Last week Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian businessman who was involved with Trump liar Rudy Giuliani, sat for an interview with Rachel Maddow. Parnas is under indictment by the Southern District of NY for violation of laws concerning illegal campaign financing.
What Parnas stated in the course of the interview would bury Trump in any honest courtroom in the world. He told Maddow that his job as outlined by Rudy under orders from Trump, was specifically to instruct the new government of Ukraine that they had to announce that they were opening an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden for corruption involving a Ukrainian gas company. If they did not do this, Mike Pence would not attend their inauguration. In addition, all aid, not just limited to military, would be withheld by the Trump administration even though it had already been approved by congress.
This would be a huge blow to the new government led by Volodymyr Zelensky. They desperately needed American money to fight off the Russian invasion but more important they needed the image of American backing, as would be seen by Pence’s presence at the inauguration of Zelensky to set a tone of prestige and power. This is really the whole case against Trump in one statement. Of course Trump has denied that he knows Parnas, this despite numerous photos of them together at various affairs.
This, of course, is old Trump strategy. He has denied knowing anyone who has ever accused him of anything, including his own personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. If he thought they presented any threat to any of his goals Trump would deny knowing Ivanka, Eric and Don Jr.
Just to prove to the Ukrainians that Parnas was speaking for Trump, Giuliani pulled Pence’s visit when Zelensky didn’t make the announcement of an investigation into the Biden’s. Parnas stated this to Maddow and it all makes perfect sense.
Parnas is a clever and greedy criminal that got caught. Sure he’s cooperating with the prosecutor to save himself jail time, but everything he says checks out with other witness testimony and when you get that, you realize that if what he is saying is verifiable, everyone in this administration is a crook. That starts with Trump and goes down the line from Pence, Pompeo and Barr, through Mulvaney, Miller and Perry and on to a list of co-conspirators as long as your arm.
So you say that Parnas will say anything to get a shorter sentence. Maybe. But this writer sees it as a much more threatening situation. Parnas is telling his entire story in an interview so that he has nothing else to tell, so that he is not in danger of being “Epsteined” while in prison. Parnas clearly understands that Trump ass kisser Bill Barr is in charge of his fate and he doesn’t want to give Barr any reason to silence him when he hits the cell. This way it’s all out on the table already.
An interesting sidelight to Parnas revelations was when he brought up Russian billionaire oligarch and mobster Dimitry Firtash, who is currently under indictment by he Southern District of NY for felony financial charges while fighting extradition from Switzerland. Firtash had been looking for a way to influence those prosecuting his case. This was known to the group involved in the Ukraine affair. It turned out that Firtash had connections in Ukraine. He claimed to be able to influence their government, so conversations were held to an end in which Firtash would approach Zelensky on behalf of Trump and Bill Barr would investigate ways to make the charges against Firtash disappear. Firtash attempted to make it happen, but it appears he wasn’t as well connected as he claimed and Barr backed off giving him a pass.
But then Parnas brings in Derek Harvey and Devon Nunes, explaining that Nunes helped them gin up a phony scandal involving the Biden’s and Ukrainian gas company Burisma so that Nunes could then lead an investigation into the false scandal he had invented.
It’s clear that just about everyone in the administration, as well as their associates in congress, were involved in illegal and unethical behavior. It’s equally clear that they all knew what was going on and ignored or involved themselves in it to the detriment of the constitution and the American people. It seems this was all done in the search for a second term for Donald Trump.
I know Trump is being impeached but there are so many others in this administration who should be indicted for any number of crimes against the nation and its people. There is already 34 individuals and 3 companies who have been indicted and pled guilty including the likes of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo and a long list of Russians plus about a dozen other Americans who pled to lesser charges.
Now we have Pence, Pompeo, Barr, Giuliani, Miller, Nunes, and a long list of lesser lights, all involved up to their eyeballs in what genuinely appears to be a huge criminal conspiracy that makes the Mafia look like a bunch of giddy schoolboys.
What started out looking like a bunch of unethical politicians has morphed into an international criminal enterprise aimed at destroying the American Constitution and turning our democracy into an undisguised dictatorship.
