Rand Paul Uses Senate Floor To Blare 'Whistleblower' Question Roberts Tried To Silence
Rand Paul isn’t letting go — not now, and not in the future.
The Kentucky Republican was censored last week by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts when he tried to ask a question at President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial about the suspected “whistleblower” whose complaint set the proceedings in motion.
But Paul not only held a news conference to read his question aloud to the media, he took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to read it again — this time with it printed on a placard placed on an easel next to him, part of the visual record of the proceedings for posterity.
THIS is the question Adam Schiff didn’t want anyone to hear during the impeachment trial@RandPaul was silenced when he tried to ask about the alleged “Whistleblower” and his partisan ties
This question needs to be heard & answered
RT!
pic.twitter.com/rSh3WsooDy— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 4, 2020
Explaining his reasoning, Paul said he wanted to get to the heart of how the impeachment effort really began.
“Everything they did about investigating the president was untrue and abused government to do something they never should have done in the first place,” he said. “So I asked this question.”
“Are you aware that the House Intelligence Committee staffer Sean Misko had a close relationship with Eric Ciaramella while at the National Security Council together? Are you aware and how would you respond to reports that Ciaramella and Misko may have worked together to plot impeaching the president before there were formal House impeachment proceedings?”
In case anyone is unaware of it by now, Eric Ciaramella is the name of the former National Security Council staffer and current CIA analyst who is widely suspected of being the “whistleblower” who took alleged concerns about a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and gave radical Democrats ammunition to try to oust a duly elected president of the United States.
Most sane Americans would probably think the motivation behind such an act was fairly important, but in the duplicitous world of Washington Democrats, Paul’s frankness had politicians and pundits — even, apparently, executives at Fox — practically clutching their pearls in distress.
They claimed Paul had identified a “whistleblower,” when he had done nothing of the kind. He named two individual federal employees, identifying one as a staffer of the House Intelligence Committee and the other as someone who’d worked at the National Security Council.
Democrats who claim, absurdly, not to know the identity of the “whistleblower” — like the loathsome House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff — should have no way of knowing whether Paul was actually naming a “whistleblower.”
And yet the farce was staged last week, with the disappointing assistance of Chief Justice Roberts.
In his speech on Tuesday, Paul explained his actions so clearly even Elizabeth Warren should have been able to follow him.
“Why did I ask this question? Because there are news reports saying these two people, one of whom works for Adam Schiff and one of whom worked with this person at the National Security Council, that they knew each other and had been overheard talking about impeaching the president in the first month of his office,” he said.
“In January of 2017, they were already plotting the impeachment.”
Paul also noted that the public perception of a “whistleblower” depends on the popularity of the topic being outed.
“The greatest whistleblower in American history, in all likelihood, was Edward Snowden,” he said, naming the former CIA contractor now living in exile in Russia after leaking massive amounts of information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance methods.
(The fact that Snowden is in exile, rather than working a cushy Washington job, is a pretty good indication that his move wasn’t nearly as popular as that of the “whistleblower” who helped Democrats attack Trump.)
“I’m not for retributions on the whistleblower,” Paul said. “I don’t want him to go to jail, I don’t want him to lose his job.
“But if six people who all worked together at the National Security Council knew each other and gamed the system, knowing that they would get these protections, they gamed the system in order to bring down the president, we should know about that.”
Even a Democrat could hardly disagree with a statement like that.
“So I think the question is an important one, and I think we should still get to the bottom of it,” he said.
Then he got to the real point: that what is happening to Trump — thanks to a rogue government bureaucracy and top lawmakers in the Democratic Party who have long since abandoned any sense of decency — could happen to any American if it’s not stopped now.
“This could happen again,” he said. “When the institution of the bureaucracy, when the intelligence community, with all the power to listen to every phone conversation you have, has political bias and can game the system to go after you, that’s a real worry.”
“It’s a real worry that they spied on the president, but what if you’re an average, ordinary American?”
The Twitter post at the top of this story was published by Charlie Kirk, founder and president of the conservative group Turning Point USA.
He was flooded with responses from liberals who either deliberately missed the point of Paul’s speech or responded without knowing what he actually said. (That would be a good bet, considering the myopically knee-jerk mindset of too many modern liberals.)
But Paul had plenty of supporters too:
Sen. Paul showed his patriotism and his bravery today. As he said, everyone denies knowing who the whistleblower is. If true, how could CJ Roberts deny the question. Who told him? Schiff? Misko? Other Dem staff?
— P G Sroufe (@g_sroufe) February 4, 2020
Those who remember the cold war see an all to familiar resemblance in the Democrat Party today. It started with propaganda such as we see today. Attack and Demonize those who disagree with them, get the press to comply, use scare tactics, race bait, and so much more. !Trump 2020!
— Don123 (@donmikel212) February 4, 2020
God bless Rand Paul for standing up for the rule of law and openly expressing the same concerns the American people have had thru all this nonsense. ❤???#AmericansAreFedUp with the bullshit
— Sandy Plonsky (@SandyPlonsky) February 4, 2020
Those who remember the cold war see an all to familiar resemblance in the Democrat Party today. It started with propaganda such as we see today. Attack and Demonize those who disagree with them, get the press to comply, use scare tactics, race bait, and so much more. !Trump 2020!
— Don123 (@donmikel212) February 4, 2020
It wasn’t all that long ago — say fall and winter of 2016 — that liberals were claiming the Trump presidency was bringing about the shadow of the kind of totalitarian government George Orwell described in “1984.”
But as Paul’s speech made clear, the time since then has shown the exact opposite is true — it’s Trump’s opponents who have engaged in the kind of surveillance-state tactics Americans are used to associating with dictatorships, not their own elected officials, their FBI directors and their intelligence community.
“We’re going to have this conversation go on,” Paul said. “It isn’t really about the whistleblower so much, it’s about reforming government.
Those are the words of a man who’s not letting go.
And every American — regardless of whether they agree with every twist of Paul’s sometimes dogmatic politics – should be thanking him for them.
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