public.
On September 18, three of the Washington Post's top collusion conspiracy theory reporters, Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Shane Harris, wrote that the whistleblower's complaint involves "Trump's communications with a foreign leader" and a "Promise" that was made.
"Lawmakers were concerned," wrote Blake, "That the administration was failing to provide $250 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which is intended to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia." By declassifying the transcript of his call with Zelensky, Trump had gained a step on his opponents.
Trump's reluctance to hand out U.S. taxpayer dollars to a foreign government was unlikely to turn supporters against a president who had campaigned on America First.
"At a certain point he must have found out that he was Biden's guy on Ukraine," says Ciaramella's former colleague in the intelligence community.
Monday, September 28, 2020
'Permanent Coup': Just as Mueller probe fizzles, anti-Trump cabal hatches new collusion tale
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment