Month: November 2019

I don’t think your average Democratic primary voter has a particularly sophisticated understanding of presidential politics, but they seem to collectively be searching for a safe choice, or at least someone who won’t further inflame the racial, regional or ideological polarization of the country. Maybe they haven’t noticed that Trump’s rural advantage has probably grown since 2016, but they seem to understand that they can’t just rely on the cities and suburbs to overcome the GOP’s Electoral College advantage. The Democrats are gravitating toward candidates they perceive to be electable, and they base that perception more on who they fear alienating than on who they hope to excite.

They worry about nominating someone too far to the left, or a woman, or a person of color, or someone with age or health related concerns. If someone seems to check all those boxes, well, how about a gay small-town mayor with not a lot of experience?  Simply put, there are no candidates that the Democrats feel comfortable with, and that certainly includes Kamala Harris.

Where I agree with Al Giordano is that all the candidates have both real and imagined weaknesses. Where I disagree is that I don’t believe Harris has much of a chance to emerge as someone who is more broadly acceptable to all the various factions of the party than the others. Maybe he’s right to complain that it’s too early to be flooding the zone with Harris’s political obituaries, but I think he grossly overstates her potential appeal in the current political environment. Simply put, she combines too many risk factors, from relative lack of experience, to coastal identity, to race and gender, and I think the primary voters are unlikely to ever perceive her as a safe choice based solely on ideological grounds.

If that were the case, Cory Booker wouldn’t be fighting to qualify for the next debates. Unfortunately, one byproduct of Trump’s effective style of racist politics is that the Democrats are taking identity into account as a mostly negative factor in this cycle. This is probably the primary reason Joe Biden continues to poll so well nationally despite his wretched debate performances and clear signs of his decline.

Michael Bloomberg clearly doesn’t like what he’s seeing from Biden, but he has his own massive identity problems, including his status as a multi-billionaire. He’s most likely to hand the nomination to Warren or even Sanders by denying Biden the votes he needs to go on a winning streak after the Iowa and New Hampshire contests are concluded. But carving up more of the middle seems very unlikely to redound to Harris’s benefit. Voters aren’t really comparing the candidates’ platforms except when they seem perilously far to the left. So Harris can position herself in the middle and not really get a benefit out of it.

I don’t see a pulse to her campaign right now, and I have trouble seeing how she can break through. Her biggest hope is simply that everyone implodes around her at just the right times and in just the right combinations, but that’s like running an inside straight. It can happen, obviously, but few people ever got rich betting on it.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting with a new painting of Wilderstein, the Hudson Valley home of FDR’s cousin Daisy Suckley. The photo that I’m using (my own from a recent visit) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

I started with my usual grid and pencil sketch. I think that this turned out fairly well. Some small adjustments will be needed.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a former leader of the moderate Main Street Republicans, voiced almost nonstop discontent with the Tea Party and Donald Trump before finally calling it quits and declining to run for reelection in 2018. In fact, he grew so disgusted that he simply resigned from Congress in May 2018. So, I am really not surprised that he says if he were still in office he’d probably vote to impeach Trump.

A former GOP lawmaker on Thursday spilled the beans on what his ex-colleagues in Congress are saying about President Donald Trump in private.

Ex-Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) acknowledged in an interview on “CNN Newsroom” that Republicans are in public “standing with the president for the moment,” despite the impeachment inquiry prompted by the Ukraine scandal.

They “are in a situation where they understand their base pressure, the base has not yet bolted from the president,” he explained.

“But there’s no question, having spoken to many of them privately, they’re absolutely disgusted and exhausted by the president’s behavior,” said Dent, who stepped down from Congress in 2018. “They resent being put in this position all the time.”

I have no particular reason to disbelieve Dent when he says that his former colleagues in the House are “disgusted and exhausted” by Trump and resent his behavior. But I also don’t know why I should care. This information, to the extent that it is true, only makes me angrier with the Republicans for their refusal to stand up to “their base pressure.”

