In an early morning tweet Wednesday, President Trump called out the media over a new report that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), the top Democratic impeachment manager, appears to have mischaracterized in a significant way new impeachment evidence.
“Big story. Hope Fake News covers it!” Trump tweeted in response to a post by his senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis highlighting the new report, which Ellis described as a “shocking turn of events.”
Ellis was responding to a report by Politico’s Melanie Zanona revealing that “Adam Schiff may have mischaracterized a piece of the Lev Parnas evidence from last week, according to unredacted documents obtained by [Politico].”
Big story. Hope Fake News covers it! https://t.co/NCtUYK6Eco
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2020
Adam Schiff may have mischaracterized a piece of the Lev Parnas evidence from last week, according to unredacted documents obtained by @politico… The story >> https://t.co/canRArBovk
— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) January 22, 2020
Zanona details in her report that newly obtained impeachment evidence reviewed by Politico shows that Schiff apparently “mischaracterized a text message exchange between two players in the Ukraine saga”:
The issue arose when Schiff (D-Calif.) sent a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) last week summarizing a trove of evidence from Lev Parnas, an indicted former associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. In one section of the letter, Schiff claims that Parnas “continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelensky,” citing a specific text message exchange where Parnas tells Giuliani: “trying to get us mr Z.” The remainder of the exchange — which was attached to Schiff’s letter — was redacted.
But an unredacted version of the exchange shows that several days later, Parnas sent Giuliani a word document that appears to show notes from an interview with Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, followed by a text message to Giuliani that states: “mr Z answers my brother.” That suggests Parnas was referring to Zlochevsky not Zelensky.
The document, Zanona explains, presents a series of questions and answers without identifying who is speaking, but it is clear from the responses that it is not the Ukrainian president, Zelensky, rather it is Burisma’s founder, Zlochevsky, answering the questions. One of the responses reads “we wanted to build Burisma as [an] international company” and “we also thought it would help in Ukraine to have strong international board figures,” indicating that Burisma’s founder is speaking.
While Politico makes a point of trying to downplay the revelation as “not undercut[ting] Democrats’ argument that Trump withheld critical military aid to Ukraine as a way to pressure Zelensky into opening up investigations into the Bidens,” the evidence that Schiff appears to have yet again misrepresented key impeachment evidence, as he infamously did in his egregiously paraphrasing of Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky on the House floor, undermines his credibility as the leader of the Democrats’ impeachment case.
Schiff’s much-criticized handling of the impeachment inquiry was a key point of focus for Trump’s impeachment team in opening arguments on Tuesday. “He manufactured a false version of that call,” Trump lawyer Pat Cipollone said Tuesday in reference to Schiff’s “parody” of Trump’s call. “He read it to the American people, and he didn’t tell them it was a complete fake. Do you want to know about due process? I’ll tell you about due process. Never before in the history of our country has a president been confronted with this kind of impeachment proceeding in the House.”
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