CNN was able to read behind the redactions in a recent court filing and discovered that feds seized way more material from Rudy Giuliani than had been previously known.
The letter, filed today, is from Joseph Bondy, the lawyer for criminal defendant and former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, to the judge in the case. It suggests that materials seized from recent raids on Giuliani and Victoria Toensing, would be helpful in Parnas’ case.
By copying and pasting the redacted portions of the letter, CNN found that federal prosecutors seized material from “a wider array of individuals than previously disclosed, including messages from email and iCloud accounts they believe belong to two former Ukrainian government officials, as well as the cell phone and iPad of a pro-Trump Ukrainian businessman.”
“The Ukrainians include the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko, the former head of the Ukrainian Fiscal Service Roman Nasirov and businessman Alexander Levin,” CNN reported.
But an unredacted portion of the letter also contains tantalizing new information. As Marcy Wheeler pointed out, Bondy claims the seized material has communications from Donald Trump, William Barr, high levels of the DOJ, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Devin Nunes that would help his client. Bondy also suggests that those communications were used to time Parnas’ arrest in order to prevent him from providing damning information to Congress in Trump’s first impeachment.
The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as a means to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump. Not only will the seized items reflect the conversations between Giuliani, Toensing and others leading up to the arrests of the defendants, but also the communications immediately following the defendants’ arrests, and subsequent to Mr. Parnas’s decision to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) and to provide information directly adverse to Mr. Giuliani, Ms. Toensing, the former President, and others.
The plot, as they say, thickens.
