Eric Ciaramella, alleged to be the Ukraine whistleblower, was cited in a key passage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in connection to the meeting between President Trump and Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after James Comey was fired as FBI director.
Ciaramella, a career CIA analyst, was Ukraine director on the National Security Council during the end of the Obama administration and remained there during the early months of the Trump administration, when he was briefly acting senior director for European and Russian affairs before the arrival of Fiona Hill. This week, the Washington Examiner reported that Ciaramella, 33, is now a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia on the National Intelligence Council, reporting to the director of national intelligence.
On Oct. 31, RealClearInvestigations reported that Ciaramella was the whistleblower who filed a complaint about a July 25 phone call. During the call, Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into a conspiracy theory regarding CrowdStrike and to investigate Democratic 2020 candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Ciaramella appears in a footnote on the 71st page of Mueller’s 448-page report, with Mueller citing two emails that he sent to John Kelly, then chief of staff, and other administration officials describing the details of a meeting between Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
A letter that then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote in May 2017 justified Comey’s firing by criticizing his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, but Trump would subsequently suggest he’d fired Comey because of the Trump-Russia investigation. After Comey was fired, he leaked information from some of his memos to the media in order to prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
The Mueller report footnote referenced Ciaramella’s emails when it stated that “the meeting had been planned on May 2, 2017, during a telephone call between the President and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the meeting date was confirmed on May 5, 2017, the same day the President dictated ideas for the Comey termination letter to [Trump aide] Stephen Miller.”
The body of the Mueller report went on to quote from a New York Times article published on May 19, 2017, that cited an “American official” who read a “document summarizing the meeting” to the reporters.
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump was quoted as saying. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off … I’m not under investigation.”
Mueller noted that “the White House did not dispute the account” but rather issued a statement defending Trump’s decision to fire Comey.
“By grandstanding and politicizing the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia,” former press secretary Sean Spicer said at the time. “The investigation would have always continued, and obviously, the termination of Comey would not have ended it. Once again, the real story is that our national security has been undermined by the leaking of private and highly classified conversations.”
The New York Times had already revealed on May 16, 2017, that Trump disclosed some classified information about an anti-ISIS operation in Syria to the Russians during the same Oval Office meeting.
Mueller went on to say that former Trump adviser Hope Hicks “said that when she told the President about the reports on his meeting with Lavrov, he did not look concerned” and that Trump reiterated that Comey “is crazy.” Mueller also said that when White House counsel Don McGahn asked Trump about his comments to Lavrov, Trump “said it was good that Comey was fired because that took the pressure off by making it clear that he was not under investigation so he could get more work done.”
The whistleblower complaint in August alleged that the transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky was “locked down” in a potentially “abusive” way and that U.S. officials were “deeply concerned” by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s “circumvention of national security decision-making.”
Trump asked for a “favor” from Ukraine in investigating a conspiracy theory related to the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which determined the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email systems, an assessment agreed to by Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community. Trump also urged the Ukrainian leader to look into any Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election. The president brought up his request related to CrowdStrike immediately after Zelensky asked about purchasing anti-tank weaponry, known as Javelins, from the United States. Trump also talked about “the other thing,” suggesting that the Ukrainians investigate allegations of corruption related to Biden and his son.
In recent weeks, more reports from the May 2017 meeting between Trump and the Russians have emerged.
CNN’s Jim Sciutto reported in early September that Trump’s handling of classified information during his discussion with the Russians prompted the U.S. to exfiltrate a high-level CIA informant close to the Kremlin shortly thereafter, although a follow-up story from the New York Times and others cast doubt on CNN’s reporting, stating that the U.S. had tried to pull the informant out as early as 2016 and that its 2017 decision to remove him from Russia wasn’t due to Trump’s comments.
The informant, recruited by the CIA decades ago, has been described as a mid-level Russian official who was outside Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and yet saw Putin on a regular basis and was privy to high-level information. This Moscow spy’s intelligence was allegedly key to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin himself ordered a Russian interference campaign in the U.S. 2016 election.
The Washington Post reported in late September that, during his conversation with the Russians, Trump said that he “was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election because the United States did the same in other countries” and that Trump’s assertion “prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people.”
