U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, often spoke to Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, as Giuliani peddled unproven allegations at the heart of the Trump impeachment inquiry, a congressional report said on Tuesday.Previously undisclosed telephone records appended to a House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., center, flanked by Daniel Goldman, director of investigations for the Democrats, left, and Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif, the ranking member.But, he said that it was “deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity.”The phone records were obtained from AT&T, the report said. The company acknowledged it complied with a request.Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to run against Republican Trump in the November 2020 election.Parnas’ lawyer Joseph Bondy said his client was prepared to testify to Congress about the substance of the phone calls.In an Oct. 5 interview with Reuters, Giuliani said he had been in contact with Nunes about Ukraine, but “not a lot” and that the lawmaker and his staff obtained information on their own.”We’ve talked about some of it, yes, Giuliani said. “But we haven’t investigated it together.”The call records showed that Giuliani maintained more frequent contacts with Washington officials than were disclosed in some two months of private and public testimony by current and former U.S. officials to House committees conducting the impeachment review.In the hearings, Nunes cited the same unproven allegations supported by Giuliani that Biden tried to curb an investigation into a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board his son was a member. He and other Republicans also referred to the debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.The call records showed that over the course of four days in April, Giuliani had calls with Nunes, John Solomon, a conservative columnist whose articles for the Hill newspaper promoted the allegations, and Parnas.On April 12, the records showed that Parnas called Nunes in the late afternoon. The call lasted for one minute. Less than an hour later, Nunes placed two calls to Parnas that appear to have gone unanswered. Parnas later called Nunes and the two spoke for more than eight minutes, according to the records.During that same period, Giuliani received three calls from someone at the White House budget office, which in July held up the security aid to Ukraine.On May 8, Giuliani spoke with Derek Harvey, a member of Nunes’ staff and a former White House official, and on May 10 with Kashyap Patel, a former Nunes staff member who is now a senior counterterrorism official at the White House’s National Security Council.
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