Ukraine whistleblower witness touted Russia collusion claims and Nina Jankowicz while at Trump DoD

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.