Rudy Giuliani

No wonder Donald Trump wants the Senate to quickly short-circuit his impeachment trial: New evidence is constantly coming out about his campaign to extort Ukraine into helping him in the 2020 election. Tuesday, the House Intelligence Committee released documents from Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate who’s already been indicted for funneling foreign money to political campaigns, and they contain bombshell after bombshell. Coming as the House prepares to send the impeachment articles to the Senate, this puts additional pressure on wobbly Republicans to vote to call witnesses in the trial—and it’s information that would not have been out in time for a trial if Speaker Nancy Pelosi hadn’t held the articles since December.

The newly released documents include a letter from Giuliani to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky making it very clear that he’s working for Donald Trump, not the United States government—literally “I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump. Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States”—before asking for a meeting with Zelensky in very interesting language. “I have a more specific request. In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you.” With Trump’s knowledge and consent.

They include Giuliani promising to revive a visa for former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin that had been turned down due to his corruption, with Giuliani specifically telling Parnas that “I have no 1 in it.” (Shokin did not end up receiving a visa.)

Parnas also took handwritten notes saying “Get Zalensky to Annouce that the Biden case will be Investigated,” of which former top government lawyers Neal Katyal and Joshua Geltzer write that it shows that “the real goal here” was “not to prompt an investigation of Hunter Biden, but to score an announcement of a Biden investigation. Pursuing an announcement, rather than an investigation, makes sense only if Trump’s objective was to dirty the reputation of a leading political rival, Joe Biden.” Actual investigations, they point out, happen in secret.