The man believed to be behind the whistleblower complaint regarding a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been named.
Previously, all that has been known publicly about the whistleblower is that he was a male and worked as an intelligence officer for the CIA.
Inside the halls of Congress, though, his name was considered an open secret.
Earlier this week, One America News Network (OANN) — a conservative cable news outlet — first named the suspected whistleblower.
On Thursday, Real Clear Investigation’s Paul Sperry, a pro-Trump reporter, also named the suspected whistleblower “because of the public’s interest in learning details of an effort to remove a sitting president from office.”
According to Sperry’s report, the whistleblower is 33-year-old government official Eric Ciaramella.
Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) is reportedly a registered Democrat, a holdover from former President Barack Obama’s administration. In the past, he’s worked for former Vice President Joe Biden.
After Trump’s inauguration, he reported to former CIA Director John Brennan inside the White House.
And Ciaramella was reportedly reassigned from his job in the National Security Council inside the White House in 2017 amid concerns he was leaking anti-Trump information to the mainstream media.
“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” a former National Security Council insider reportedly told Sperry.
Sperry wrote —
In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier.
Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.”
In effect, Ciaramella helped generate the “Putin fired Comey” narrative, according to the research dossier making the rounds in Congress, a copy of which was obtained by RealClearInvestigations.
According to The Washington Examiner, the whistleblower’s identity hasn’t yet been confirmed by officials.
Additionally, the newspaper said Sperry’s report contains at least one inaccuracy.
When asked, attorneys for the whistleblower refused to confirm nor deny his identity.
They also cautioned the public about rushing to judgment.
The Horn editorial team