Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Tuesday released phone records of Republican Devin Nunes and other allies of President Trump as part of the House Intelligence Committee’s Impeachment report. The stunning revelation that Democrats obtained the phone records of their political rivals was a fresh detail found in their lengthy report, which is mostly a rehash of arguments they’ve already made in favor of impeachment.
Schiff, the Intel Committee’s chairman, obtained telephone records involving Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking Republican on the committee, Nunes staffer Derek Harvey, conservative journalist John Solomon, and Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, among others. The Southern District of New York apparently subpoenaed the phone records of Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate who was recently indicted on campaign finance charges.
Prosecutors said the donations by Parnas and Igor Fruman, another Giuliani associate with Ukraine ties, were made while the men were lobbying U.S. politicians to oust the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
The records were reportedly obtained from AT&T and Verizon either before or during the impeachment hearings.
It’s not clear how, but Schiff obtained records showing that Parnas was in contact with Nunes and the others in April, when Giuliani was publicly calling for an investigation of Ukraine’s 2016 election meddling.
Schiff said that he found Nunes’ communications with Parnas and Giuliani “deeply concerning.”
“It is deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” he said.
In response to phone records obtained by House Intel showing @DevinNunes placing several calls to @RudyGiuliani , @RepAdamSchiff says it's "deeply concerning" that there "may be evidence that there were members of congress complicit" in Trump's pressure of Ukraine pic.twitter.com/YFgwGQSZ4F
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 3, 2019
Of course, President Trump never asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fabricate Biden’s corruption (like Schiff fabricated quotes in Trump’s phone call during the first impeachment hearing). He was asking the Ukrainians to look into Burisma, the corrupt energy company that lavishly paid Biden’s ne’er-do-well son for a no-show job on their board. Biden openly admitted on tape that he threatened to have $1 billion in promised aid withheld from Ukraine if it did not immediately fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma’s corruption. That information didn’t need to be “dug up.” It was out there for all to see, and as Trump told Zelensky in their July phone call, it sounded “horrible.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said Tuesday night on Fox News’ Hannity that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. “If Adam Schiff is going to be getting the phone logs of Republicans like Devin Nunes, I want to see Adam Schiff’s call logs,” Gaetz declared. “I want to see how many times he coordinated with he and members of his staff coordinated with the whistleblower, their Trump-hating lawyers and everyone who’s trying to create a frenzy for a coup when we should be working on behalf of the interests of the American people.”
While upset over phone logs that implicate his colleague Devin Nunes, a triggered Matt Gaetz demands Adam Schiff turn over his phone records pic.twitter.com/TCjBWBA796
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 4, 2019
John Solomon reported at the Hill back in April that Ukrainian prosecutors had uncovered evidence of corruption and wrongdoing by American Democrats, including their involvement with Ukraine’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton, but they were having trouble obtaining visas from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine so they could deliver their evidence to Washington. The U.S. ambassador in Ukraine at the time was Marie Louise Yovanovitch, who was fired a month later.
The Ukrainian law enforcement officials claimed they had evidence of “contacts between Democratic figures in Washington and Ukrainian officials that involved passing along dirt on Donald Trump,” according to Solomon.
Nunes meanwhile on Tuesday, filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN in a federal court in Virginia over its report claiming he secretly traveled to Vienna last year to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin to “dig up dirt on Biden.” The California congressman adamantly denies that he traveled to Vienna last year and is asking for more than $435 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
“CNN is the mother of fake news,” Nunes said in his lawsuit against the network.
On November 22, CNN published a story from reporter Vicky Ward that claimed Nunes traveled to Vienna, Austria, in December 2018 to meet with Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general whose firing had been demanded by then-Vice President Joe Biden in early 2016. At the time, Shokin was reportedly investigating Burisma, a shady Ukrainian energy company that paid Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars to sit on its board despite his lack of expertise in business, Ukraine, and the oil and gas industry.
“A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani tells CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden,” CNN claimed in its story on Nunes.
The problem for CNN is that Nunes, according to his lawsuit, has never spoken with or met Shokin and never traveled to Vienna in 2018. At the time of the alleged meeting, Nunes was on official congressional travel in Malta and Libya, where he met with government officials in both countries. His lawsuit included pictures of him with the prime minister of Malta and the head of the Libyan National Army.
“This statement [by CNN] is demonstrably false,” the defamation suit against CNN states. “[Nunes] was not in Vienna in 2018. Between November 30, 2018 and December 3, 2018, when CNN claims [Nunes] was in ‘Vienna,’ [Nunes] was actually in Libya and Malta.”
Rudy Giuliani had planned to go on a fact-finding trip to Ukraine last May, but cancelled it because he sensed that he was walking into “a trap.”
Giuliani told Fox news Shannon Bream that he was traveling to Ukraine to encourage the government there to get to the bottom of the country’s 2016 election meddling.
Giuliani told Bream, “I wasn’t going to start an investigation — they already have an investigation of how Ukrainians helped the DNC and Hillary operatives to get, in some cases false, dirty information about the Trump campaign.” He also said he believes that parts of the Steele dossier were written in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian court ruled in December of 2018 that two Ukrainian officials broke the law in 2016 when they leaked a secret ledger showing $12.7 million in payments between Ukraine’s ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The Kyiv district court ruled that National Anti-Corruption Bureau Director Artem Sytnyk and legislator Serhiy Leshchenko broke the law by revealing that Manafort’s name and signature appeared on the ledger.
Democrats and their allies in the media want you to believe that’s all a “conspiracy theory.”