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By John Solomon
Updated: April 20, 2026 7:09am
Several Republicans, including the influential House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, are throwing their weight behind an effort to repudiate or expunge the 2019 House impeachment vote against President Donald Trump after years of belated bombshells eroded most of the scandalous narrative Democrats sold to America seven years ago.
The latest evidence to boomerang on the 2019 Democrat House impeachment managers came last week when Just the News successfully persuaded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to release long-secret memos showing the intelligence community had raised red flags about the credibility and political motives of the CIA analyst who prompted the scandal with a tale that Trump had wrongly pressured Ukraine's president to investigate the Biden family.
Exculpatory evidence withheld from the congressional proceedings in 2019 and 2020
Back in 2019, it was taboo to question anything about the CIA analyst or even to mention his name, now confirmed to be retired CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella.
But it turns out Democrats like then-Rep. Adam Schiff as well as the intelligence community's chief watchdog at the time, Michael Atkinson, withheld from the public some bombshell revelations, according to the memos that Gabbard released last Sunday.
Those memos showed Atkinson's investigators had flagged the CIA analyst for having "potential for bias," noted he had provided false information in his initial complaint, had apologized for the falsehood and held animus toward conservatives inside Trump's circles.
Gabbard blasted Atkinson's work, suggesting the former watchdog had "weaponized the whistleblower process" and used his office to "manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump." She referred both Atkinson and Ciaramella to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation.
Both men have not responded to requests for comment.
The fact that such relevant information was kept from Trump's defense team to use at the impeachment proceedings touched of a firestorm, with famed law professor Alan Dershowitz becoming the first to suggest it was evidence enough to warrant expunging the 2019 impeachment vote. Soon, many Republicans rallied around the idea, including Jordan, Rep. Claudia Tenney and Trump himself.
But the illusion of an untouchable, unimpeachable star "whistleblower" isn't the only tenet of the Democrat impeachment narrative to crack. Here are four other major parts of the story that Democrats wove together seven years ago that have fallen apart.
The Biden firing of Ukraine's chief prosecutor
The scandal began in March 2019 when this reporter uncovered evidence in a series of columns in The Hill newspaper that revealed then-Vice President Joe Biden withheld $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Kyiv to force the firing in late 2015 of Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who at the time just happened to be investigating Hunter Biden's Ukrainian employer, the energy firm Burisma Holdings.
Shortly after the story broke, Team Biden locked into an alternate story: Shokin wasn't really investigating Burisma that much, and Joe Biden only took the action because career officials wanted Shokin out for his weak efforts to fight corruption and had recommended that the vice president withhold the loan guarantees.
State Department officials like George Kent backed up the narrative in their impeachment testimony, Kent, for instance, answered "he did" when he was asked during his impeachment testimony whether Joe Biden acted consistent with U.S. policy when he used the loan guarantee as leverage to force Shokin's firing.
That story held for three years until Just the News sued to win documents showing a far different tale.
State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, had actually praised Shokin's work fighting corruption, even sending him a letter of congratulations. You can read that here.
File
NulandtoShokinJune2015.pdf
And contrary to what Biden claimed, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials had decided in fall 2015 that Ukraine and specifically Shokin had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee.
"Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee," reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.
You can read that here.
UkraineTaskForceLoanGuaranteeMemo.pdf
Separate of the documents, Hunter Biden's ex-business partners also testified to Congress in 2023 that Shokin's office was, in fact, conducting an increasingly aggressive corruption investigation into Burisma Holdings, an energy firm the State Department deemed to have been engaged in bribery. They also testified that Hunter Biden and Burisma's owner, Mykola Zolchevsky, were worried about Shokin's probe just before Joe Biden flew to Kiev and pulled the loan guarantees.
"He was a threat," ex-Burisma partner Devon Archer said of Shokin, the prosecutor. "He ended up seizing assets of Mykola a house, some cars, a couple properties. And Mykola actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets."
The newly unearthed evidence was so compelling that even The Washington Post's fact-checker changed his tune on the scandal, saying contrary to what had been reported during the impeachment trial in 2019 Joe Biden himself conducted an "audible" on his own when he forced Shokin's firing with the threat of withholding the loan guarantees.
State Department witness testimonies conflict with their own documents.
Another 2019 Democrat narrative to hit the skids was the claims by top State Department officials that Hunter Biden's dealings with a Ukrainian company tainted by corruption allegations had no real impact on U.S. policy in the former Soviet republic.
During Trump's first impeachment in late 2019, State officials testified that Hunter Biden's acceptance of a job at Burisma at a time when his father was vice president created the appearance of a conflict of interest but did not materially impact U.S. policy in Ukraine.
