First, of course, we have the massive blockbuster interview with indicted Russian-American Lev Parnas who went on Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper and revealed that Trump Knew Everything about the effort by Giuliani to force Ukraine into investigations of Crowdstrike and the Bidens.
Parnas stated that he worked hand-in-glove with Giuliani as his interpreter talking to Ukrainians and was constantly on the phone with Trump — whom he said he could overhear without being on speakerphone as he shouted at Giuliani.
KIEV, Ukraine — In the United States, Paul J. Manafort is facing prosecution on charges of money laundering and financial fraud stemming from his decade of work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
But in Ukraine, where officials are wary of offending President Trump, four meandering cases that involve Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.
The cases are just too sensitive for a government deeply reliant on United States financial and military aid, and keenly aware of Mr. Trump’s distaste for the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, some lawmakers say.
The decision to halt the investigations by an anticorruption prosecutor was handed down at a delicate moment for Ukraine, as the Trump administration was finalizing plans to sell the country sophisticated anti-tank missiles, called Javelins.
Poroshenko eventually lost his re-election to Zelensky and again you have Giuliani requesting a meeting with him in a letter where he stated he was acting with the “knowledge and consent” of Trump in his private capacity — which should be an outright Logan Act violation — while Parnas apparently met with representatives of Zelensky and told them that “Mike Pence will not attend the Inauguration” if they didn’t commit to investigations of Biden and Crowdstrike.
The official dropped Parnas from his WhatsApp connection, so he informed Giuliani and Pence didn’t show up. Pence was also supposed to meet with Zelensky personally in Budapest where he would tell him he needed to initiate investigations in order to have a White House meeting with Trump. Clearly, Pence had to be “in the loop” in order to be able to make this demand.
Parnas stated that Energy Sec. Rick Perry went to Zelensky’s inaugural instead of VP Pence and later met which him and got him to agree to “investigations” but that Giuliani blew his stack when they claimed these were about general corruption. “He has to say the name Biden.”
Parnas was also involved in setting up a deal with Russian Mobster Dimitry Firtash by convincing him that Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova could help with his extradition to the US on corruption charges because they were all good friends with Bill Barr. Firtash hired Toensing and diGenova as his attorneys in exchange for providing Parnas and Giuliani with more Ukrainian dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden most of which has been totally debunked.
Giuliani had attempted to get a visa for Viktor Shokin going through Trump so that he could whine to Lindsay Graham about how Biden had him fired to protect his son Hunter — even though Shokin had formerly been investigating Burisma head Mykola Zlochevsky not Biden — but the visa application was held. They had blamed Yovanovich for his but George Kent at the Ukrainian embassy testified to blocking this visa because he was concerned that Shokin was bitter after being fired.
Kent describes Viktor Shokin, who served as prosecutor general in 2015-2016, as “a typical Ukraine prosecutor who lived a lifestyle in excess of his government salary, who never prosecuted anybody known for having committed a crime and who covered up crimes that were known to have been committed.”
He was fired under pressure from the U.S. State Department, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. His removal, Kent says, became a condition for an IMF loan guarantee.
[...]
Later, a resentful Shokin fed Giuliani the lie that he had been dismissed under pressure from then-Vice President Biden, who allegedly wanted to block an investigation into corruption by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where his son Hunter was on the board of directors.
However, Kent said, it was the State Department’s idea to engage Vice President Biden to push Poroshenko to remove Shokin. Similarly, former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk had been pressured to have one of his corrupt allies, lawmaker Mykola Martynenko, resign, Kent said.
Kent specifically mentioned the Shokin visa during his testimony.
“Knowing Mr. Shokin, I had full faith that it was bunch of hooey, and he was looking to basically engage in a con game out of revenge because he’d lost his job,” Kent testified.
Kent said that Rob Blair, the deputy White House chief of staff, called the State Department to see what was going on with the visa request.
“We laid out enough frank detail about U.5. Government engagement and assessment of Mr. Shokin. And Mr. Blair said, thank you very much, I’ve heard enough,” Kent recalled.
Parnas said that Bill Barr had many conversations with Giuliani and was practically a “Member of the Team” as was Devin Nunes who he spoke with at the Trump Hotel in DC and that he had coordinated with Nunes’ staffers Derek Harvey on their efforts who was already fully aware of what they were trying to do with pushing Ukraine into investigations.
