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The House managers at President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial on Wednesday stressed, as they did Tuesday, the need to order other relevant witnesses and documents for the trial’s proceedings.
Their statements follow Tuesday’s release of new severe evidence signalling that White House officials were looking to halt the release of about $400 million in military support to Ukraine on July 24th, the day before the U.S. President’s July 25th call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
During the July 25th call, Donald Trump found pushing Zelensky to “do us a favour” by inaugurating an investigation of one of the President’s chief political rivals in the 2020 election – Joe Biden – and looking into a discredited conspiracy theory circling the 2016 election hack.
The telephone call with Zelensky, which the President and his attorneys have repetitively called “perfect,” did happen at the heart of the President’s impeachment for abuse of power.
While it has been shown earlier that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent an email to the Department of Defense guiding them to withhold military aid to Ukraine about 90 minutes after President Trump’s July 25th call, the new documents provide the initial solid evidence that the White House was working to withhold aid Ukraine before the call.
The new documents also disclose a road map of efforts headed by Michael Duffey, OMB’s associate director, to assist in the halting of the aid together with the White House Counsel’s office and the U.S. Department of Defense.
This evidence comes just days after the nonpartisan General Accounting Office announced that the White House’s withholding of Ukrainian military aid was unlawful.
Tuesday night’s proof consists of roughly 200 pages of heavily redacted documents passed on by the Office of Management and Budget in consent to a Freedom of Information Act request by a watchdog group, American Oversight.
Given the substantial evidence the House managers narrated on Wednesday in the opening arguments on the Senate floor, it would be easy to consider these emails replicas of existing evidence and testimony.
But they are not. They appeared something more critical as they reflected that Trump’s stance to bully Zelensky to “do us a favour” was premeditated and timed to give the U.S. President the hammer to force a foreign leader to do Trump’s personal bidding for his advantage. (Trump vehemently rejects that this was his intent.)
These newly presented documents not only indicate the degree to which the President’s efforts to allegedly force a political benefit from a foreign country were intended, but they also demonstrate why the Senate must order documents from the White House, OMB, the Department of State, and the Defense Department.
As the Freedom of Information Act carries, the public owes a right to know what took place.