On the other hand, his advice for the Democrats seems sound to me, although I don’t know that it’s realistic:

Earlier in the interview, Dent said he would have certainly “voted for the impeachment inquiry based on the facts as I understand them now” and “would probably support” the impeachment of Trump.

But he cautioned Democrats against moving forward until they had secured the testimony of key witnesses in the Ukraine scandal, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

As I’ve stated repeatedly, I believe the primary to danger to Trump now isn’t potential testimony from non-cooperating members of his cabinet or inner circle, but from the travails of Rudy Giuliani and his fraudster cohorts, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. To see the basic outlines of what I’ve called the biggest scandal in American political history, I highly recommend Philip Bump’s rundown in the Washington Post. Simply put, the president is once again right at the center of a massive criminal conspiracy. It’s more his pervasive criminality in petty affairs than his effort to smear Joe Biden that the Republicans will find cripplingly hard to defend.

But, to lay all this out will take some time, and probably more time than the Democrats really want to take. They can keep the impeachment process narrow, but not so narrow that they neglect to put Giuliani at the heart of it.

It seems like everyone knows what a “kangaroo court” means but few can agree on where we got the term. In short, it’s a legal proceeding that does not follow the normal procedures, that disadvantages the defendant, and in which the outcome is foreordained. Donald Trump has referred to the impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee as a kangaroo court, in part, because he was not allowed to have a lawyer present during the questioning of witnesses.

I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify, but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away, and true facts are not allowed out for the public….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2019

It would be a reasonable complaint if the impeachment hearings in the House were an actual trial, but they functioned more like a grand jury which gathers information to see whether a crime has occurred.

The Intelligence Committee is supposed to deliver a report on their findings to the House Judiciary Committee sometime next week, and the Judiciary Committee will then hold their own hearings and determine whether or not they should send articles of impeachment to the floor of the House for a vote. During this second half of the process, the president actually will be allowed to have lawyers present and can question witnesses and even call his own witnesses to testify in his defense. I don’t think there is an exact parallel to this setup in the normal judicial process, but I guess it is somewhat like a preliminary hearing.

In any case, the president is being afforded a right to which he is not logically entitled. Defendants don’t get to question or call witnesses prior to being indicted. So, the process in the Judiciary Committee will grant the president more rights than an ordinary citizen, not fewer rights as the president has claimed to date.

However, it looks like he may not intend to take advantage of this gift. Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman report in Politico’s Playbook that Trump doesn’t want to give the proceedings any legitimacy.

…as of right now, people close to President Trump on the White House staff and on Capitol Hill do not believe he will send a lawyer to participate in next week’s Judiciary impeachment hearings, as is his right.”

“This comes after weeks of complaining that the process was rigged against him because he didn’t have representation.”

But Trump’s allies think that the president is winning the process argument — that impeachment is rigged, crooked, etc. — and he should continue to sit it out.

Now, they thing about a Kangaroo Court is that it’s rigged. A verdict of guilty is the only possible outcome. In that kind of situation, it makes sense for the defendant to boycott the proceedings or refuse to offer a defense.

But Trump’s motive here is basically the opposite. While it’s true that Trump will be impeached and nothing he can offer as a defense can change that, the reason he doesn’t want to participate in the process is because he knows everything is rigged in his favor. He expects he will be acquitted at trial no matter how damning the evidence against him and no matter how much pain it causes Republican senators to absolve him. So, he has no need to defend himself in the House and doing so would have little upside and the downside of making it appear to be a fair process.

What Trump wants is a bizarre version of a show trial. In an ordinary show trial, an acquittal is out of the question.

A show trial is a public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors.

In Trump’s trial, a guilty verdict is out of the question. Or, at least, that’s what he is banking on as he sets his strategy.

So, I don’t know if the Senate trial will more resemble a kangaroo court or a show trial. That will depend on whether the Republicans and Chief Justice John Roberts, who will preside, decide to disadvantage the prosecution or they simply ignore the evidence and deliver a foreordained verdict.

