by Jerry Dunleavy
Gavin Wilde, a/k/a "Witness 2," played a key role in the Ukraine whistleblower saga in 2019. The year prior, he penned articles that seemingly endorsed the Russiagate fervor of the times, and supported Biden's internet censorship campaign.
A year before he assisted the Ukraine whistle-blower in an
anti-Trump impeachment saga, national security official Gavin Wilde
published multiple articles seemingly promoting Russia collusion claims
and calls for social media censorship while working for the Trump
Defense Department.
Wilde — known only as “Witness 2” in internal intelligence memos from the Ukraine impeachment episode but identified by Just the News
— had worked with disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok and had co-authored
the flawed January 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian
meddling in the 2016 election prior to serving on the Trump National
Security Council in 2018 and 2019. Just before he took on that new role,
Wilde used his perch at the Defense Department and the National
Security Agency to pen a series of articles in early 2018 which echoed
leftwing themes about Russian interference and Donald Trump.
Supported internet censorship
Wilde wrote six articles in 2018 for International Policy Digest where he often hyped up Russian disinformation threats and even approvingly cited advocates for online censorship such as Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz was later ridiculed as the "The Disinformation Nanny." The articles by Wilde cited alleged evidence from since-discredited anti-disinformation operations such as the "Hamilton 68 Dashboard," which was run by
the anti-Trump-oriented Alliance for Securing Democracy. Wilde's
stories also linked to articles that promoted baseless Trump-Russia
collusion claims.
“Gavin Wilde has analyzed Eurasian security issues for the U.S. Department of Defense for nearly a decade,” Wilde’s author description for the articles stated. “He has lived, worked, and studied extensively in the region. The views expressed here are his own.”
Wilde’s articles noted that “the views expressed in this
article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the
official views of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense.”
Wilde’s official online biography
says that he was the Director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucus Affairs
for the first Trump White House’s National Security Council in 2018 and
2019 — during the Ukraine impeachment saga. Wilde said that he
“coordinated whole-of-government efforts to counter Russian malign
influence efforts — including counterintelligence, cybersecurity, and
election security initiatives” during his stint on the NSC.
Wilde’s time in government spanned much longer than that, with his biography
listing him as a “senior analyst” at the Defense Department from 2009
to 2021, although it appears he was working at the Carnegie Endowment by
2020.
His biography said that, during Wilde’s time at the Defense
Department, he “directed analysis to provide impactful insights to the
U.S. intelligence, policymaking, diplomatic, and military communities”
and “oversaw integration and collaboration with counterpart offices,
interagency partners, and foreign liaison services.”
“This guy sounds like a leftwing activist, but it doesn’t
appear to me upon cursory examination that he violated any law regarding
his publications as a government employee,” Kurt Schlichter, a retired
Army colonel and accomplished trial lawyer, told Just the News.
Just the News confirmed
that Wilde is the unnamed "Witness 2" identified in the Ukraine
impeachment documents released this month by Director of National
Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The 2019 claims by Witness 2 were critical
in helping the intelligence community watchdog push the whistle-blower's
complaint forward, and his Russiagate-linked biases were concealed from
House investigators during the impeachment saga.
Wilde did not respond to requests from Just the News
for comment sent to him through the Carnegie Endowment, Defense
Priorities, and the Alperovitch Institute, three organizations where
Wilde is currently listed as working.
Wilde published baseless Trump-Russia collusion claims
Wilde penned a January 2018 piece titled, “The Kremlin Subverts Media Abroad to Cement the Narrative at Home” where he linked to
the 2017 intelligence community assessment on alleged Russian meddling
(without noting his role in its authorship). He said that “in the
intervening year since the U.S. intelligence community (IC) assessed
Kremlin-orchestrated meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,
Washington and the general public have undergone a re-education of sorts
on the subject of ‘active measures’ – the Soviet-era term encompassing
political subversion, including disinformation and propaganda.”
Wilde seemed to write a copy or version of the January 2018 article for republishing at The Small Wars Journal too.
Wilde’s article also linked to a piece by Wired
which repeatedly blasted Trump, suggested the president was an
“unwitting ally” of Russian influence efforts, hyped the Russian
meddling threat, cited as fact the bogus Steele Dossier, and quoted
former CIA Director John Brennan suggesting the Trump campaign had been
“treasonous” in its dealings with the Russians.
