House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff appears to have made an error in presenting a piece of evidence in the impeachment of President Donald Trump, according to documents obtained by Politico on Wednesday.
The apparent mistake does not take away from the Democrats' major claim that Trump withheld military aid to Kyiv in an attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksiy to help him out politically by investigating leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who was once a board member on the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.
However, Republicans likely will jump on the apparent error in order to use it to discredit the Democratic version of events.
In fact, Trump already sent out a tweet on Wednesday in which he referred to the subject by saying, “Big story. Hope Fake News covers it!”
The apparent error came when Democrats were trying to rapidly sift through, in time for the Senate trial, a large amount of evidence from Lev Parnas, an indicted former associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, which was only provided by the courts last week.
Schiff sent a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler last week summing up the evidence, writing that Parnas “continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelenskiy,” citing a text message exchange where Parnas tells Giuliani: “trying to get us mr Z,” with the rest of the exchange redacted.
But when an unredacted version of the messages became available several days later, it suggests by the context of the conversation that the “mr Z” Parnas was referring to was not Zelenskiy, but Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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