I just think it’s ironic that Trump complained that he didn’t have representation and now he’s willingly foregoing having representation. He said the proceedings are biased against him, but the truth is that he believes that there’s basically no crime he could commit short of murder that would cause the Republicans to find him guilty.

So, he’ll go without lawyers for now because nothing matters in today’s America.

Long before Photoshop was invented, the Soviets figured out how to alter photographs and thereby alter history. In the following example, you can see Nikolai Yezhov, the feared chief of the secret police during the worst of the Great Purge, whitewashed out of a photograph of Stalin. Yezhov was executed in 1940 after having served his purpose. He reportedly insisted on his loyalty to Stalin until the end, even declaring that he would die with Stalin’s name on his lips.

It wasn’t enough to simply kill Yezhov, however. Stalin wanted to eliminate him, as much as possible, from the historical record. That wasn’t an easy task for someone who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and cropping him out of a photo seems so insufficient to the task as to be somewhat ridiculous.  Still, it was Stalin’s version of, “I hardly knew the guy.”

As of October 9, 2019, the Washington Post had tallied 13,435 false or misleading claims by President Trump since he was inaugurated in January 2017. Among these are numerous denials that he said or did things that are well-documented. Among these are statements that he hardly knew people who worked closely with him or that minimized the amount or importance of their work. There are lies about Russia did in 2016 and lies about what Ukraine did not do in 2016.

One recent example of the former involves the U.S Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. On October 4, Trump minimized the statements of the State Department officials who were lining up to give depositions to Congress about Ukraine, “I don’t even know most of these ambassadors. I didn’t even know their names.” But Trump expected Sondland to have his back and called him “highly respected.”

He followed that up with a tweet on October 8, in which he wrote that Sondland “a really good man and great American.” Exactly a month later, on November 8, Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House and said with a straight face, “Let me just tell you: I hardly know the gentleman.” On November 20,  as Sondland was testifying on national television that Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo, Trump told reporters “I don’t know him very well. I have not spoken to him much. This is not a man I know well. He seems like a nice guy though.”

The truth is much different. Sondland had as many as twenty one-on-one phone calls with the president and was widely understood within the State Department to have direct and unusual access to both the president and his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. In fact, he was effectively given the lead role on Ukraine in a May 23 meeting in the Oval Office, despite Ukraine not being a member of the European Union or an official part of Sondland’s portfolio. To demonstrate my point, the following is from acting assistant secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Reeker’s October 26, 2019 deposition before the House Intelligence Committee (see, e.g., pages 71-75 for his discussion of Sondland’s role). Reeker had just been asked if it is true that Sondland had been given “a rather large remit (for Ukraine) by the president”?

The latest example of Trump trying to whitewash history came on Tuesday night  when he claimed in an interview with Bill O’Reilly that he had not deputized Rudy Giuliani to help carry out his Ukraine policy.

Asked point-blank if Giuliani was acting on his behalf in trying to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden—an issue now at the heart of an impeachment inquiry—Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior.”

Let’s compare that to what President Trump said on the July 25 call with President Zelensky of Ukraine:

Trump is very clear there that President Zelensky is to take a call from Rudy Giuliani to discuss several issues, including the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. In fact, going back to the May 23 meeting in the Oval Office, Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Sondland were instructed to “talk to Rudy” so they could implement Trump’s instructions for Ukraine.

President Trump’s instruction in May to a U.S. delegation that had just returned from Ukraine made clear that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was playing the driving role in shaping the president’s view of that country — and that top officials needed to cater to him, according to transcripts of testimony released this week.

“Rudy had some bad issues with Ukraine, and until Rudy was satisfied, the president wasn’t going to change his mind,” European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland said in his testimony to House investigators.

After the May 23 Oval Office meeting, Kurt Volker, then-special envoy to Ukraine, contacted Giuliani, attempting to court his support for U.S. foreign policy goals, and also put him in touch with a top Ukrainian official.

