New evidence against Trump emerging for the Senate Impeachment Trial

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Published Jan. 14, 2020
Updated Jan. 15, 2020, 7:22 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — New details emerged on Tuesday of President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine, intensifying demands on Senate Republicans on the eve of a historic impeachment trial to include witness testimony and additional documents in the proceeding.

The dozens of pages of notes, text messages and other records lay out work conducted by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and his associate Lev Parnas on behalf of the president. They include handwritten notes scrawled on a sheet of hotel paper at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Vienna that mention getting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to announce an investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.

House Democrats released the records even as Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a Wednesday vote to name House prosecutors and send the articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump to the Senate to begin the trial. The material undergirds the accusations against Mr. Trump, and highlights how much is still to be learned about the scope of a scheme that the impeachment charges call a blatant effort to solicit foreign help in the 2020 election.

The documents, provided by Mr. Parnas, contain a series of exchanges between him and a Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who was helping Mr. Giuliani unearth damaging information about the Bidens.

In one of the exchanges, from March 2019, Mr. Lutsenko messaged Mr. Parnas on the WhatsApp messaging service to complain that the Trump administration had not yet ousted the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch. Mr. Lutsenko, who had clashed with Ms. Yovanovitch and wanted her gone, appeared to link her removal to his assistance in attacking the Bidens.

“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are bringing into question all my allegations. Including about B,” he wrote to Mr. Parnas, in apparent references to Ms. Yovanovitch and Mr. Biden.

Mr. Lutsenko added: “And here you can’t even get rid of one fool,” an apparent reference to Ms. Yovanovitch. He also inserted a frowning emoji.

“She’s not a simple fool trust me,” Mr. Parnas responded. “But she’s not getting away.” The president, with Mr. Giuliani’s encouragement, recalled Ms. Yovanovitch from her post in late April.

The Parnas documents also include a May 2019 letter from Mr. Giuliani requesting a meeting with Mr. Zelensky in which he said Mr. Trump had “knowledge and consent” of his actions. It is the first document to be made public to say as much.

Mr. Parnas, who is under federal indictment, has only recently been cleared to hand over the material to Congress, and an official involved in the inquiry indicated more was likely to be made public soon.

Senior Democrats who led the House impeachment inquiry said the new records underscored the need for senators to demand additional evidence at trial. The new documents, they said in a statement, “demonstrate that there is more evidence relevant to the president’s scheme, but they have been concealed by the president himself.”

“There cannot be a full and fair trial in the Senate without the documents that President Trump is refusing to provide to Congress,” they said.

Ms. Pelosi said she would announce the names of her impeachment managers at 10 a.m. Wednesday, and a vote to formally name them and send the articles was scheduled for early afternoon. “The American people deserve the truth, and the Constitution demands a trial,” she said.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, indicated that senators would be ready to receive the charges on Wednesday and take sworn oaths to render “impartial justice” in the trial shortly thereafter, if not the following day.