By R. Cort Kirkwood
The first impeachment of President Trump in December 2019 appears to have been a rogue operation of the CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Independent journalists Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger, who helped blow the lid off the “Twitter Files” scandal, linked the two to the get-Trump operation because the original “whistleblower” that instigated the impeachment was a CIA operative.
The operative cited a “journalism” outfit, funded by USAID and the State Department, four times in his whistleblower report to chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Meanwhile, just how much money the federal government has fed to news organizations is becoming more clear. American taxpayers have funded The Associated Press to the tune of almost $40 million through the years.
The impeachment got rolling when CIA “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, a hate-Trump Obama holdover at the National Security Council, reported what he claimed was the gist of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump had asked Zelensky to work with then-advisor Rudy Giuliani to get to the bottom of the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme. In 2016, then-Vice President Joe Biden ordered Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating corruption at Burisma, an energy company that had inexplicably hired Biden’s son, Hunter. If Ukraine didn’t fire the prosecutor, it would lose $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
Ciaramella confessed that his report about the phone call was mostly hearsay. “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described,” he wrote.
But the CIA torpedo’s long missive to Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chief of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then-Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chief of the House Intelligence Committee, Shellenberger reported, also relied on material published by a little-known outfit called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
In July 2019, it reported that “two Soviet-born Florida businessmen — one linked to a Ukrainian tycoon with reputed mafia ties — are key hidden actors behind a plan by U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s personal attorney to investigate the president’s rivals,” as Gutentag and Shellenberger explained.
Ciaramella’s letter cited OCCRP four times.
“The OCCRP story was crucial to the House Democrats’ impeachment claim, which is that Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is why the whistleblower cited it four times,” the two wrote.
Read the rest here: https://thenewamerican.com/us/report-cia-usaid-linked-to-first-trump-impeachment-aps-take-from-taxpayers-almost-40m/
