Documents made public Tuesday provide new insight into the breadth of President Donald Trump’s effort to extract dirt from Ukraine on the Bidens and show Rudy Giuliani was actively soliciting information on Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter even before the interactions with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s impeachment. The new material released by House Democrats shows Trump’s team offering up what appears to be another quid pro quo to the previous regime in Ukraine, as well as admitting to surveilling the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine.
The Trump administration, and Republicans generally, has for months been disingenuously condemning the impeachment inquiry as incomplete because of a lack of witnesses and documentation, while simultaneously refusing to allow administration witnesses to testify and stonewalling document requests. The latest release shows how little we actually know as a result and how bad it all is already, as the messages appear to show Trump’s team, led by Giuliani and his associate Lev Parnas, attempting to procure damaging information on Burisma from Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, as early as March. In return, Lutsenko was demanding the removal of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who had been critical of the regime’s anemic anti-corruption efforts.
“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam—you are bringing into question all my allegations. Including about B,” Lutsenko wrote to Parnas in a WhatsApp message in March 2019, in apparent references to Yovanovitch and Biden. Lutsenko’s boss and close political ally, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, was running for reelection against Zelensky at the time. In one back-and-forth, Lutsenko informs Parnas, who is under federal indictment for campaign finance violations, he has copies of payments Burisma made to an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden. Lutsenko said he had the dirt! He was just waiting on Trump to do his part. Continue reading.