On Tuesday night the House released new evidence on Trump and Ukraine. Documents revealed that Giuliani was having Parnas and others follow Yanakovitch in Ukraine before her firing. And another document reveals Trump may have been more involved than previously known: “One of the new documents shows Mr. Giuliani saying that he had Mr. Trump’s blessing to seek a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president-elect, last spring, potential new evidence on the eve of the president’s impeachment trial.”
Mr. Giuliani has previously said he was acting at Mr. Trump’s direction in his dealings with Ukrainian officials, but the letter released on Tuesday is the first public document that says he was doing so.”
Greg Sargent breaks down the significance of these documents:
“They leave almost zero doubt that the scandal that got President Trump impeached will continue getting worse — substantially so — for him and his defenders.
The Giuliani letter undercut Trump’s main defense: “Giuliani explicitly states that he was representing Trump “as a private citizen, not as the president of the United States,” and also that Giuliani was carrying out this mission with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.”
Sargent points out that the House Foreign Relations Committee is now asking the State Department to turn over any information about threats to Yanakovitch, what Pompeo knew, and how they responded. The chair issued a statement: “This unprecedented threat to our diplomats must be thoroughly investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Parnas went on Maddow Wednesday and Thursday nights for an interview. Parnas also gave an interview to the New York Times on Wednesday:
- “asserting for the first time in public that the president was fully aware of the efforts to dig up damaging information on his behalf.”
- “Text messages and call logs show that Mr. Parnas was in contact with Tom Hicks Jr., a donor and Trump family friend, and Joseph Ahearn, who raised money for pro-Trump political groups, about developments in the Ukraine pressure campaign.”
“Mr. Parnas said that although he did not speak with Mr. Trump directly about the efforts, he met with the president on several occasions and was told by Mr. Giuliani that Mr. Trump was kept in the loop. Mr. Parnas pointed in particular to text messages, released by the House this week, in which Mr. Giuliani refers to an effort to obtain a visa for a former Ukrainian official who leveled corruption allegations against Mr. Biden.”
- “Before taking his first trip to Ukraine in February 2019, Mr. Parnas said that he met with Mr. Giuliani at the Grand Havana Room, a smoke-filled private club high above Midtown Manhattan, and relayed a concern that he and an associate, Igor Fruman, lacked the diplomatic credentials to carry out their task. Mr. Parnas said he proposed that the president designate them “special envoys” to ensure their safety and access. Then, Mr. Parnas said, Mr. Giuliani walked away to call Mr. Trump, and returned with a new plan: He would represent Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, as well as the president, a move that might afford their shared mission the confidentiality of attorney-client privilege. Mr. Giuliani has denied Mr. Parnas’s account.”
Here are some Parnas takeaways from the Washington Post: “a newly revealed document, a message from the Ukraine prosecutor: “I’m sorry, but this is all simply b——t,” Lutsenko wrote on March 13 in Russian. “I’m f—–g sick of all this. I haven’t received a visit. My [boss] hasn’t received jack all. I’m prepared to [thrash] your opponent. But you want more and more. We’re over. ” This shows that Trump was never concerned about corruption but about Biden, which Parnas said in the interview. He also implicated Bolton, Pence, Barr and Nunes as being “in the loop.”
The New York Times reports that in November 2018 Russia began hacking Burisma: “experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.”
On Wednesday evening the House voted to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate, and Pelosi named the impeachment managers.
The Senate opened its impeachment trial on Thursday, which John Roberts swearing in the senators and having them state their oath to render “impartial justice.”
On the same day the GAO rendered a verdict that the OMB broke the law by withholding the Ukraine funding.
On Friday the White House named Trump’s defense team, which will include Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz.
We also learned that 8 Americans were injured in the Iran strike and evacuated, despite the administration saying there were no injuries.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%