Lordy, there are tapes—or, at least, one tape. When Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine bagmen, gave an interview to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week, he recalled attending a private dinner in April, 2018, at the Trump International Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the hotel’s proprietor, who works part time as the forty-fifth President of the United States, ordered a White House aide to fire Marie Yovanovitch, a veteran diplomat who was then serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
This was one of many damaging claims that Parnas made to Maddow, prompting Trump’s supporters to dismiss him as a self-serving fantasist. But, on Friday, it emerged that Igor Fruman, Parnas’s sidekick and fellow-defendant, has provided a tape recording to federal prosecutors that features Trump using mob-boss language to order Yovanovitch’s axing. ABC News, in a reportpublished on Friday morning, as the House managers were preparing to wrap up their presentation in the Senate impeachment trial, said that it has reviewed a tape recording in which a voice that “appears to be President Trump’s” says of Yovanovitch, “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”
The White House’s response to the ABC News story didn’t deny that Trump attended the dinner, which reportedly took place on April 30, 2018, or that the President used the language attributed to him in the ABC News report. “Every President in our history has had the right to place people who support his agenda and his policies within his Administration,” the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement.