After the House Intelligence Committee released bombshell new documents from Lev Parnas, the former associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who is now under indictment for campaign finance violations and foreign influence peddling, Fox News hosts are busy pushing a new talking point suggesting that it’s somehow suspicious or disqualifying that the evidence is being released now, ahead of Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

But the reason for this is in fact very simple: When Parnas was arrested while attempting to flee the country, his electronic devices were also seized. Back in early December, Parnas’ lawyer petitioned the court to allow him to release the materials to Congress, a request that was granted earlier this month.

And those documents are a real doozy, showing Parnas and Giuliani, plus another associate, Republican congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde, engaged in such activities as surveilling Marie Yovanovitch, then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and coordinating efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The documents also show Parnas working very closely with frequent Fox guests Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova and their client, current-Fox contributor John Solomon.

Sean Hannity dismissed Parnas’ evidence as “the left's latest desperate attempt to smear President Trump, keep this impeachment charade alive forever. It's insane.” The Fox prime-time host attacked House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) for having “attached an addendum to the articles of impeachment. We've got new evidence! Filled with random documents from a Ukrainian-American named Lev Parnas.”

Hannity also brought on right-wing talker and fellow Fox News host Mark Levin, who mocked the very idea of calling the Parnas documents “evidence.”

The Friday morning edition of Fox & Friends kicked off with the panel shooting down the idea of introducing the Parnas evidence at this stage. Co-host Pete Hegseth got a bit ahead of the familiar talking points by saying it “was the House’s job to conduct the trial” — which is, in fact, the Senate’s job under the Constitution. And then co-host Steve Doocy added: “They say, ‘Oh, we have all these witnesses we want to call.’ They should have called them during the House — that is the way our government works.”

And later on, Fox correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera called former Giuliani associate Parnas a “super-snitch,” and asked: “If we start with the Lev Parnas’s of the world, where does this stop?”