Lastly, he stated that the WhatsApp messages he provided with Connecticut landscaper and congressional candidate Robert Hyde weren’t to be taken seriously. “He was always drunk.” He said that he gradually distanced himself from Hyde as he began posting detailed updated messages about the movements and actions of Ukrainian ambassador Marie Yovanovich which seem to indicate he had paid people on her security team to keep her under surveillance.
The focus on Yovanovich had gone back to a grudge held by Lutsenko who was essentially in the pocket of Russia and corrupt, and as an anti-corruption person, he saw Yovanovich as a threat. Removing her from her post became a priority as a gift to Lutsenko as part of the plot to enable investigations. “Journalist” John Soloman was part of the team who had been pushing most of these conspiracy theories and had interviewed Lutsenko but wasn’t able to really get anything from him until pushing out Yovanovich was on the table.
As a result of all this Ukraine has now opened an investigation into the surveillance of Yovanovich and Robert Hyde has received a personal visit from the FBI. All of which is weird because the FBI had already had all this information from Parnas for the last 3 months, but it’s not until he releases it to the House Intel committee, and they release it to the public that the FBI has decided to act?
That’s a little strange.
It is ironic that all this effort was placed into trying to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens -— long before the phone call between Trump and Zelensky — and it’s ended in Ukraine investigating one of their own, Robert Hyde.
And on top of all that, the Government Accountability Office has determined that Trump withholding the funds from Ukraine was an illegal violation of the Impoundment Control Act.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” a GAO opinion said. “OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA). The withholding was not a programmatic delay. Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.”
“The burden to justify a withholding of budget authority rests with the executive branch. Here, OMB has failed to meet this burden. We conclude that OMB violated the ICA when it withheld USAI funds for a policy reason,” the GAO said.
The WH has responded that Parnas is a “Liar” and that the GAO has “Over-stepped” but all of this makes sense when you look at the larger picture.
When the whistle-blower issued his report on the Zelensky call the CIA Counsel made a criminal referral to the DOJ.
WASHINGTON — Weeks before the whistleblower's complaint became public, the CIA's top lawyer made what she considered to be a criminal referral to the Justice Department about the whistleblower's allegations that President Donald Trump abused his office in pressuring the Ukrainian president, U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell NBC News.
The move by the CIA's general counsel, Trump appointee Courtney Simmons Elwood, meant she and other senior officials had concluded a potential crime had been committed, raising more questions about why the Justice Department later declined to open an investigation.
FOIA leaked documents of emails from the DOD to the OMB also indicate that the holding of the funds was illegal.
When President Donald Trump ordered a halt to aid to Ukraine last summer, defense officials and diplomats worried first that it would undermine U.S. national security. Ukraine is, as some of them later testified before Congress, on the front lines of Russian aggression, and only robust American support would fend off aggressive Moscow meddling in the West. This worry eventually helped galvanize congressional support for one of the two impeachment articles approved by the House of Representatives on Dec. 18.
But there was also a separate, less-noticed facet of the internal administration uproar set off by Trump’s July 12 order stopping the flow of $391 million in weapons and security assistance to Ukraine. Some senior administration officials worried that by defying a law ordering that the funds be spent within a defined period, Trump was asking the officials involved to take an action that was not merely unwise but flatly illegal.
The DOJ declined the investigation because Attorney General William Barr was in on the plot from the beginning. His spoxs have claimed that Parnas is “100% wrong” but I would bet a look at Rudy Giuliani’s phone records would change that view. They claim he’s trying to “stay out of jail” but none of what he’s saying here will have any effect on the $325,000 he helped illegally shuttle to a pro-Trump Superpac, which is what he’s been indicted for.
Senate GOPers may claim that the House “didn’t do its job” to procure these documents and testimony earlier but the House did issue subpoenas for these materials and also subpoenaed Lev Parnas months ago.
The House Intelligence Committee had subpoenaed Mr. Parnas for documents on Oct. 10 and said it expected him to testify at a later date. Mr. Parnas’s previous lawyer, John Dowd, had sent a letter to the committees Oct. 9 saying his client would adopt the White House position not to “participate” in the investigation—an assertion House Democrats rejected.
Those subpoenas were blocked and ignored on orders from Trump without declaring that they were protected by executive privilege. He claimed he has “absolute Immunity” which he does not.
