The White House is disputing Gordon Sondland’s testimony that everyone was in the loop regarding the Trump-Giuliani extortion scheme, but that argument is officially dead after the new release of State Department documents.
As Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) noted on Saturday, Giuliani wasn’t “freelancing” when he was pressuring for an investigation of the Bidens; he was carrying out a scheme that everybody knew about.
“The demands, these bribery demands, were exactly the same. They were identical. Everybody was on the same page,” the Democratic lawmaker said.
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Rep. @tedlieu says newly released State Department documents show that “everybody was on the same page” regarding Trump’s extortion scheme. #ctl #p2 pic.twitter.com/JfHYNmmrxc
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) November 23, 2019
Rep. Lieu said:
We have this new additional batch of documents, as you just reported, from American Oversight, that further confirms what Sondland said, that everybody knew what we were doing and why we were doing it, and these documents show that Giuliani was not freelancing, that he was essentially talking to Secretary Pompeo. And if you look at the demands that Trump made of the Ukrainian leader, he asked for an investigation into the Bidens as well as the DNC server. Giuliani didn’t then go and say, ‘Hey, go and investigate Amazon and Elizabeth Warren.’ The demands, these bribery demands, were exactly the same. They were identical. Everybody was on the same page.
New documents show frequent contact between Giuliani and Pompeo
As The Hill noted on Saturday, “The State Department late Friday night released nearly 100 pages of documents showing repeated contacts between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney.”
In other words, the line of defense that Giuliani was acting alone is completely false. Not only was the former New York mayor acting at the direction of the president, but he seems to have been acting with the support of Mike Pompeo’s State Department.
As Rep. Ted Lieu said on Saturday, “Everybody was on the same page.”
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