Moscow Mitch McConnell’s dirty work with Supreme Court appointments destroyed the first line of constitutionality. Barr’s appointment as Attorney General destroyed the second line of constitutional control. The GOP controlled Senate is undermining the Congresses ability to protect the constitution.
It’s only Trump’s ego and stupidity that has weakened his hold on the last serious element available to protect our democracy. That was his egomaniacal rant against the military when they refused to endorse his betrayal of the Kurds. Don’t forget, our current generals were foot soldiers who fought in the jungles of Viet Nam while Trump’s money was allowing him to stay home and nurse bone spurs.
Look, despite the ravings of the Trump base, the instigation of the impeachment investigation was never really to kick Trump out of office. Those who led the investigation understood that his backing under a Senate led by Moscow Mitch McConnell, was too strong to ever convict. The movement fell into two schools. The first was that anyone who had instigated so many violations of the constitution had to be held to some kind of authority or those violations would subsequently become greater and more frequent. The American people had to be made to see this and he must be held accountable.
The second reason for the impeachment was to curtail actions undertaken by Trump that the Democrats saw to be hurting the nation, it’s security and its economy. The theory being, if Trump could be kept busy defending himself, he would not have the time to cause problems in other areas of governing. Trump has never been a hard worker and that in itself has limited what little he has been able to accomplish. Cut that time in half and the nation will benefit.
Although the Senate has not as yet shown any evidence of abandoning Moscow Mitch’s authority, there have been a couple of cracks of late that indicate some small leaning toward including testimony and intellectual evidence into the trial proceedings of the impeachment. This will uphold the House’s aim of informing the American people of just how criminal their President really is.
Ever since this impeachment process began there has been a loud and persistent argument that it is taking away the people’s electoral choice. That impeachment, especially in this case, is simply a Democratic attempt to subvert the 2016 election results because the Democrats just don’t like Trump.
Well, there is some truth to that argument. The Democrats definitely don’t like Trump, but the rest of the concept is like saying that the guy who robbed the bank shouldn’t be tried because banks don’t like him. The fact of the matter is, a crime has been committed. Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine by holding out aid because they wouldn’t announce n investigation into Joe Biden for corruption. The Ukrainians knew that Biden wasn’t guilty of anything so they ultimately refused and Trump held up their money until the news about the whole thing broke and he couldn’t hold out he money anymore because he saw that it was prima facie evidence that he had committed a crime. It wasn’t just the House that saw his actions this way. The GAO has also named his actions as criminal.
In Trump’s defense, many of the GOP Senators have stated that if the House wanted to hear from certain individuals as witnesses they should have called them. The reality is; that the House called numerous witnesses that testified to the facts now in evidence but many of the witnesses that didn’t testify were stopped by Presidential interference, which has led directly to the second count against the President, “Obstruction of Congress.”
The house wanted this testimony, but was unable to hear it from any potential witness that worked for the administration, including Bolton, Barr, Mulvaney or any number of others, all of whom Trump stopped under the non-existent concept of Presidential Privilege. To run all these witnesses through hearings in order to justify their freedom to testify would have meant the testimony would have been dragged out for months or even years, far past the time when Trump will be voted out of office by an election.
It is important to point out that this whole process has been brought about because of criminal Presidential actions that are just a repeat of his same actions as testified to by all our intelligence services in the 2016 election. Prior to Election Day 2016 Trump, who at tat point considered himself to be a sure loser, spent a lot of time whining that the election was rigged. That turned out to be true but not in the way he initially claimed. In fact he was illegally assisted by the Russians and legally shoved into the Presidency by our own ludicrous Electoral College, which gave the Presidency to a man who lost the actual election by more than 3 million votes. If that isn’t a violation of “one man one vote.” What is?
Since that election Trump has, on various occasions, asked various foreign nations to help him win our next election, clearly demonstrating that whether or not he was aware it is illegal to seek help from foreign entities in an American election, he was clearly into it. And oh, by the way, ignorance of a crime is no excuse. One would think that someone who held the highest office in the nation would have at least the minimal intelligence to know what is a crime and what is not.