The American impeachment drama has taken a fresh turn with the release of new documents. Here’s a look at what they mean and what their importance might be.

The American impeachment drama has taken a fresh turn with the release of new documents. Here’s a look at what they mean and what their importance might be.

The note is an ink scribble on letterhead from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Vienna. On the first page, at the top, there’s a highlight star, and then a summary of the enterprise’s main point: “get Zalensky to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.”

The writer? Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudolph Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. The note is part of a batch of documents provided by Mr. Parnas and released by House Democrats on Tuesday that provide new details about who wanted what, and what they asked for in return, during President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine. If nothing else, the material has roiled the impeachment process against the president on the eve of his Senate trial, increasing pressure for senators to hear new witnesses and view new documents during their proceedings.

The new documents also contain menacing messages regarding Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. envoy to Ukraine since removed by President Trump. Whether the messages reflected a real surveillance and targeting campaign against former Ambassador Yovanovitch, directed by Robert Hyde, a Trump donor now running for U.S. Congress in Connecticut, remains unclear. But the material may help explain why she was removed suddenly from her post and told to immediately return to the United States as a matter of her own security. Here are three questions about the newly released documents.

One of President Trump’s main defenses throughout the impeachment process has been that whatever he did, he was trying to benefit the U.S. as a whole, not himself. This is meant to counter the charge that he was urging Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s role in the country, and son Hunter Biden’s job at the energy company Burisma, for his personal political benefit.

In his July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine, for instance, Mr. Trump said “do us a favor.” He has insisted that the “us” refers to the U.S. Some of the documents released Tuesday call this into question. The first note scribbled by Mr. Parnas, for instance, refers only to “Announce” in regards to an investigation of the “Biden case.” There’s no mention of actually carrying it out, or engaging in any larger fight against bribery and graft in a nation dogged by those problems in the past.