Remember when Democrats impeached President Trump the first time? The one over a phone call with Ukraine’s president? The one where some mysterious “whistleblower” supposedly had the goods on Trump committing high crimes? Well, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just declassified the memos from that whole circus — and it turns out the whistleblower was a Biden loyalist, a registered Democrat, and a guy who admitted under oath that he had zero firsthand knowledge of anything Trump said.

Whoa! We are shocked. Shocked, we tell you. A Democrat operative with an axe to grind fabricated a scandal out of office gossip and got an entire impeachment out of it? Who could have possibly seen that coming? (All of us. Every single one of us saw it coming.)

The whistleblower’s name is Eric Ciaramella — a retired CIA analyst who spent years working directly with Joe Biden on Ukraine policy during the Obama administration. He traveled to Ukraine with Biden. He attended state luncheons with Biden. He was so tight with Biden’s team that a senior State Department official said Ciaramella was “regularly the clearing authority to get me into the White House.” This is the guy Democrats told us was just a brave, nonpartisan public servant who stumbled onto corruption.

Here’s where it gets really fun. On the disclosure form Ciaramella filed back in August 2019, there was a box that asked whether he’d previously contacted Congress about any of this. He didn’t check it. Oops! Because he absolutely had been in contact with Adam Schiff’s staff before filing the complaint. When the Inspector General caught him on it two months later, Ciaramella apologized and said the omission “was certainly not his intent.”

Meanwhile, Schiff was out on MSNBC telling America with a straight face: “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.” His own spokesman doubled down, saying Schiff “does not know the identity of the whistleblower.”

They lied. They all lied. And the memos prove it.

But wait — the bias gets even juicier. In the declassified interviews, Ciaramella described working for Trump’s White House as “very stressful.” He called a Trump NSC staffer “slippery and untrustworthy.” He specifically asked that Republican Congressman Devin Nunes — a member of the Gang of Eight who was legally entitled to see the complaint — be blocked from viewing it. He was also a contributing editor at Lawfare, the legal blog run by Benjamin Wittes, the guy Politico literally dubbed “the Bard of the Deep State” and a self-described buddy of James Comey and Peter Strzok.

This wasn’t a whistleblower. This was a Democratic operative running a covert political operation from inside the intelligence community. And the Inspector General, Michael Atkinson, helped cover for him. Atkinson’s own letter flagged “some indicia of an arguable political bias” but still stamped the complaint as “credible” — and then kept the damning details locked in a classified vault where Congress and the American people couldn’t see them.

Oh, and the corroborating “Witness 2” who backed up Ciaramella’s complaint? That was an NSC member from the NSA who co-authored the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference and worked directly with Peter Strzok during the Russia collusion investigation. Even this witness admitted he “could not connect the same dots” the whistleblower did and wouldn’t have filed a complaint on his own. The ICIG’s own memo literally warned that someone trying to discredit this witness “might focus on” his authorship of the Russia interference report. They knew it looked bad. They buried it anyway.

As Alan Dershowitz put it: “The evidence about the bias and credibility of the whistleblower should have been front and center in the 2019 impeachment, but it was hidden by bureaucrats, and that was a disservice to justice and to the American people.”

Devin Nunes — the congressman Ciaramella tried to block from seeing the complaint — didn’t mince words either: “It was clearly a staged attack by anti-Trump malcontents in the intelligence bureaucracy who believed that they, not the American people, should determine who is the U.S. president.”

And here’s the cherry on top. CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a separate memo showing that Biden’s VP team intervened back in February 2016 to stop the CIA from circulating an intelligence report about how senior Ukrainian officials viewed Hunter Biden’s business dealings. So the same guy whose son was neck-deep in Ukrainian corruption had his staff actively suppressing intelligence reports about it — and then one of his own loyalists filed an impeachment complaint against Trump for asking about it.

That’s not government oversight. That’s a protection racket.

We spent years being told we were conspiracy theorists for questioning the impeachment. We were told the whistleblower was brave, the process was legitimate, and anyone who doubted it was attacking democracy. Now the receipts are on the table. The whistleblower was a biased partisan who relied on hearsay, lied on his disclosure form, secretly coordinated with Schiff’s office, and had the Inspector General running interference to keep it all hidden.

Five years later, vindication tastes pretty sweet. Every single person who voted to impeach Donald Trump over this fabricated nonsense should have to answer for it — starting with the 230 House Democrats who raised their hands and said “guilty” based on the testimony of a guy who admitted he didn’t actually know anything.

Somewhere, Adam Schiff is probably rehearsing his “I had no idea” face in a mirror right now. He’s had a lot of practice.