On Thursday, House Democrats subpoenaed Rick Perry, Trump’s energy secretary and former Texas governor, in the ongoing impeachment inquiry. Perry has until October 18 to turn over documents related to Ukraine. It’s not yet clear if he will comply.
In a letter to Perry, House investigators wrote that public reports have raised “significant questions about your efforts to press Ukrainian officials to change the management structure at a Ukrainian state-owned energy company to benefit individuals involved with Rudy Giuliani’s push to get Ukrainian officials to interfere in our 2020 election.”
Earlier this week, Trump tried, like a teenager, to say Perry made him do it — made him make the now infamous phone call between the president and Ukraine’s president that triggered the impeachment inquiry.
The former Texas governor has said he did urge the president to discuss energy policy with Ukraine’s president on the now infamous phone call, but the Biden family never came up.
“Not once, as God as my witness, not once was a Biden name — not the former vice president, not his son — ever mentioned,” Perry told CBN News.
Earlier Thursday, former GOP Congressman Pete Sessions, who once represented Dallas and is now running for a different congressional seat in Central Texas, also appears to be ensnared in the impeachment drama.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the two Russians who helped Trump’s lawyer attempt to get dirt from Ukraine officials on Joe Biden were arrested and indicted for breaking campaign finance laws. Sessions, according to multiple news accounts, may have had a hand in the financial transactions.
“The indictment doesn’t mention Sessions by name nor does it charge him of any crime. But it makes multiple references to donations and activities by a ‘Congressman-1’ that comport exactly with what’s known about Sessions’ interactions with the two men,” reported the Dallas Morning News.
In a statement, Sessions appeared not to know if he was ‘Congressman-1.’
“There has been a suggestion that I am ‘Congressman One,’ which I cannot confirm,” he said. If he was the person referenced in the indictment, he said, he “could not have have had any knowledge of” any wrongdoing.
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