Papers show Trump’s lawyer Giuliani, Pompeo contacts before Ukraine envoy ousted
- Nearly 100 pages of documents were released by the watchdog group American Oversight
- The president has blasted the impeachment inquiry as a ‘witch hunt’
The group American Oversight, a self-described non-partisan watchdog investigating the Trump administration, said the documents provide “a clear paper trial” of contacts in March between lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The group, which obtained the documents through a federal Freedom of Information Act request, does not claim to know what the two men discussed in the calls on March 26 and 29.
But the documents confirm contacts between the men roughly a month before then-US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled.
The new information “reveals a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a US ambassador,” the director of American Oversight, Austin Evers, said in a statement.
Witnesses in the recent impeachment hearings in the US House of Representatives have described Giuliani as conducting a rogue operation, independent of the State Department’s mission, to pressure Kiev to investigate Trump’s domestic political opponents.