Where Congress failed, FOIA succeeded.

An ethics group late Friday published nearly 100 pages of previously unreleased State Department documents that the group says shows “a clear paper trail” between President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before a Ukraine ambassador was abruptly recalled.

The documents were published by American Oversight, which calls itself a non-partisan and nonprofit ethics watchdog and Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.

And they’ve been litigating away like mad while we’ve been watching Trump yammer at everyone, and they have virtual warehouses of documents.

They appear to show two calls between Giuliani and Pompeo in March, around a month before former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption expert, was abruptly called back to the U.S. in April and then removed from the post.

David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs, testified on Wednesday that Pompeo and Giuliani spoke on the phone twice in late March.

The information released Friday “reveals a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement.

Yovanovitch has told members of Congress in an impeachment inquiry that her reputation was smeared by Giuliani, including false allegations that she badmouthed Trump and was blocking corruption investigations by circulating a “do not prosecute” list and stymieing investigation into the Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

And they’re still doing it, at least Trump is. Remember yesterday he told Fox News that that Bad Woman Yovanovitch refused to hang his photograph in the embassy? That’s a lie. The administration delayed sending the photograph for months; it was hung as soon as it arrived.

The emails also show that before the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, took the job he was among six former Ukraine ambassadors who objected to “recent uncorroborated allegations” about Yovanovitch.

The April letter from Taylor and the five others says, “these charges are simply wrong.”

Taylor told Congress he was asked to return to lead the embassy in Kyiv in May by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In his testimony, Taylor said his initial reservation about taking the job was because of the poor treatment of Yovanovitch.

The April 5 letter from Taylor and the former ambassadors cited recent articles by John Solomon, who at the time was an opinion contributor for The Hill, that claimed the embassy under Yovanovitch interfered with the ability of the Ukrainian prosecutor to investigate anti-corruption cases, and that she criticized Trump.

Who is John Solomon and why was he telling lies about Marie Yovanovitch?

American Oversight says this is just the first round of disclosures.

“The evidence is only going to get worse for the administration as its stonewall strategy collapses in the face of court orders,” Evers said in the statement.

Bring it on.