There is every indication that Giuliani may soon be indicted on a laundry list of crimes, and so now the president is finally realizing that he needs to create at least a little distance from him. Before long, he may try to tell us that he hardly knew Giuliani and rarely spoke to him. He can do this because he he has two things going for him. The first is a right-wing media Wurlitzer that plays his tune with little contradiction. The second is a mainstream media that does an excellent job of documenting his lies but feels compelled to offer “both sides” of every argument. When the Republican Party and high-ranking Republican officials adopt the president’s line, it gets reported as almost as credible as whatever the media or the Democrats are saying.

This is why you need organizations like the Washington Monthly that do not engage in both-siderism. At Political Animal we call bullshit on bullshit and we document the atrocities without feeling the need to get a quote from partisan hacks like Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham or Devin Nunes. That’s not “balance.” It’s amplifying lies and helping the president act like some modern day Josef Stalin.

As you know, traditional media outlets are cutting staff and going out of business at an alarming rate as the digital revolution continues to steamroll the industry of journalism. We don’t get bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, or some right-wing oil tycoon. We rely heavily on the support of ordinary readers like you. And if we’re going to survive to tell the true history of what is happening in this country, we need people like you to help us out.

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It’s Wednesday, but on a holiday week. For some of us that means a shortened work week. Maybe a quieter news cycle. Many of us here in the US will spend the day with family (hopefully minus the bickering). I’ll be out of town Thursday. But I will be dropping by a bit throughout Wednesday. In the meantime, let’s start things with a collaboration – Herbie Hancock and Foday Musa Suso recorded this lovely piece for the 1984 Summer Olympics:

In a lot of ways it is a product of its time, but it was track like this that paved the way for what would follow. Plus this is just so catchy.

Bar is open, and hopefully we’ll see our favorite bartender return. Jukebox is ready as well. Plenty of room here so sit a spell if you are so inclined.

Cheers!

If you were to ask me why so many folks are attacking members of the Baby Boom Generation lately, I’d point you to the latest United Nations report on climate change.

Four years after countries struck a landmark deal in Paris to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert the worst effects of global warming, humanity is headed toward those very climate catastrophes, according to a United Nations report issued Tuesday, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, having expanded their carbon footprints last year.

“The summary findings are bleak,” the report said, because countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions even after repeated warnings from scientists. The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

I’m from Generation X and I just turned fifty years old. There are only a handful of U.S. Senators who are younger than me. We’re just coming into our natural time of peak power, and we have nothing but messes not of our own making to deal with. The younger generations feel even more aggrieved, since they have even less responsibility for the state of the world.

I firmly believe that we will soon wash away the gridlock and many of the idiotic political disputes that are the legacy and obsession of the Baby Boomers, but that won’t make it any less of a daunting task to fix what they let fester.

I’ve got a nine year old son and two stepsons in their twenties. Here is what they have to look forward to:

Amid that growing pressure to act, Tuesday’s U.N. report offers a grim assessment of how off-track the world remains. Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much as 3.9 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to the United Nations’ annual “emissions gap” report, which assesses the difference between the world’s current path and the changes needed to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord…

…Should that pace continue, scientists say, the result could be widespread, catastrophic effects: Coral reefs, already dying in some places, would probably dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Some coastal cities, already wrestling with flooding, would be constantly inundated by rising seas. In much of the world, severe heat, already intense, could become unbearable.

You can add stronger storms, widespread drought and famine, and an extremely inhospitable environment for peaceful coexistence.

I don’t really think the Boomers deserve all the blame for inaction on climate. It’s more that they’ve created a situation where action on anything is impossible, and an inability to be proactive on climate is just the most important consequence of that.

I know one thing for certain. As Generation X takes the reins of power over the next decade, they will be looking for help from younger people, not their older brothers and sisters or their parents. They don’t seem to be able to agree that climate change is even occurring and half of them think they can Make America Great Again by burning more fossil fuels.

 

You know, what’s bad for the goose is often just as bad for the gander. At least, that is what I thought to myself when I saw the Dallas Morning News reporting that “a bizarre political blunder” had resulted in the Texas Republican Party’s strategic plan for the 2020 election cycle “showing up in Democratic email [boxes] Monday evening.”