“As the investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016
election — and the Trump campaign’s potential participation in that
effort — has intensified this summer, the Putin regime’s systematic
effort to undermine and destabilize democracies has become the subject
of urgent focus in the West,” the article cited by Wilde asserted.
“According to interviews with more than a dozen US and European
intelligence officials and diplomats, Russian active measures represent
perhaps the biggest challenge to the Western order since the fall of the
Berlin Wall.”
The article cited by Wilde asserted that “sometimes, too,
Russia finds a witting or unwitting ally in its information efforts” and
claimed that “the most high-profile example of the past 18 months, of
course, has been Donald Trump” and that “every time he tweets
‘#FAKENEWS’ about a story that is, in fact, true, he helps undermine the
trust and confidence in a free and independent press.”
The article linked to by Wilde also claimed that “it hasn’t
escaped the notice of investigators and intelligence services that
there have been a number of suspicious deaths tied to the 2016 election
operation, including a one-time KGB official who appears to have been a
source for the infamous Christopher Steele ‘dossier’ assembled about
alleged Trump ties to Russia.”
The piece that Wilde cited also quoted Brennan telling the
Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 that “I know what the Russians try
to do. They try to suborn individuals and try to get individuals,
including US individuals, to act on their behalf, wittingly or
unwittingly.” The article said that Brennan “then offered a chilling,
general observation about what he’s seen—pointing, in a roundabout way,
to one possible explanation for the Trump campaign’s repeated contacts
with Russians.”
“Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not
know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late,” Brennan said.
The article cited by Wilde concluded with the assertion
that “after a year that saw the passage of Brexit and Trump’s election —
both efforts aided by the amplification of the Kremlin message machine —
Western democracy indeed seems deeply imperiled.”
Wilde’s source for “well-documented” Russian efforts was discredited "Hamilton 68"
The January 2018 article
written by Wilde about alleged Russian influence operations was based
on the now-infamous "Hamilton 68" website created by the Alliance for
Securing Democracy. “A primary factor undermining Washington’s ability
to assess and counter this Russian threat is the refusal by partisan
political commentators to disaggregate Moscow’s well-documented mischief
from the more opaque allegations of collusion between Russian
operatives and the Trump campaign,” Wilde wrote.
The examples of “well-documented” efforts by Russia were buttressed by a link to the Hamilton 68 Dashboard on “Tracking Russian Influence Operations on Twitter.”
The same month, Wilde wrote his article endorsing Hamilton 68, the group who sought to tie
Republican calls to “#Release the Memo” — a demand that the GOP-led
House Intelligence Committee’s report critiquing the Carter Page FISA
and its reliance on the discredited Steele Dossier — were linked to
Russia.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy — which launched in 2017 and ran Hamilton 68 — counted amongst its advisory council
a number of prominent anti-Trump figures. David Kramer, a former senior
director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, had pushed the Steele Dossier to numerous reporters and to the Obama State Department in 2016 and 2017.
William Kristol, the former editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard,
emerged as a strident Trump critic. Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador
to Russia under former President Barack Obama, is a longtime Trump foe.
Clinton campaign foreign policy adviser Julianne Smith was allegedly linked to the Clinton Plan intelligence in 2016, and Smith had been deputy national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration.
Michael Morell, a former acting CIA director, was an advisory council member as well. Morell injected into the American political bloodstream the idea that Trump was an “agent” of Putin and Russia, a refrain that would be repeated over and over again by the Clinton campaign and by mainstream media.
Journalist Matt Taibbi posted
in 2023 that Yoel Roth, then the head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety,
had claimed in a 2018 email that an analysis showed that Hamilton 68
"falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate, right-leaning accounts of being
Russian bots." Roth had also reportedly
internally assessed at Twitter in 2018 that he was “increasingly of the
opinion that [Hamilton 68] is actively damaging and promotes
polarization and distrust through its shoddy methodology[.] Real people
need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without
evidence or recourse.”
The Washington Post announced in 2023 that it “issues minor corrections in coverage of Hamilton 68.”
