Judge tells State Dept to begin producing Ukraine records

A judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to begin producing within 30 days documents related to the Trump administration's dealings with Ukraine, saying the records were of obvious public interest.

The documents were sought under a Freedom of Information Act request by American Oversight, an ethics watchdog that investigates the administration. Any release of government documents could shed new light on President Donald Trump's efforts to prod his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, the matter at the heart of the Democrat-led House impeachment inquiry.

"These records concern a matter of immense public importance," Daniel McGrath, a lawyer for American Oversight, said during arguments in Washington's federal court. US District Judge Christopher Cooper said he agreed.

Cooper encouraged the organization to work with the government to identify which documents can be released because they are not classified or otherwise exempt from disclosure. That could potentially include any correspondence with Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer and a key participant in a backchannel diplomacy effort with Ukraine, since he is not an administration official.

"His emails, text messages which he showed on TV are going to be subject to public disclosure with limited redactions," Austin Evers, the organization's executive director, told reporters after the hearing. "It's possible that this administration will jump through some legal hoops to try to withhold them, but we have the court today urging the parties to focus on those communications as top priority." He described the judge's ruling as "a crack in the administration's stone wall."
The panels wrote that they "may draw the inference that their nonproduction indicates that these documents support the allegations against the president and others."