There is already plenty of evidence that Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, took the lead in pressing Ukraine’s president to publicly announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
But wait: there’s more.
“House Democrats unveiled new evidence Tuesday that they plan to send to the Senate as part of their case to remove President Donald Trump from office,” CNN reports.
The cable network says the new evidence provides “text messages and hand-written notes from an indicted Rudy Giuliani associate that add more details about the push for Ukraine to announce an investigation against Trump’s political rivals.”
That Giuliani associate, Lev Parnas, provided the House Intelligence committee with those documents, showing, among other things, that he tried to arrange a meeting between Giuliani and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“The records also add more details about the push by Giuliani to seek the ouster of the then-US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch,” CNN says.
This is likely to affect the Trump impeachment trial, expected to begin next week:
“The House Intelligence Committee pored through the reams of material provided by Parnas as they prepared for Trump’s Senate impeachment trial,” CNN says, “and the transition of the material to the Senate suggests House Democrats may cite the documents while presenting their case.”
Some of the documents were made public on Tuesday, “including a letter from Giuliani to then-President-elect Zelensky requesting a meeting as the President’s personal attorney, in which Giuliani said he was working ‘with the President’s knowledge and consent,’” CNN says.
The texts disclosed Tuesday “also revealed a previously unknown participant in Parnas’ efforts”: Robert Hyde, a Republican Connecticut congressional candidate.
“In a series of texts, Hyde ranted in crude language about a person identified by the House of Representative committee officials as Yovanovitch.”