“Hamilton 68 mixed the smattering of real Russian accounts
with a crowd of mostly American, mostly anti-establishment accounts to
create a dashboard that falsely synthesized the appearance of Russian
social media backing for everything from the Devin Nunes memo to the
Parkland shooting,” Taibbi told the House in 2025.
Wilde called for stricter social media censorship to deal with Russian info ops
Wilde then wrote
an article in February 2018 which stated that “when disinformation is
introduced into the algorithm—for instance, to meddle with the outcomes
of something as trivial as a game show or as consequential as a
presidential election—calls for stricter regulation will inevitably
follow.” He included a link to a November 2017 article by NPR.
The outlet cited by Wilde reported, “The nongovernmental organization Freedom House released its annual Freedom on the Net report
this week. Russian interference in the U.S. election, the subject of
daily reports for most of the past year, played a part in a decline of
Internet freedom in the U.S. But Americans did plenty themselves.”
Wilde’s own article called upon social media companies to take action against alleged Russian disinformation.
“Given that social media represents an ever-evolving social
and commercial experiment, concrete ideas to legislate it are
fragmentary and hotly debated,” Wilde wrote. “So it was last October
2017, when the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google—a spectacle for which the quiz show hearings of 1959 were downright prescient.”
The Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a 2023 report which linked the lab to the broader Election Integrity Partnership and its alleged censorship activities.
“Enter the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of
‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford
Internet Observatory that worked directly with the Department of
Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency
entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor
Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.
Created in the summer of 2020 ‘at the request’ of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, the EIP provided a way for the federal
government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing
both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”
Wilde promoted collusion promoter and future “Disinfo Czar” Nina Jankowicz
Wilde’s article
from February 2018 also called upon social media companies to take
action — and approvingly cited Nina Jankowicz in this regard.
Wilde said: “To more strategically approach the problem, we
should liken it to the concept of foreign aid, according to
disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz’s recent article for the Wilson Quarterly.
She lobbies for concerted ‘capacity building,’ which may be a ‘harder,
longer process, but one that seeks to move beyond band-aids and
vaccinate against the virus, prioritizing the citizens who fall victim
to disinformation.’ Prioritizing the citizens of the vast social network
ahead of the network itself will help foster an online culture of resiliency against disinformation.”
Jankowicz was later selected by the Biden administration to
be the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s
ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board. Her fingerprints
were also all over a State Department-commissioned report repeatedly
cited by the Biden White House when establishing an online task force
launched by then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2022.
Jankowicz has a lengthy history
of either labeling claims as disinformation that were later found to
have credibility or giving credence to assertions that were later
discredited — a history that had begun before Wilde pointed to her
expertise in his article.
Prior to Wilde citing Jankowicz, she had publicly pushed debunked claims of Trump-Russia collusion. The Washington Examiner reported that Jankowicz had repeatedly shared the debunked Russiagate claims in 2016 and beyond.
“Husband texted me ‘you have news to wake up to.’ Never thought it would be this,” she tweeted on Nov. 1, 2016. “Confirms our worst fears about Trump. I am horrified.”
She was sharing Hillary Clinton’s infamous Halloween 2016 tweet,
which said, ”It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his
ties to Russia.” It included a screenshot with the caption: “Donald
Trump has a secret server (Yes, Donald Trump). It was set up to
communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank called Alfa Bank.”
Jankowicz tweeted
again that “Trump had not one, but two secret email servers to
communicate with influential Russian bank. Unbelievable.” She was
sharing a Slate article by Franklin Foer, whom Fusion GPS had been feeding Trump-Russia stories to, according to emails released by former special counsel John Durham.
Jankowicz had pushed other collusion claims in 2016,
including information sourced from Steele’s discredited dossier. The
British ex-spy was hired by Fusion, which had been hired by Clinton
campaign general counsel Marc Elias. Jankowicz tweeted in September 2016 that “Trump’s Kremlin ties don’t end at Manafort. This is serious people.”
She was responding to a statement by the Clinton campaign about a Yahoo News
story in which Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said, “It’s chilling to
learn that U.S. intelligence officials are conducting a probe into
suspected meetings between Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page
and members of Putin’s inner circle.”
