I once lived in Jersey — not the Atlantic state but the Channel Island tax haven. Sadly, it wasn’t because of opulent wealth. London finance houses dodged the taxman with the polite fiction that they were headquartered in Jersey and their big city offices were merely branches. Back in the day, this required a kabuki dance known as “mirror telexing.” London HQ telexed a “suggestion” to Jersey about buying shares, for example, and Jersey would telex back, bosslike, instructing London to do the deal. It was all about creating a fanciful paper trail to look aboveboard.
I suspect that something like mirror telexing has been used to gloss over a grubby procedure in efforts to impeach President Trump.
Lawyer Mark Zaid said his client, the impeachment whistleblower, would agree to answer written questions from Republicans rather than agreeing to the cross-examination they demand to find out who lit the impeachment fuse. A cloak of anonymity has been thrown over the whistleblower by Rep. Adam Schiff, who holds the impeachment dagger. Democrats pretend the whistleblower isn’t important anymore because witnesses and a rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s leader confirm his testimony.
But that’s not entirely true. He claimed Trump made “a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee,” but the transcript shows no such “specific request.” The whistleblower also interpreted, rather than just reported, what Trump said, claiming he sought Ukrainian interference in the 2020 election. This is a plausible but not a necessary conclusion to draw from the words spoken. So the whistleblower indulged in anti-Trumpian spin. And we know he also discussed his complaint with Schiff’s staff — colluded with them, so to speak — so answers from him in person would be more illuminating than written lawyerly evasions.
The law protects the whistleblower only from reprisals by his superiors at work, but journalists can shout his name from the rooftops or, more to the point, splash his name on the front page. Zaid knows this well enough, so his semiunsolicited offer of testimony looked less like an effort to keep his client in the shadows than the act of someone pining for the limelight.
And why not? Suppose, hypothetically, the whistleblower is Eric Ciaramella, whose name is all over social media, in news stories (including in the Washington Examiner), and has been cited in Congress. If he were outed definitively, he’d be hailed as a hero by the Left — actually, he already is — lionized by cable TV, and would probably get a lucrative book deal.
Concerns about whistleblower safety are mostly pious humbug. In early summer 2018, intelligence officials warned news media not to identify Stefan Halper, an academic at Cambridge University whose career on the intelligence community fringe included contact with Trump hangers-on Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. He was instrumental in the false narrative about Trumpian collusion with Russia to rig the 2016 election. Yet 18 months after being outed, he remains unmolested by forces once darkly suggested as presenting him with mortal danger.
So, what’s the real reason for today’s misdirection and secrecy? It is that sunlight is an excellent disinfectant and Democrats therefore have a vested interest in concealment? They want Trump ousted either by impeachment or by caking him with enough dirt to make him repellent to 2020 voters. Those voters should be allowed to know who started the Ukraine narrative, what political bias came into play, and how much it was shaped by Schiff, who has already been caught falsifying what he knew and when. After all, if the alternative to Trump is the Democrats, shouldn’t the public know what the Democrats have been up to?
This brings me back to mirror telexing. I suspect Ciaramella — let us continue the hypothesis — was involved in a role reversal with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Vindman is the Ukraine director on the National Security Council, the same position Ciaramella had in 2017, and he recently testified to the impeachment committee. Vindman was on the July 25 call. Ciaramella was not. Ciaramella, if he’s the whistleblower, probably got his ideas about the call from Vindman; they’re bound to have known each other. It seems likely that they arranged for Ciaramella to step forward as the whistleblower and for Vindman to follow up by testifying to the truth of a story of which he himself was the author.
If Vindman is the source of the whistleblower account, that would certainly undermine the force of Vindman’s supposed corroboration of the whistleblower account.
If Vindman was not the starting point for the whistleblower’s view of the phone call, who was? The public deserves to know. Let’s not keep this secret.