In addition to all this Russia has apparently hacked into Burimsa Holdings, the company that Hunter Biden used to be Board member for.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that Russian military officials have moved to hack into Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board former Vice President Joe Biden’s son sat.
The move suggests that the Kremlin is now also trying to hunt for the dirt on Biden that President Donald Trump tried to extort out of the Ukrainian government by withholding military aid.
“The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign,” reported the Times. “In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.”
And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has apparently been cleared of wrongdoing in the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One cases by U.S. Attorney John Huber.
A politically-driven DOJ “review” of the Clinton Foundation and other warmed-over Clinton-related stories, which President Donald Trump demanded in 2017 as the Mueller probe heated up, has essentially concluded with nothing to show for its work.
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah, John Huber, has finished the probe and found no criminal conduct to pursue, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing unnamed current and former law enforcement officials.
The review followed an intense public push in 2017 by Trump and his allies in Congress to appoint a second special counsel — counter-programming for special counsel Robert Mueller.
The same month that Trump tweeted a push for a probe of Clinton, November 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote to Huber, telling him to review existing evidence.
“Your recommendations should include whether any matters not currently under investigation warrants the opening of an investigation, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources or further investigation, and whether any matters would merit the appointment of a Special Counsel,” Sessions said.
Clinton has now been exonerated for Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Benghazi, Seth Rich, Uranium One and Ping Pong Pizza — but Trump hasn’t.
From top to bottom this has been a criminal enterprise. Trump has betrayed his oath, violated the Constitution and the Law to try and get an edge in the 2020 election over Joe Biden. It’s possible that if John Bolton or Parnas are called as witnesses before the Senate they may also try to call their own witnesses to make Trumput 's wild witch hunt seem reasonable, but as I’ve written extensively there is no case against either Joe Biden or Hunter Biden. None. If Trump's counsel attempts this they'll be cooking their own goose.
There's also the charge that Trump essentially tried to bribe Conservative Senators to stay on his side with his drone strike on Qassem Soleiman.
It would be unbearable to think the president ordered a man dead in order to give Republican Senators a means of defending him against an indictment for abuse of power and obstruction. It would be unthinkable for him to bring America to the brink of war in order to create an image of a “war president” too indispensable to remove.
As a result, the press corps has been busy this week reporting in granular detail virtually every aspect of Donald Trump’s decision last week to target and kill Iran’s top general in Baghdad. Everything, that is, short of reporting the plain, obvious and unbearable truth: the president ordered a man’s death because he was impeached.
This has been somewhat confirmed by former CIA Officer Douglas London who says that Trump looks to celebrity and ratings when considering how to handle national security.
Rather than caring about what career professionals thought were the biggest danger to the United States, Trump was instead interested in — what else? — actions that he could tout as personal victories. This drew the president toward what London called “celebrity targeted killing,” that is, the assassination of high-profile figures whose names could make a big splash in the newspapers. The killings of Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former leader of ISIS, and of former Iranian military leader Qassim Suleimani fall into this category.
This description of Trump’s priorities rings true — he is always trying to take credit for supposed presidential accomplishments, like his recent attempt to garner praise for the falling rate of cancer deaths. Even before coming president, the appearance of success was always more important to him than actual business success.
In this spirit of killing “celebrity” targets, London said Trump was obsessed with killing a son of Osama bin Laden, Hamza, even though the intelligence community saw him as a low-priority target.
When it comes to the killing of Suleimani, which London was not involved in, the ex-CIA official argued that the Trump administration’s explanation for his killing doesn’t add up.
“[It] appears to have been more about Trump, and the potential for headlines, rather than the intelligence,” he wrote. “Soleimani’s very public removal was too great a headline to pass up for Trump, but there were other options.”
The Senate will now be going over the evidence based on the testimony of Ambassador Yovanovich and others to determine if Trump should be removed from office. The claims that there was “No pressure”, that Trump had the authority to hold these funds, that he was acting on a general desire to address “corruption” are all false. If the Senate chooses to ignore that truth, and all these revelations remain out there unaddressed, there will be. hell. to. pay. with the general electorate.
Sure, some Senators are in safe seats and aren’t up for re-election this year and they may not care. But some of them are. Again it’s still doubtful that Trump will be removed but as these documents of Parnas continue to be examined, which I’ve noted even Fox News has been taking them seriously, they will be backed into a corner and have no escape.
It’s either Trump or them. Either choice will have consequences.
Here are the remaining events for the past week;