I was immediately reminded of when Guccifer 2.0 published the Florida Democratic Party’s strategic documents on August 15, 2016 and then followed that up on August 22, with this:

A Florida GOP campaign consultant who runs a blog under a pseudonym directly contacted the hackers behind the breach of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and he solicited material from them. The Wall Street Journal reports that Aaron Nevins set up a Dropbox account specifically for “Guccifer 2.0” to drop files into, and he received 2.5 GB of data from the Democratic Party breaches—including the “get out the vote” strategy for congressional candidates in Florida.

Nevins analyzed the data and posted his analysis on his blog, HelloFLA.com. Guccifer 2.0 sent a link to the blog to Trump backer Roger Stone, who told the paper he was also in communication with the hackers. Nevins told the Journal that the hackers didn’t understand what they had until he explained the data’s value.

Some of the most valuable data, Nevins said, was the Democratic Party’s voter turnout models. “Basically, if this was a war, this is the map to where all the troops are deployed,” Nevins told the person or persons behind the Guccifer 2.0 account via Twitter. He also told them, “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”

Guccifer 2.0 responded via direct message, “Hmmm. ok u owe me a million :)”

I read through the story in the Dallas Morning News a few times, looking for a description of “the blunder,” but I didn’t find any explanation. Perhaps someone attached the wrong person to an email chain and it is as simple as that. But the result is certainly unpleasant for Texas Republicans. We now know who they are targeting and how they plan on attacking them. In other words, we have a sense of where they plan to “deploy their troops.” This isn’t information that the Democrats should have, and it would be very concerning if the information was stolen from the Republicans, particularly if it was stolen by hackers working for a foreign government. It would be doubly concerning if a Democratic strategist actually solicited this information from foreign hackers.

It seems to me that the Republican Party of Texas has every right to ask for an investigation, and if they are the victims of a foreign or domestic hack, they have the right to expect justice.

If the FBI, backed by the CIA and NSA, came back and explained that, say, the Ukrainian government was behind the breach, I think they’d be outraged if the Democrats refused to accept this and tried to point the finger at the Russians. If the consensus of the Intelligence Community were that the Democrats had actually asked for these documents, I think the demand for justice would be even louder, as well as more justified.

But, honestly, if any of this were the case, the Republicans would not have a leg to stand on because they didn’t defend our democracy when they were the beneficiaries of unfair play.

I don’t know about you, but I am finding the first (and hopefully only) term of the Trump administration to be an interminably unpleasant experience. That’s why I take my pleasures wherever I can find them, and the prospect of seeing Rudy “Hand Grenade” Giuliani locked up in a federal prison along with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone is pretty high up on my wish list. If the Wall Street Journal is correct, I may soon be quite a bit happier than I am today.

In recent weeks, prosecutors have sent subpoenas and other requests to potential witnesses seeking records and information related to Mr. Giuliani and two of his associates, according to the people. The investigation, led by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has already led to campaign-finance charges against the associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

The subpoenas offer the clearest indication yet that federal prosecutors are examining Mr. Giuliani’s consulting work. Among the entities named in the subpoenas are Giuliani Partners, a security-consulting firm founded by Mr. Giuliani in 2002 that had multiple foreign clients, including a city in Ukraine. The subpoenas also sought information on a company co-founded by Mr. Parnas that paid Mr. Giuliani for business and legal advice.

Subpoenas described to The Wall Street Journal listed more than a half dozen potential charges under consideration: obstruction of justice, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to the federal government, serving as an agent of a foreign government without registering with the Justice Department, donating funds from foreign nationals, making contributions in the name of another person or allowing someone else to use one’s name to make a contribution, along with mail fraud and wire fraud.

Now, you might think that Trump could see what is coming and that he might start creating some distance between himself and his personal lawyer/errand boy. Yet, based on Trump’s comments from the White House today, that process has not yet begun.