The 2016 story, written
by Michael Isikoff, was titled “U.S. intel officials probe ties between
Trump adviser and Kremlin.” It infamously recounted claims from the
Steele dossier, including about Page, and anonymously cited Steele as a
“Western intelligence source.”
Jankowicz wrote a Wiczipedia Weekly
story about the Isikoff article, wherein she talked about Page, saying,
“The fact that a man publicly associated with the campaign set up
meetings with high-ranking energy and finance officials in Russia while
the candidate he served was publicly encouraging the Kremlin to hack
U.S. servers is worrisome.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report
“did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or
coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference
activities.” Page was never charged with wrongdoing.
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized
the DOJ and FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions”
related to the FISA warrants against Page and for the bureau’s reliance
on the discredited dossier.
Jankowicz had also referenced Clinton’s claims about Trump in June 2016 and shared a link to a since-deleted Medium
piece she had written which featured an imaginary mural of Trump and
Putin kissing. Jankowicz wrote, “Putin’s Russia is not a country that
any American voter would seek to emulate. The United States should not
elect a demagogue who intends to do exactly that.”
She was sharing
a statement from Democratic National Committee national press secretary
Mark Paustenbach, who said, “Trump’s campaign still maintains strong
ties to Russia and pro-Kremlin elements.” She also shared
a link to a Clinton campaign article in August 2016, tweeting, “Trump’s
bizarre relationship with Russia [...] Foreign policy matters.”
The Clinton campaign article Jankowicz was sharing pushed
Russia collusion claims, including asking, “What’s behind Trump’s
fascination with Vladimir Putin? … Why does Trump surround himself with
advisers with links to the Kremlin? … Why is Trump encouraging Russia to
interfere in our election?”
Jankowicz kept pushing baseless Trump-Russia collusion allegations in 2017 as well.
“Preach,” she tweeted in March 2017 when sharing a screenshot and a Washington Post article
by Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director,
which was titled “The Clinton campaign warned you about Russia. But
nobody listened to us.” The article described efforts to push concerns
about Trump and Russia at the Democratic convention in 2016 and beyond.
The article concluded that “the possibility of collusion between Trump’s
allies and Russian intelligence is much more serious than Watergate.”
All these facts about Jankowicz were public prior to Wilde
touting her expertise. After Wilde’s 2018 article, Jankowicz also cast
doubt on the Hunter Biden laptop story, touted British ex-spy Christopher Steele as a disinformation expert, wrongly tried to undercut the assessment
that Iran was attempting to hurt Trump’s reelection chances just before
the 2020 vote, critiqued the media's promotion of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, and more.
Wilde’s ties to anti-Trump controversies concealed — until now
Wilde allied with and assisted the CIA whistle-blower —
identified by lawmakers and media reports as Eric Ciaramella — during
the Ukraine saga and spoke with Intelligence Community Inspector General
Michael Atkinson’s team on August 21, 2019 — a year after he penned his
Russia collusion-themed pieces.
“Witness 2” — now known to be Wilde — was also referenced nearly one hundred times in Atkinson’s recently-declassified
October 4, 2019, session before the House Intelligence Committee. The
declassified memos also recounted that “one of the jobs Witness 2 is
engaged in is to secure the election in 2020.”
Witness 2 disclosed
in 2019 that he had also worked on the controversial January 2017
intelligence community assessment that claimed Vladimir Putin tried to
help Trump beat Hillary Clinton in that year’s presidential race, an
assessment that the CIA now admits included flawed spy tradecraft. The
assessment also cited the discredited anti-Trump dossier written by
British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
Wilde — whose name remains redacted
— told investigators at the time he had been assisting the alleged
whistleblower with making his disclosures, and also admitted to having a
connection to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who was fired in 2019 for his misbehavior while helping lead the discredited Russia collusion probe.
Witness 2’s potential biases — including his involvement
with the ICA and, presumably, his prior affiliation with Strzok — were
recorded in interview notes by the inspector general’s team in 2019, but
were redacted and hidden from congressional investigators during the watchdog’s testimony.
Now, Wilde’s biases, his role in the Ukraine impeachment
saga, and his questionable writings are public — but a half decade
later.
Jerry Dunleavy
Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/ukraine-whistleblower-witness-touted-russian-collusion
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
