House Democrats release second batch of Parnas materials

House Democrats have released a second batch of materials from Lev Parnas, a former associate of President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, as part of the official record to be included with impeachment articles transmitted to the Senate for its trial.

The documents released Friday include a series of text messages exchanged by Parnas and an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, apparently seeking information gathered by Parnas in the spring of 2019.

Parnas, a Soviet-born Florida businessman, had previously claimed on MSNBC that Nunes and the aide “were involved in getting all this stuff on Biden.” Nunes’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the messages on Friday night.

The newly released records also include two pictures of Parnas posing next to Trump as well as a series of photographs showing Giuliani in various social settings including on a boat, at a baseball game and on a golf course.

Democrats also put into the record transcripts of Parnas’s interviews this week with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Anderson Cooper in which he described his decision to speak out on allegations about efforts in Ukraine at the center of impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Democrats in charge of the House Intelligence Committee turned the materials over to the Judiciary panel to include them in the record to be sent to the Senate, which is expected to begin its trial of Trump in earnest on Tuesday.

“The documents provided today were part of large trove of documents and materials, including additional text messages and photos, produced to the Intelligence Committee by Lev Parnas in the last week pursuant to an October 10, 2019 subpoena. The Committee’s review of these materials is ongoing,” a Democratic official working on the impeachment trial said in a statement.

House Democrats earlier this week released a trove of documents offering more detail on a scheme to get Ukraine to launch investigations that would have benefitted the president politically and remove former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

The White House has pushed back on Parnas’s claims and Trump himself on Thursday denied knowing the businessman beyond posing for a photo with him.

“I don’t even know who this man is, other than I guess he attended fundraisers so I take a picture with him,” Trump told reporters at an Oval Office event. “I take thousands and thousand of pictures with people all the time. Thousands during the course of a year.”

– Tal Axelrod contributed reporting

Updated: 9:45 p.m.