During a White House meeting with visiting Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, Trump continued to defend Giuliani and take shots at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Trump described Giuliani, a former mayor of New York who is heavily enmeshed in the Ukraine controversy, as “a great guy.”

“Rudy is the best mayor in the history of New York,” Trump told reporters, as Borissov looked on. “Rudy is a great crime fighter, corruption fighter.”

Trump said the media was not treating Giuliani fairly.

The president was responding to a question from the media about Giuliani’s insistence that Trump will never throw him under the bus because he has “insurance.” Trump tried to wave that inquiry away by saying Rudy had already addressed it, and then he launched into the  “great crime fighter” rhetoric cited above. It makes me wonder if Giuliani is in possession of the pee tape.

It looks like he’s going to need it.

Investigators have sought information from prospective witnesses about Messrs. [Lev] Parnas’s and [Igor] Fruman’s political and business activities, and how they intersected with the Trump administration and Mr. Giuliani’s work, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

The subpoenas also sought materials related to America First Action and America First Policies, two pro-Trump groups. Kelly Sadler, a spokeswoman for the groups, said the organizations contacted the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office last month and offered to cooperate. She said neither group received a subpoena.

Prosecutors alleged in the indictment last month that Messrs. Fruman and Parnas concealed the true source of a $325,000 donation to America First Action by listing it as a gift from an energy company they had recently founded.

At least for now, Attorney General William Barr seems unable to control the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. And if he doesn’t find a way to stop them, they’re going to roll up the whole administration like a Persian rug.

 

Way back on October 23, I called this Ukrainian thing “the biggest scandal in American political history.” If you’re keeping up with the latest breaking news, then you know why I said that. On Saturday, I wrote a piece for my subscribers called “If Rudy Giuliani is a Hand Grenade, Lev Parnas is the Pin.” In both of those articles, I took a look at the role of Dmytro Firtash, a Putin-aligned Ukrainian oligarch who is presently under house arrest in Austria and fighting extradition to the United States.

If you watched the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings over the last two weeks, you probably remember Ambassador Bill Taylor. He was the guy people likened to Walker Cronkite who said it was “crazy” to withhold aid to Ukraine for nakedly political purposes.

In June 2019, Taylor became chargé d’affaires ad interim for Ukraine. It was essentially his second go-round as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, but in a role that didn’t require Senate confirmation. His previous “official” posting in Kyiv lasted from 2006 to 2009. The position was vacant because the previous ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, had been smeared and unceremoniously sacked.

In his first go-round as ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor was paid an unsolicited visit by Dmytro Firtash. We know all about this meeting because Taylor sent a lengthy cable back to State Department headquarters about it that was later published by WikiLeaks. Near the end of that cable is a description of Firtash’s explanation for his close relationship with notorious Russian mafia crime “boss of bosses” Semyon Mogilievich. Firtash is not the kind of guy ordinary people would want to associate with.

But Paul Manafort is not an ordinary person and he has maintained a long and very close relationship with Firtash. Together they were sued in the Southern District of New York by Yulia Tymenshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine who was imprisoned in 2011 on trumped up charges. Manafort operated a real estate investment business in Manhattan which was funded by Firtash, but you can see from a complaint filed by a former employee with the New York Department of Labor’s fraud unit that their the business was actually a money laundering sham.

Rudy Giuliani became convinced that Ukrainian politicians had sabotaged Paul Manafort during his time as the campaign chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign by publishing the contents of a black ledger that detailed the illegal governmental payouts Manafort had received from now exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party. This forms the primary basis for Trump’s belief that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Giuliani has immersed himself in this Manafort-Firtash relationship. The Washington Post recently reported that Giuliani has been consulting with Manafort despite the fact that the former Trump campaign chairman is in prison. It’s also clear now from reporting in the New York Times that Giuliani approached Firtash and convinced him to fire Lanny Davis as his lawyer and to hire Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing to represent him in his fight against extradition.

This is where Lev Parnas enters into the story.

