Trump lawyer suggests 'whistleblower' had role in allowing Biden-Burisma

White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin addresses the Senate during the impeachment trial of President Trump. (screenshot)

White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin believes the unnamed whistleblower who prompted the impeachment of President Trump may be implicated in the Obama administration's decision to overlook the conflict of interest in Hunter Biden's profiting from a Ukrainian company under investigation for corruption while his father was the point man for Ukraine policy.

In the question-and-answer session Wednesday, Philbin raised concern about reports of the whistleblower's coordination with the staff of lead House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., PJ Media reported.

"Manager Schiff or his staff had some role in consulting with the whistleblower that remains secret to this day and all attempts to find out about that, to ask questions about that, were shut down," Philbin said.

Investigative reporter Paul Sperry reported last week that just two weeks after Trump took office, the alleged whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, was overheard in the White House discussing with future Schiff staffer Shawn Misko how to remove Trump, according to former colleagues.

Ciaramella and Misko at the time were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. Both, Sperry reported, expressed anger over Trump's new "America First" foreign policy, a dramatic change from President Obama's approach to international affairs.

Schiff initially said the whistleblower would testify in the Senate trial. But the House Intelligence Committee chairman changed his mind after he was caught falsely stating his office had no interaction with the whistleblower before the complaint was filed. And since Sperry reported the whistleblower was Ciaramella, the CIA analyst's political bias and connections have been scrutinized.

Along with stating publicly that the whistleblower was politically biased, the intelligence community inspector general, who handled the complaint, said the whistleblower had once worked with a Democratic political candidate on Ukraine issues. That candidate was later reported to be Joe Biden.

"If the whistleblower, as is alleged in some public reports, actually did work for then-Vice President Biden on Ukraine issues, exactly what was his role?" Philbin asked. "What was his involvement when issues were raised — we know from testimony that questions were raised — about the potential conflict of interest that the vice president then had when his son was sitting on the board of Burisma.

"Was the alleged whistleblower involved in any of that and in making decisions to not do anything related to that?"

Hunter Biden was paid $83,000 a month over a period of three years by the Ukrainian firm, Burisma, while his father was President Obama's point man on Ukraine matters. Joe Biden later boasted openly that he threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine to force Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Shokin, at the time, was overseeing an investigation into Burisma.

Defenders of Biden's contend the vice president was simply carrying out the will of the international community in ousting a corrupt prosecutor. But the investigation into Burisma was dropped after Shokin was forced out.

Philbin asked the senators if the whistleblower had "some reason to want to put the deep-six on any question raising any issue about what went on with the Bidens and Burisma and firing Shokin and withholding a billion dollars in loan guarantees and enforcing a very explicit quid pro quo — you won’t get this billion dollars until you fire him."

"We don’t know, and because Manager Schiff was guiding this whole process — because he was chairman in charge of directing the inquiry and directing it away from any of those questions — that creates a real due process defect in the record," the president's lawyer said.