Messages show Nunes aide communicated with Parnas about Ukraine campaign

House Democrats released new documents Friday evening showing extensive contact between an associate of President Trump’s personal attorney and an aide to the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee regarding the effort to obtain material from Ukrainian prosecutors that would be damaging to former vice president Joe Biden.

The text messages between Lev Parnas, who functioned as Rudolph W. Giuliani’s emissary to Ukrainian officials, and Derek Harvey, an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, indicate Nunes’s office was aware of the operation at the heart of impeachment proceedings against the president — and sought to use the information Parnas was gathering.

The newly released texts show that Parnas was working last spring to set up calls for Harvey with the Ukrainian prosecutors who were feeding Giuliani information about Biden.

“Also do you want to interview the general prosecutor who got [ditched] by Biden ? Also the anti corruption prosecutor ? Let me know,” Parnas wrote on April 19.

“Does tomorrow work?” Harvey responded.

The messages also show that Harvey met with Parnas and Giuliani at the Trump hotel in Washington.

Harvey and a spokesman for Nunes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The text messages corroborate Parnas’s previous claims that he arranged conversations with the Ukrainian prosecutors for the Nunes aide. And they deepen questions about how much Nunes knew about the pressure campaign — even as he served as one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders during the House impeachment hearings.

Records that the House Democrats released in December first showed calls between Parnas and Nunes. At the time, Nunes said he couldn’t remember speaking with Parnas.

On Thursday, Nunes told Fox News that he had reviewed his records, which refreshed his memory of having one conversation.

“I checked it with my records and it was very clear — I remember that call, which was very odd, random, talking about random things, and I said, ‘great,’ you know, ‘talk to my staff,’ and boom, boom, boom. That’s just normal operating procedure,” Nunes said.

However, the documents released Friday show extensive interactions between Parnas and Nunes’s aide beginning in early 2019.

In March, Parnas sent Harvey a link to a story by conservative columnist John Solomon suggesting the Ukrainians sought to help Hillary Clinton win in 2016.

“Any documents for us or are you going to keep working through Solomon?” the Nunes aide texted back a few days later.

Parnas responded that he was out of the country but would meet with Harvey upon his return.

In April, Harvey sent Parnas contact information for the congressman, the messages show. And Harvey set up several in-person meetings, including with key individuals around Giuliani who were most involved in the Biden effort.

“We are at trump with Rudy and John Solomon and joe in private room,” Parnas wrote the Nunes aide on May 7, apparently inviting him to the Trump International Hotel to meet with Giuliani, as well as Solomon and Joe DiGenova, a lawyer working with Giuliani.

“Can you come now,” Parnas continued.

“Yes,” Harvey responded.

The texts also indicate that Parnas passed a copy of one of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s résumés in English to Harvey. Parnas also seemed to have sent him a copy of the Ukrainian passport of the tycoon who owns the gas company that placed Biden’s son Hunter on its board. How the copy of the passport was obtained, and what Harvey was planning to do with it, if anything, is unclear.

Parnas, who is facing federal campaign charges and has recently broken with Giuliani and turned against the president, told MSNBC this week that Nunes and Harvey “were involved in getting all this stuff on Biden.”

“Derek Harvey had several interviews, Skype interviews I set up, with different prosecutors like [Nazar] Kholodnytsky, which is the anti-corruption prosecutor of Ukraine [and] Konstantyn Kulyk, one of the major guys that’s had this whole Biden stuff,” Parnas said.

Parnas suggested to MSNBC he was told to communicate with Harvey instead of Nunes directly because “Devin Nunes had an ethics, something to do with an ethics committee, and he couldn’t be in a spotlight.”

The materials released Friday also include screenshots that Robert F. Hyde, a former Marine and candidate for Congress in Connecticut, sent to Parnas discussing surveillance of then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

The screenshots appear to show Hyde having a text message exchange with an unknown person with a Belgian mobile number regarding Yovanovitch’s movements in Ukraine, as he updates Parnas about the situation. 

The new materials also offered further indication of how Giuliani sent messages to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky through Parnas. In one message released late Friday, Giuliani appears to ask Parnas to tell Zelensky through the Ukrainian prosecutor general that he needs to break with a Ukrainian oligarch who is associated with him and take more of the tycoon’s assets for the state.

“Show him my tweets and tell him to tell President-elect to stop acting like a boy and become a man and take control,” Giuliani told Parnas. “Arrest this bum and take more of his money back.”

Parnas responded with three thumbs-up emoticons.

Ukrainian authorities announced this week the opening of an investigation into the possibility that the U.S. ambassador was under surveillance or being stalked by associates of Parnas and Giuliani. Yovanovitch was removed from her post last spring after Giuliani urged Trump to fire her and helped fuel a public pressure campaign against her in conservative media outlets.

According to text messages the House Democrats released, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko had demanded her ouster in exchange for helping with the Biden effort.

It’s worth remembering that everything Trump does is for two reasons: to keep himself in office, and to please Vladimir Putin. It’s also worth remembering that the House of Representatives, which voted articles of impeachment, didn’t pick Lev Parnas. The Senate, which will hold  the impeachment trial, didn’t pick Lev Parnas. Donald Trump picked him to help with his shakedown of the president of Ukraine, yet another attempt to get a foreign country to help his election campaign. Lev Parnas is Trump’s guy. That’s why he’s under indictment by Barr’s Justice Department and facing serious time in federal prison. That’s why he’s a smoking gun. He knows too much.