The House released a bundle of new Parnas documents this evening. I’ve been working my way through them at home. The most interesting to me are copies of exchanges between Robert Hyde — the landscaper from Connecticut — and an unidentified man in Belgium, or at least texting from a Belgian country code cell number.
A lot of those reports from Hyde to Parnas, allegedly about Yovanovitch’s whereabouts and actions, seemed to come from this guy in Belgium. In many cases, Hyde was apparently just copying and pasting what the guy in Belgium was telling him. The whole thing was very hard to make sense of, both logically and in terms of making sense of what was even contained in the documents released from the House. Was an image of a text exchange or a screen capture of one text exchange passed on in a separate text exchange? In any case NBC just published a report that clarifies a lot of this. It’s very weird and very dark. I just recommend reading the NBC report.
The gist seems to be that Hyde had connected with a guy named Anthony de Caluwe either at Mar-a-Lago or the D.C. Trump hotel. De Caluwe seems to be another Trump superfan, though it’s not clear to me whether he’s actually American. In any case, when he was first contacted by NBC News he basically denied working with Hyde in any way. This was quickly undercut by the new document releases this evening. At that point de Caluwe stopped responding to NBC’s queries. They were then contacted by another pro-Trump Youtube personality named Karyn Turk, who said she was now representing de Caluwe to the media. Turk is also an apparent associate of Roger Stone and just last week was sentenced to a month in federal prison and subsequent house arrest for stealing her mother’s social security checks. Presumably she hasn’t yet reported to prison to serve her sentence.
