Rudy Giuliani wrote a letter requesting a private meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, then president-elect of Ukraine, with the "knowledge and consent" of President Donald Trump, according to records released Tuesday by House Democrats.
The letter was part of the evidence that the lawyers of Lev Parnas, the associate of Giuliani, who is awaiting trial for the campaign's financing charges, handed the investigators the indictment of the House of Representatives. It reinforces the argument of the Democrats that Giuliani was following Trump's orders by trying to dig up dirty rags about political rival Joe Biden and the National Democratic Committee. Trump previously tried to distance himself from his lawyer, saying last November that he had not addressed him.
Records submitted by Parnas' lawyers also seem to show that the former Ukrainian ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, was being closely monitored by a Republican congressional candidate, following her physical movements in real time along with her computer and her phone.
A statement by the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and other important Democrats, said the information would be sent to the Senate along with the articles of the political trial. "All this new evidence confirms what we already know: the president and his associates pressured Ukrainian officials to announce investigations that would politically benefit the president," the statement said.
The letter, written on Giuliani's letterhead, was dated May 10, 2018. "Dear President-elect Zelensky: I am a private advisor to President Donald J. Trump. To be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as president of the United States. This is quite common under US law because the duties and privileges of a president and a private citizen are not the same. Separate representation is not the same, "unusual letter begins.
He congratulated Zelenskiy on his electoral victory, and then requested a meeting with him to discuss a "specific request." "In my capacity as personal advisor to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you this Monday, May 13 or Tuesday, May 14. I will not need more than half an hour of your time and I will be accompanied by my colleague Victoria Toensing, a distinguished American lawyer who is very familiar with this matter, "continues the letter.
The "specific request" issue is not mentioned, but the correspondence came a day after Giuliani told The New York Times that he was traveling to Ukraine to find out information about the work that Biden's son had done for a company of Ukrainian gas "We are not meddling in an election. We are meddling in an investigation, which we have the right to do," Giuliani told the newspaper at the time.
Trump, in a July 25 phone call, asked Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a conspiracy involving the Democrats and the 2016 elections. That call prompted the House to launch a Formal investigation of political trial on Trump's dealings with Ukraine.
Parnas sent a text message with Giuliani's letter to a Zelenskiy associate. The response was written in the statement. Giuliani then sends a text message to Parnas: "I think this guy cancels the meeting"
The former mayor of New York City did not take rejection well.
"I will say that I have been informed that the people who advise the elected president are not his friends. At least one was involved in the delivery of fraudulent evidence falsely accusing the campaign and made horrible statements about his desire to defeat him," he wrote Giuliani, according to the records. "They inform me that the president-elect is in the hands of people declared their enemies," he added.
Giuliani told NBC News in a text message that the letter "unequivocally shows that he was acting" in his role as defense lawyer seeking "exculpatory evidence."
The documents also include WhatsApp exchanges between Parnas and Robert Hyde, a Republican candidate for Congress in Connecticut, where they appear to be discussing Yovanovitch, the US ambassador. UU. in Ukraine that was removed from his post at the request of Giuliani.
The exchanges, in March 2019, do not name the ambassador, but include links to stories about her, and are from the period of time when Giuliani and her associates tried to fire Yovanovitch. The messages suggest that they had learned that the president had already decided to dismiss her, but that he could have changed his mind.
Ambassador monitored
Hyde's messages indicate that Yovanovitch's physical movements were being tracked in real time, along with his computer and phone use. "She is under strong protection outside Kiev," Parnas is told in an exchange. "They will move it tomorrow," says the person in another message.
Hyde, whose campaign website says he is an ex-veteran of the Iraq war, then sends an "update" saying "he will not be transferred" and "the special security unit updated the force in the complex." He tells Parnas on March 27: "We have a person inside."
It also seemed to be the topic of discussion between Giuliani and Parnas a month later. "He fired her again," Giuliani wrote. "I pray that it will happen this time. I will call you tomorrow, my brother," Parnas replied.
Yovanovitch was removed from his position on May 20. In his phone call with Zelenskiy, Trump said that Yovanovitch was "bad news" and that "he was going to go through some things."
In testimony before the House last year, Yovanovitch said he had heard cryptic warnings from Ukrainian officials that Giuliani and the then Attorney General of Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko, "had plans and were going to do things, even for me."
Yovanovitch's lawyer, Lawrence Robbins, told NBC News : "It goes without saying that the notion that US citizens and others were monitoring the movements of the ambassador for unknown purposes is disturbing. We trust that the corresponding authorities will conduct an investigation. to determine what happened. "
Hyde, who runs his own construction company, said in a text message to NBC News that he was drinking when he sent WhatsApp messages to Parnas publicly published by the Chamber. He also attacked Schiff in intense terms.
Hyde was removed from Trump National Doral Miami by police in May. He told the officer that "a hired killer had gone out to look for him" and that his computer had been hacked by the Secret Service, according to an incident report obtained by The Hartford Courant .
Other documents published by the Democrats include text exchanges between Parnas and Giuliani where they discussed efforts to obtain a visa for former Ukrainian Viktor Shokin to come to the United States. Shokin was the prosecutor that Joe Biden helped to expel him for accusations of corruption, and he accused the son of the former vice president of acting badly. "They rejected his visa today," Parnas wrote. "I can revive it," Giuliani replied. "It will work. I have no one."
The documents also included the handwritten notes of Parnas on paper from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Vienna. The notes have no date, but the first says that Zelenskiy "announces that the Biden case will be investigated." It ends with asterisks around the name "Rudy".
They also detailed plans involving Dmytro Firtash, a business associate of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, and a Ukrainian oligarch who had Parnas on his payroll. Plans included eliminating Firtash's spokesman, Lanny Davis, and replacing him with Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, two of the president's most fervent advocates on Fox News.
The notes say: "Get rid of Lanny Davis (very good!"). Then, the notes seem to refer to efforts to get Firtash out of his legal problems by saying "Firtash toxic" and then "closing a deal or being fired."
DiGenova and Toensing now represent Firtash and were able to meet with Attorney General William Barr to defend their case. Toensing has said he hired Parnas as a "translator" to work on Firtash's case.
Firtash was charged in 2014 for what federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois claim was his role in bribing Indian officials to obtain a lucrative mining agreement to sell titanium to Boeing. He was arrested in Vienna in March 2014, released on bail of 174 million dollars and has since been challenging his extradition to the United States.
Firtash was one of the main sponsors of the Party of Regions of Ukraine, the pro-Russian party for which Manafort worked as a political consultant for many years, according to the federal criminal complaint against Firtash and a cable from the State Department in February 2006 published by WikiLeaks in 2010. The law firm DiGenova and Toensing did not respond to a request for comment.
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