Parnas and his business partner Igor Fruman were recently arrested for engaging in “political activities in the U.S. on behalf of one or more Ukrainian government officials.” This included the solicitation of help from former congressman Pete Sessions in the removal of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from her post in Kyiv.

The two men were charged with four counts, including conspiracy, falsification of records and lying to the Federal Election Commission about their political donations, which included a $325,000 donation through a limited liability company to a super PAC formed to support Mr. Trump, according to the indictment.

Fruman has retained Trump’s Mueller investigation lawyer John Dowd as his attorney, and he’s not talking. But Parnas appears desperate to tell Congress and the American people everything he knows. And he knows all about Giuliani’s efforts to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden.

To truly understand what happened, it is necessary to know a little bit about the charges against Firtash. He’s accused of paying bribes to Indian officials to win the rights to mine titanium for Boeing. There’s a piece of evidence against him referred to as “Exhibit A” in court documents. Firtash would like to get this evidence thrown out.

Giuliani realized this and sent Parnas and Fruman to Vienna to argue that diGenova and Toensing would accomplish what Lanny Davis could not. They could win an audience with Attorney General William Barr and get the Chicago-based prosecutors to drop the Exhibit A evidence. They did, indeed, speak directly to Barr about this matter, but were reportedly told to take their case to the prosecutors in Illinois. Here is what Parnas wants to tell Congress about this whole affair:

[Firtash] hired [diGenova and Toensing], he said, on a four-month contract for a singular task — to arrange a meeting with the attorney general and persuade him to withdraw Exhibit A. He said their contract was for $300,000 a month, including Mr. Parnas’s referral fee. A person with direct knowledge of the arrangement said Mr. Parnas’s total share was $200,000; Ms. Toensing declined to discuss the payment but has said previously that it was for case-related translation.

There was one more piece to Mr. Parnas’s play. “Per Giuliani’s instructions,” Mr. Parnas’s lawyer said, his client “informed Mr. Firtash that Toensing and diGenova were interested in collecting information on the Bidens.” (It was the former vice president who had pushed the Ukrainian government to eliminate middleman gas brokers like Mr. Firtash and diversify the country’s supply away from Russia.)

One reason that Parnas’s claim is credible is that he was part of an anti-Biden working group that included diGenova and Victoria Toensing.

[Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph] Bondy told CNN that Parnas is also willing to tell Congress about a series of regular meetings he says he took part in at the Trump International Hotel in Washington that concerned Ukraine. According to Bondy, Parnas became part of what he described as a “team” that met several times a week in a private room at the BLT restaurant on the second floor of the Trump Hotel. In addition to giving the group access to key people in Ukraine who could help their cause, Parnas translated their conversations, Bondy said.

The group, according to Bondy, included Giuliani, Parnas [The Hill] journalist [John] Solomon, and the married attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. Parnas said that Harvey would occasionally be present as well, and that it was Parnas’ understanding that [Derek] Harvey was [Devin] Nunes’ proxy, Bondy said.

I don’t know what it will take to convince congressional Republicans that Trump should be removed from office, but this story is going to become common knowledge before any vote is held.

In short, Trump empowered Giuliani to manufacture evidence that Ukraine had been responsible for hacking the DNC and framing Russia, that Joe Biden had forced out a Ukrainian prosector to kill an investigation into his son Hunter, and that Ukrainians had acted inappropriately by using doctored evidence to implicate Paul Manafort in corruption and thereby harm Trump’s campaign. Giuliani then deputized two Ukrainian-American fraudsters with ties to Russia to help him carry out his scheme. These fraudsters have been indicted both for their role in Giuliani’s scheme, including the sacking of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and for making illegal campaign contributions with foreign money to a Trump Super PAC. They also attempted to corrupt the Department of Justice and intervene in the extradition of a Russian-mob connected Ukrainian oligarch who ran a money laundering operation with Paul Manafort.

And, for the cherry on top, the Republican responsible for overseeing the impeachment inquiry in the House, Devin Nunes, was integrally involved in this all along the way.

Are you seeing now, why I called this this biggest political scandal in history?