More and more yet to come

A set of text messages released Friday evening by the Intelligence Committee show a top Nunes aide, Derek Harvey, in frequent contact with Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani who has become a key figure in the Ukraine controversy that resulted in Trump’s impeachment last month. In one exchange, Harvey appears to pass along Nunes’ contact information two days before the Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report indicated that a phone connected to Nunes made contact with a phone connected to Parnas.

The text messages, provided to investigators by Parnas, show Harvey in contact with Parnas throughout the spring of 2019 — the same time Parnas was working with Giuliani and other Trump allies to remove the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

[...]

The newly released text messages show Harvey asking Parnas to pursue several lines of inquiry with his Ukrainian contacts, including one regarding what Harvey calls “rumors” about coordination between the 2016 campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Harvey asked a few days later whether Parnas was preparing to send documents or if he would “keep working through [John] Solomon,” a reference to a former columnist at The Hill who was working closely with Parnas and Giuliani on the effort.

Over the next few weeks, the pair attempted to arrange Skype interviews between Republican staff of the Intelligence Committee and senior officials in Ukraine, including former prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, who had been working to oust Yovanovitch and had offered up allegations of dirt on Biden.

[...]

It appears that at least one of the interviews ultimately occurred but Harvey then asked on April 19 to hold off on “any more interviews” until there were official letters exchanged and documents available.

The new text messages add another layer to Nunes’ potential involvement in the Giuliani-led effort to oust Yovanovitch and push the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation targeting Biden. Nunes' office did not respond to a request for comment.

  Politico

I'm really ready for that smug scumbag to go down.

In an interview on MSNBC earlier this week, Parnas said both Nunes and Harvey were “involved in getting this stuff on Biden,” adding that Nunes was trying to “help out.”

[...]

House impeachment investigators first revealed late last year that Nunes exchanged a handful of phone calls with Parnas and Giuliani. Investigators obtained the call records from telecommunications company AT&T, and Republican lawmakers objected to the decision to publish identifying information about a sitting member of Congress, accusing House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff of abusing his authority to smear his political opponents.

Schiff has maintained that Nunes was not subpoenaed and that the information was lawfully obtained from AT&T. He has defended the decision to release the call records as part of his committee’s final report on the impeachment inquiry, citing Parnas’ and Giuliani’s relevance to the investigation.

Schiff has declined to directly address Nunes’ possible involvement, but he suggested at a press conference in December that Nunes was “complicit” in what Democrats have described as Trump’s impeachable conduct.

So when will Nunes try to tell us he had no idea what his top aid was doing?

UPDATE:

Nunes admitted Wednesday to speaking on the phone with Parnas, who has become a key figure in the Ukraine scandal, after previously saying such a conversation would have been "very unlikely."

  CNN

We knew when he said it that he was trying to avoid outright lying. He must have figured receipts might be coming.

Parnas told Harvey in an April text message that he would be interviewing "the general prosecutor that got fired by Biden," who is Viktor Shokin. Parnas also references Ukraine's then-prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. Both prosecutors also spoke to Giuliani in his effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens.

"Let's do our call at 12 and we can do the first prosecutor at 1 your time?" Parnas texts Harvey on April 17, 2019.

"Okay," Harvey responds.

Two days later, Harvey texts Parnas: "Lev. I think we are best served by sending the official letter and receiving documentation before any more interviews."

The new documents