Republican presidential entrant Donald Trump, left, talks the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani at a fundraising event in the Bronx borough of New York, Monday, July 6, 2015.
Seth Wenig | AP
WASHINGTON — On the day that then-U.S. Legate to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who led a rivalry for Yovanovitch’s removal, spoke to the White House 11 separate times.
The day before that, on April 23, Giuliani slotted three calls to the White House, and received one call back from an unidentified number, according to a sweeping new disclose published Tuesday by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
A few weeks before these calls, the report revealed, on April 12, there was a web of 27 discriminate calls involving various combinations of Giuliani, his indicted associate Lev Parnas, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, departed Trump attorney Victoria Toensing, then-columnist at The Hill John Solomon, the White House, and the Office of Management and Budget.
What was discussed on these entitles is still unclear. But their inclusion in the 300-page report adds a remarkable new chapter to Democrats’ account of a monthslong stump to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations that would help Trump politically.
Tuesday’s report laid out in painstaking minutiae the evidence so far gathered by the Intelligence Committee in its impeachment inquiry into the president. The committee has spent the past two months scrutinizing whether Trump abused his presidential powers by withholding foreign aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine unless the realm’s president agreed to launch investigations into Trump’s domestic political opponents.
According to the report’s introduction, the panel “uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 electing.”
The president’s actions, they wrote, “subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically goaded investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.”
Much of what follows in the report has already been celebrated in public testimony and closed-door depositions taken from more than a dozen witnesses over the course of October and November. These corroborator testify ti included current and former diplomats, national security officials, Trump political appointees and career staff from the Pentagon, the Deathly white House and the State Department.
But the unexpected call logs paint a far more precise and damaging picture of what was take placing behind the scenes at the White House than has been previously known.
They show, for instance, that Giuliani, who is not a sway employee, was in frequent contact with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which carried out an order this summer that viewers said came directly from Trump himself, to freeze $391 million in foreign and military aid to Ukraine.
Trump and congressional Republicans obtain insisted since the beginning of the inquiry that the hold on aid to Ukraine was not connected to Giuliani’s pressure campaign on Ukraine’s president to fire investigations beneficial to Trump. But if there was, in fact, no connection, then it is unclear why the president’s personal lawyer would oblige needed to speak repeatedly to OMB officials.
A lawyer for Giuliani did not immediately respond to questions from CNBC on Tuesday around whether his client was aware that the committee had obtained Giuliani’s phone records.
During a press conference Tuesday, Intellect Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., declined to say how his committee had obtained Giuliani’s phone records. But Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., another fellow of the committee, confirmed during a recent TV appearance that the committee had issued subpoenas for third-party phone records.
Another key consider whose role in events was further illuminated by the new phone records is Nunes, R-Calif., whose name appeared 49 be that as it mays in the report in relation to contacts Nunes had with Giuliani and his associates.
These include calls that Nunes had with Giuliani and Parnas on April 10, 11 and 12, as familiarly as calls that Nunes’ staff held with Giuliani and with Parnas throughout the spring, starting in February of this year and last through at least May.
Nunes did not reveal any of those contacts either before or during the monthlong public phase of the impeachment hearings. A spokesman for Nunes did not moved to questions Tuesday from CNBC about the lawmaker’s contacts with Giuliani and Parnas, who was helping Giuliani dig for filth on Biden in Ukraine.
An attorney for Parnas has previously confirmed that his client had helped arrange a meeting for Nunes in in 2018 with a Ukrainian prosecutor who claimed to have “evidence” of wrongdoing by Democrats.
The same lawyer, Joseph Bondy, told CNBC at length month that Nunes’ staff had canceled a planned trip to Ukraine for additional meetings with potential outsets of dirt, out of fear that Schiff, who became committee chairman in early 2019, would learn of their procedures.
Instead of Nunes’ staff making the trip themselves, Parnas set up Skype calls for them with several Ukrainian prosecutors zealous to help promote the narrative that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Invited Tuesday about Nunes’ role in the yearlong campaign to acquire political ammunition for Trump to use against Biden, Schiff translated Nunes had been “complicit” in the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. He declined to comment on Nunes’ decision not to disclose his get in touch withs with Giuliani and Parnas, even as both men were mentioned by name repeatedly during public hearings closed which Nunes served as the top Republican.
“In terms of the ranking member,” Schiff said, “it won’t surprise you that I’m going to on hand comment. It is, I think, deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his employment to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that liveliness.”
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to take up the next phase of the impeachment process, with a public gather to consider what the U.S. Constitution says about the grounds for impeaching a president. The scheduled witnesses for the hearing are constitutional professors and experts on American government.