‘More evidence of the president’s corrupt scheme’: Newly released e-mails detail White House ‘coverup’ to withhold military aid to Ukraine

More than a month has passed since President Donald Trump was indicted on two articles of impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives, but new evidence that is relevant to the Ukraine scandal and Trump’s impeachment continues to surface. This week, an abundance of Ukraine-related e-mails were released, and a January 22 article written by journalist Colin Kalmbacher for Law & Crime stresses that some of them “reveal White House officials allegedly plotting to withhold military aid in violation of federal law — even before President Donald Trump’s infamous July 25, 2019 phone call.”

The July 25, 2019 phone call that Kalmbacher is referring to is Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. House Democrats have been arguing that Trump committed an impeachable offense when he tried to pressure Zelensky into investigating a political rival — former Vice President Joe Biden — and his son, Hunter Biden, and made that investigation a condition of military aid to Ukraine.

“Released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) per the terms of a court order, the 192-pages-worth of heavily-redacted emails came to light through an exceptionally well-timed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request,” Kalmbacher explains. And he notes that “observers immediately noticed that many of those FOIA-produced documents had not been provided to the House of Representatives, though all would have been considered relevant and responsive to the Democratic Party’s impeachment investigations in the House.” Continue reading.