Big Trump/Ukraine Document Dump, Annotated

Rudy Giuliani, Former Mayor of New York City speaks to the Organization of Iranian American Communities during their march to urge "recognition of the Iranian people's right for regime change," outside the United Nat... Rudy Giuliani, Former Mayor of New York City speaks to the Organization of Iranian American Communities during their march to urge "recognition of the Iranian people's right for regime change," outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York on September 24, 2019. - They urged recognition of the Iranian people's right for regime change and declared their support for the leader of democratic opposition, Maryam Rajavi. (Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP) (Photo credit should read ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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Chairs Schiff, Engel and Cummings did a major document dump tonight based on texts exchanged between various Trump Department officials, Rudy Giuliani and a top advisor to President Zelensky. The upshot is documentation of months of efforts by the Trump officials to get Ukraine to publicly announce investigations of the Bidens and 2016 election collusion between Ukraine and the DNC in exchange for a White House meeting with President Trump and military aide to ward off Russian-backed separatists in the east.

What is important to note here is that the Ukraine-DNC collusion conspiracy theory, in addition to being crazy in itself, is in fact an exoneration of Russia. The idea is that Russia didn’t really interfere in the election. They were framed by Ukraine and the DNC. We’ve heard lots of talk about these ‘investigations’. But what seems more clear here is that the big “deliverable”, as Trump megadonor Gordon Sondland puts it in one text, is a public statement from Zelensky announcing these investigations. That in itself validates the key Trump/Giuliani conspiracy theories for domestic consumption in the United States and quite likely is the predicate for Bill Barr for announcing his own probes into the same.

It’s late. So I went through the document dump and tweeted out the key passages. I’ve assembled them together here.

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