Parnas Document Dump

Ken AshfordCrime, L'Affaire Ukraine, Trump & Administration, Trump ImpeachmentLeave a Comment

Last night, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff submitted new impeachment evidence to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler which will be included in the file expected to be turned over to the Senate today.

This evidence has come from Lev Parnas, a close associate of Rudy Giuliani. Parnas was indicted by the SDNY in October 2019 along with Igor Fruman on charges of conspiring to violate straw and foreign donor bans. Parnas and Fruman had been working with Giuliani to push for investigations of the Bidens. The two Florida-based businessmen were also leveraging political connections to Trump and other prominent Republicans to pursue a lucrative natural gas deal.

One piece of evidence includes Parnas’ undated note to himself scribbled on a Ritz Carlton Vienna notepad. It says, “get Zalensky [sic] to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated. start commun[icating] with Zalensky [sic] without [Pinchuk or Kolomoisky].” He could have written the notes yesterday for all we know.

The most important document, for the legal impeachment case against Donald Trump, is a letter Rudy sent to Volodymyr Zelensky stating clearly that he was contacting the Ukrainian president as Trump’s personal lawyer, not a government lawyer.

Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.

It makes it clear that — contrary to the Republican cover story — Rudy and Zelensky both knew they were negotiating a personal benefit for Trump, not a benefit to the US.

The evidence also includes text messages. One “seemingly showed Parnas’ associates tracking the movements of Marie Yovanovitch.”

In one exchange from March 2019, Robert F. Hyde, a Trump donor and Republican Congressional candidate whose involvement in the Ukraine saga has not been previously detailed, sent a series of texts to Parnas that implied he had access to people tracking Yovanovitch’s movements in Kyiv, according to the newly released documents.

“They know she’s a political puppet,” Hyde texted. “They will let me know when she’s on the move… They are willing to help if you/we would like a price.”

“Guess you can do anything in Ukraine with money… what I was told,” Hyde messaged. Parnas responded: “LOL.”

Shortly after the text exchanges were released Tuesday, a lawyer for Yovanovitch called for an investigation into the “disturbing” claim that she was being stalked while serving in Ukraine.

Reached for comment on the text messages last night, Hyde texted, “Bull Schiff is a giant b*tch.” 

Additionally, Parnas texted with Yuriy Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian prosecutor who pushed discredited theories about Yovanovich’s supposed hostility toward Trump. According to one March 2019 text message, Lutsenko appeared to link Yovanovitch’s removal to a probe into the Bidens.