House impeachment manager Adam Schiff misconstrued text messages between two key players in a pressure campaign against Ukraine waged by President Trump’s administration, according to a new report.
In a letter to fellow impeachment manager Rep. Jerry Nadler, Schiff said indicted businessman Lev Parnas “continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelensky” and provided text messages between Parnas and Rudy Giuliani, the driving force behind the campaign, as evidence of this effort.
Documents obtained by Politico Tuesday night show Schiff cited one text message in which Parnas told Giuliani he was “trying to get us mr Z.”
A Democratic official told the outlet that “Z” was commonly used as a shorthand by associates of the president to refer to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. However, a Republican aide said the interpretation was, at best, careless.
“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,” Politico reported.
Burisma is the oil and gas company that former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter worked for despite a lack of experience. Trump has pointed to Hunter Biden’s place on the board as an example of “how corrupt” the Bidens are.
Last week, Parnas claimed in a series of media interviews that though he did not speak with Trump directly about the pressure campaign, the president knew what he and Giuliani were doing.
An intelligence community whistleblower filed a report about that effort following a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky during which Trump asked him to “do us a favor” and investigate Biden, a domestic political rival. The scandal led to Trump’s impeachment in the House and a trial starting this week in the Senate.