But in a private, classified email obtained by Just the News years later, one of the top U.S. officials in the Kyiv embassy, Kent, told then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch at the end of the Obama administration that Hunter Biden had, in fact, impacted the U.S. anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.
"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules," Kent wrote to Yovanovitch in the Nov. 22, 2016, email marked "confidential."
You can read that here.
KentBurismaEmailNov222016.pdf
Foreign millions, and Joe Biden's admonition to 'be good to my boy'
Back in 2019 and 2020, the Bidens insisted they had not gotten rich off of Hunter Biden's foreign dealings and that Joe Biden never interacted with his son's business clients.
"There will be an absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government. There wasn't any hint of scandal at all when we were there," Joe Biden claimed in 2019. "And I will impose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That is why I have never talked with my son or my brother, or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period."
But evidence and testimony uncovered by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer found the Biden family collected millions of dollars from Ukraine, China and other foreign locations and routinely traded on the vice president's name to win influence and deals with overseas clients,
Two former business partners of Hunter Biden, Jason Galanis and Tony Bobulinski, told Congress in 2023 that the Biden family used their name and access to the family patriarch to ink deals across the worldrecounting specific times that Joe Biden was in direct contact with his son's associates through phone calls and meetings.
Galanis testified about a specific 2014 phone call when then-Vice President Joe Biden called in to a meeting Hunter Biden had organized with Devon Archer, Galanis, and two Russian oligarchsYelena Baturina and her husband, the late Yuri Luzhkov, the former Mayor of Moscowat a New York bar.
"Hunter called his father, said hello and 'hold on, Pops,' then put the call on speakerphone and said, 'I am here with our friends I told you were coming to town, and we wanted to say hello'," Galanis recounted.
After exchanging pleasantries, the vice president ended, saying: "Ok then, you be good to my boy."
"The entire value-add of Hunter Biden to our business was his family name and his access to his father, Vice President Joe Biden," Galanis testified to lawmakers.
Likewise, another Biden family friend, Rob Walker, testified unequivocally in an interview transcript released by Comer's team in 2023 that Joe Biden met with a delegation of officials from the Chinese energy company CEFC, including its Chairman Ye Jianming, at a lunch in Washington, D.C. shortly after leaving office.
That hotel meeting occurred just days before CEFC made its first payment totaling $3 million to a Hunter Biden-tied company, the transcript showed.
Ties to the earlier and now discredited Russia collusion probe
The recently declassified memos from Gabbard's office offered one other stunning revelation.
An intelligence official dubbed "Witness 2" an ally of Ciaramella's during the Ukraine saga spoke with Atkinson on August 21, 2019. At the time, "Witness 2" was a member of the NSC whose home agency was the National Security Agency, and he was working for the Directorate of Intelligence and for the European and Russian Affairs Directorate.
"Witness 2 reviewed the transcript [of the call between Trump and Zelenskyy] in order to have situational awareness of the circumstances surrounding the call, and the discussions of the call, as he was covering for the Director of Ukraine, hereafter referred to as ('Alex'), while Alex was out of the office," the recently-declassified memo said.
The memo said that "Witness 2 worked with Peter Strozk [sic], and Witness 2 knew how it would play out if [Redacted] said anything" as the intelligence community watchdog quoted him saying that "if I unilaterally try to make an issue out of it the only person impacted is me and not for the better."
Strzok was a key player throughout the FBI's deeply flawed Crossfire Hurricane investigation including writing the opening communication that launched the inquiry. His text messages particularly with his co-worker and paramour Lisa Page in 2016 repeatedly displayed an anti-Trump bias.
"Witness 2 is assisting Complainant in regard to the urgent concern because Witness 2 wants to be able to sleep at night, and [Redacted] wants to help Complainant sleep at night, by registering how concerning this whole thing was," the memo said. "Witness 2" stated that he "feels a moral and patriotic duty to help Complainant due [sic] what is right" and said that he wanted to "sleep the sleep of the just.''
Despite this, "Witness 2" said he would not have done what Ciaramella had done.
"Witness 2 made it clear that [Redacted] would not have taken independent action on the information [Redacted] read in the transcript for two reasons: first that [Redacted] routinely deals with issues on a daily basis that are contrary to [Redacted] personal beliefs; and second that [Redacted] did not have the level of granular insight of details related to the Ukraine that Complainant had," the memo said. "Witness 2 could not connect the same dots that Complainant did into the impact of what was said during the telephone call."
In a section on "Potential for Biases or to Be Discredited" it was also revealed that "Witness 2" had helped with the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian election meddling.
"If someone were to try to discredit information provided by Witness 2, they might focus on Witness 2 being the co-author of the 2017 ICA on Russian Interference in the 2016 election," the memo said, adding that "the ICA could have been, or could be looked at, as negative towards President Trump." The 2016 ICA was written at the direction of then-President Obama and largely overseen by Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
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