The U.S. State Department has released 100 of pages of documents from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requested by American Oversight. They are documents that Congress has demanded but the State Department refused to hand over, so American Oversight sued under the FOIA laws and was able to obtain the documents.
While American Oversight’s website is down due to the traffic, they are available for download and review on Document Cloud.
According to Austin Evers, executive director of AO, the emails link Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rudy Giuliani, but they also link President Donald Trump through his Oval Office assistant.
“The documents show a clear paper trail connecting not just Rudy Giuliani to Mike Pompeo but being connected by the Oval Office,” said Evers in an MSNBC interview with Ali Velshi. “President Trump’s personal assistant Madeleine Westinghouse serving as a conduit when Rudy Giuliani can’t get through to Pompeo through, quote, regular channels. The president’s personal assistant makes that connection happen. Based on the timing which is around March of this year it looks apparent this was a connection to ensure that Rudy Giuliani’s smear campaign against a sitting U.S. ambassador made it to Mike Pompeo’s desk. This is just the first set of disclosures American Oversight’s litigation is going to expose.”
He said that the organization’s team would be up all night detailing the specifics of the documents on their Twitter account.
“If you look at these documents you can understand why Mike Pompeo wouldn’t want Congress to have them and why Congress has been complaining for the last two weeks that they haven’t received, I believe, the quote is, ‘a single scrap of paper from Mike Pompeo,’” said Evers. “Here it is. [These] are basically his call sheets showing multiple phone conversations with Rudy Giuliani at what looks to be the beginning of this scheme to smear the ambassador. We have other lawsuits already pending and soon more to come that are going to focus on different aspects of this scandal from the [Office of Management and Budget] withholding aid to contacts later in time with Mike Pompeo and other senior officials. So, again, these are just the first disclosures, and for our first round to connect this scandal directly to the oval office is pretty significant.”
You can watch the MSNBC interview with Evers below: