January 20, 2020: President Trump's "Crack" Corruption-Fighting Team in Ukraine

 

IN THIS POST, WE BEGIN COVERING YEAR FOUR OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY....

NADIR OF DEMOCRACY

  

____________________ 

“The worse [sic] part of Donald Trump’s presidency isn’t what we learned about him, it’s what we learned about our Family & Friends.” 

“Dax Gigandet” on Twitter

____________________

  

1/20/20: Year Four of the Trump Presidency begins like Year Two, and Year Three. Most Americans understand that the man in the White House is both incompetent and a threat to democracy.    

(At least the economy is strong.)

 

* 

THE GENTLEMAN below is Lev Parnas and that’s his mugshot. He’s the currently-indicted former bosom pal/business partner of Trump personal lawyer/bosom pal Rudy Giuliani. 

Rudy and Lev used to be tight.

 

____________________ 

Chasing after corruption in Ukraine, like a pit bull chasing a fat mailman.

____________________

  

Mug shot of Lev Parnas.

 

President Trump has said that he does not know Parnas. Vice President Jesus has hinted he wouldn’t know Parnas if Parnas passed the collection plate in church. Even Rudy is having difficulty remembering. 

“Lev, who?” 

So, let’s refresh our memories. Parnas, Igor Fruman (also a pal of Rudy’s) and two other lesser figures have been, 

charged in a four-count indictment alleging that each of the defendants conspired to violate the ban on foreign donations and contributions in connection with federal and state elections. In addition, PARNAS and FRUMAN were charged with conspiring to make contributions in connection with federal elections in the names of others, and with making false statements to and falsifying records to obstruct the administration of a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”). 

 

Have we mentioned lately that a lot of felons and alleged felons show up in stories about Team Trump? Parnas and his co-defendants were allegedly funneling foreign money into GOP and Trump campaign coffers. 

Or: Foreign policy for sale!

 

* 

YOU MAY BE ASKING yourself, “How can this be???” We have all heard President Trump insist that where Ukraine is involved, he only cares about cleaning up corruption. He wants to clean it all up! We have been told that he is all for investigating corruption in every shape, color and shoe and hat size. His defenders in Congress have told us the president really cares about Ukraine. 

He can’t stop thinking about Ukraine, even when he’s golfing. 

We know that in his famous July 25 phone call to the president of Ukraine, Trump asked the Ukrainians to get involved in his efforts to clean up corruption in their country, by investigating just one specific company. That company, by coincidence, was Burisma, which by an even more amazing coincidence happened to be the company for which Hunter Biden worked. 

What were the chances!

 

If you listened to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Oh.) shouting about all the sleazy Democrats in Congress who started investigating Trump – after a whistleblower tooted warning – you know Trump was going to be chasing after corruption in Ukraine, like a pit bull chasing a fat mailman. 

We know Acting White House Chief of Babysitting Mick Mulvaney told reporters that military aid was being withheld because the Department of Justice was participating in an investigation into corruption in Ukraine. We also know DOJ immediately offered this assessment. “If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” a DOJ spokesperson announced.

 

* 

THIS IS WHERE the crack corruption-crushing crew assembled by the president comes into view. Rudy would lead the crusade. The president hired Rudy. Rudy hired Lev and Igor and those three and several other lesser lights went to work investigating all the companies and individuals listed below. Not just Burisma, the company for which the son of a political rival had been employed. Not just Hunter Biden and maybe Joe Biden, his dad. Trump and his crusaders against corruption were coming. Look out, Ukrainian scumbags. Your days are numbered! 

Here’s the list: 

1)     Burisma

2)     Hunter Biden (and maybe Joe)

3)     ….

4)     ….

5)     ….

6)     ….

7)     ….

8)     ….

9)     ….

10)  …

 

Okay, there were no other companies or individuals. In fact, there were zero Ukrainians on the list. 

 

Paul Manafort, corruption fighter extraordinaire! 

In fact, the crusade for a clean Ukrainian government began even before Trump was elected. He began assembling a crack crusading crew in March 2016, when he hired Paul Manafort to help win the presidency. By June, Manafort was heading up the Trump campaign. He was leading the fight against crookery in all its manifold forms, like General Custer charging the Lakota and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. 

Manafort had vast experience in the corruption-fighting field. As a young man he and Roger Stone (both of whom have been convicted on multiple felony charges in recent years) set up a Washington law firm that specialized in cleaning up the reputations of world leaders. See! Cleaning up corruption! The two partners were good at what they did, prospered, and became known for their fine work as part of “The Torturer’s Lobby.” That’s how you clean up corruption. You spray perfume on the reputations of corrupt Nigerian politicians and others. 

Who like torture!!

 

Eventually, Manafort and Stone parted ways. Manafort went to work crusading for good government – in – of all places – Ukraine! He was adept at fighting corruption. He made tens of millions fighting. When he was done, he had piles of cash stashed in secret bank accounts in Cyprus. Not just one secret account. Fifteen. Manafort also fought the good fight by setting up shell companies to handle all the money he was making fighting crime. Not just one shell company. Ten! Ten shell companies. He was like a corruption-fighting conglomerate. Manafort’s reputation for fighting crime grew. He made millions working for leading Ukrainian politicians, only some of whom had to flee to Russia to avoid arrest after stealing from their people. 

Nowadays, the “Fake News” folks like to undercut Mr. Manafort’s fine work by quoting from Department of Justice and court documents, showing that Manafort had worked for known money-launders. Reporters crank out “Fake News” stories, noting that Mr. Manafort had – since going to work for Mr. Trump – been found guilty of a whole bunch of felonies and pled guilty to a whole bunch more – including witness tampering. They add that that tampering took place in 2018; and then Konstantin Kilimnik, the tampered-with witness, fled to Russia. 

So, as any fool could see, Team Trump has always been huge when it comes to fighting corruption. 

Only cynics could fail to see it.

 

Nor dare we ignore the corruption-crushing efforts of Mr. Rudy Giuliani. Per President Trump’s instructions, he traveled to Ukraine on several occasions, always in an effort to ferret out crooks who might be related to U.S. political opponents of his boss. While Rudy was visiting, he told everyone he met that he was functioning as Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer. He wasn’t there as a representative of the President of the United States. He wasn’t representing the U.S. government. He had one client. Trump. And Rudy knew he would need help. So, he hired two famous corruption fighters, Parnas and Fruman. The trio set to work. Their first move in their crusade was to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired. 

That was the perfect place to begin! Even though no one had ever accused the ambassador of corruption.

 

* 

MEANWHILE, back in Washington, Manafort and Stone were showing up in court, as part of the crusade to clean up government, home and abroad. Manafort was cleaning up by getting indicted and convicted by a jury on eight felony counts. The same jury voted 11-1 to convict on ten more. Manafort got off on those charges. Later he agreed to cooperate with investigators. He admitted to those extra ten charges, but they did not, technically, count against him. 

Otherwise, he would be the clear leader in the felony count, regarding all the assorted felons on Team Trump. 

Rick Gates, his corruption-fighting sidekick, who worked with him in Ukraine, pled guilty to multiple felonies also. Gates began cooperating with prosecutors. 

There were other hiccups along the way. Manafort violated his cooperation agreement. The feds slapped him with new charges. He went to court again. He got thumped in court again. He got more felonies added to his record. Currently, he’s serving seven-and-half years in prison. 

This makes fighting corruption kind of hard.

 

Stone happened to bump into a Russian in the spring of 2106. The Russian said he had dirt on Hillary Clinton. If Stone wanted to fight corruption, he would have to pay $2 million to get his hands on the dirt. Stone told the Russian that his boss, Mr. Trump, was cheap. He would never pay that much. 

Later, Stone told a congressional committee that he had never met with any Russians during the campaign. Not even anyone who sounded Russian. His corruption-fighting career came to a halt, however, when a jury convicted him on seven felony counts, including lying under oath and witness tampering. 

With a good chunk of his corruption-fighting team suddenly jailed, or awaiting sentencing, the President of the United States turned to Rudy, and Rudy turned to Lev and Igor to lead the fight.

 

____________________ 

“Protecting the integrity of our elections – and protecting our elections from unlawful foreign influence – are core functions of our campaign finance laws.”  

Notice of arrest, Southern District of New York

____________________

  

At first, the trio did some excellent work for Mr. Trump. As noted, they started cleanup on Aisle 1, by getting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, fired. You can see how committed Lev and Igor were to cleaning up Ukraine when you read the notice of their arrest: 

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: “As alleged in the Indictment, the defendants broke the law to gain political influence while avoiding disclosure of who was actually making the donations and where the money was coming from. They sought political influence not only to advance their own financial interests but to advance the political interests of at least one foreign official – a Ukrainian government official who sought the dismissal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Protecting the integrity of our elections – and protecting our elections from unlawful foreign influence – are core functions of our campaign finance laws. And as this Office has made clear, we will not hesitate to investigate and prosecute those who engage in criminal conduct that draws into question the integrity of our political process.”

 

FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said: “Campaign finance laws exist for a reason. The American people expect and deserve an election process that hasn’t been corrupted by the influence of foreign interests, and the public has the right to know the true source of campaign contributions. These allegations aren’t about some technicality, a civil violation, or an error on a form. This investigation is about corrupt behavior and deliberate law breaking. The FBI takes the obligation to tackle corruption [ironic emphasis] seriously – there are no exceptions to this rule.”

 

In other words, the F.B.I. had joined the fight for clean government in Ukraine by arresting Rudy’s pals.

 

Amnesia spread throughout the Trump administration, like that Chinese coronavirus. Attorney General William Barr said he wouldn’t know Parnas or Fruman if they jumped out of a tree and landed on him while he was out walking his poodle. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo agreed. He had never laid eyes on those characters. He wasn’t sure he could pick them out of a police lineup. Interesting – since they had been instrumental in getting a U.S. ambassador fired. 

The fact that all his friends now seemed to be turning their backs on him, just because he was under arrest, made Mr. Parnas sad. He started posting videos and pictures to remind his pals of happier times, when they were in the fight to clean up Ukraine together. He posted pictures showing him with Rudy. He had another – with Rudy – and Igor. We saw Lev sitting down for breakfast with Donald Trump Jr. We saw Lev in a video, taken at Mar-a-Lago. Here we could watch him introduce other Ukrainians to the president, but only the non-corrupt kind of Ukrainians. (We hope.) We saw Lev and Igor and Rudy standing with President Trump and Vice President Pence in another photo. All five gentlemen were smiling. 

When asked by reporters about Parnas, Vice President Jesus, responded, “I don’t know the guy.” Any claim that Pence knew about the scheme to delay military aid to Ukraine, as Parnas said he did, was, according to a spokesperson for the vice president, “completely false.” Parnas released another video. In it he could be seen holding Mrs. Pence’s hand. It was a 23-second clip, to be fair. It might not prove much. We do know Parnas ran in high Trump circles.

VP Pence, Fruman, Parnas, President Trump, Rudy Giuliani in happier times.

 

* 

He might have stolen a few pennies from the Ukrainian people. 

WE ALSO KNOW that Lev, Igor and Rudy and a number of other dedicated corruption fighters did some of their best work in trying to get a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash out of a jam. 

The crusaders quickly went to work to save Firtash, who was being targeted unfairly under U.S. law. These efforts made Firtash happy. After Parnas got arrested, Dmitry sent Lev $1 million. But he thought the safest way to fight corruption was to break up the money into five equal installments and deposit it in Lev’s wife’s bank account. Lev and his lovely wife promptly forgot they had that extra money when listing assets at Lev’s first bail hearing. When you are busy battling crooks it’s easy to forget a million dollars. In that situation, you know you would. You would be balancing the checkbook. You would see that your wife had a million more in her account than expected. “Honey,” you would yell to your spouse in the kitchen, “Do you know anything about these five installments of $200,000 that have showed up in your account?” 

Then you would go back to fighting corrupt oligarchs and politicians in Ukraine. All of them named Biden. 

Because that is your mission!

 

This is why you work for President Donald J. Trump. You are not in it for the money. You would fight corruption for free, with your bare hands, and stand there smiling, in a picture, by Trump’s side. But if someone wanted to give you a million dollars…well, you would take it to be polite. So Lev and Igor and Rudy kept up the fight to help Firtash avoid extradition to the United States, just because he’s under federal indictment for bribery and money-laundering. Also, because he might have stolen a few pennies from the Ukrainian people. 

Firtash? He too wanted to fight the corruption – not be the corruption. For that reason he paid another $1 million to two American lawyers, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. Joe and Victoria are married, and one way they like to help drain the Ukrainian swamp is to show up on Fox News, and talk about corruption problems in Ukraine, none of which involve Firtash. 

You have probably already guessed it. Joe and Victoria want to clean up corruption by focusing on Hunter Biden. 

And Hunter’s dad.

 

The happy couple had a plan. They would pay Lev Parnas to be their interpreter, so they could fight corruption in more than one language. Parnas would receive $400,000 for his services, leading him to joke at one point, “I’m the best paid interpreter in the world.” Rudy pitched in and asked Yuri Lutshenko, former prosecutor general of Ukraine, if he would like to fight corruption by handing over $200,000, and asked a second group of Ukrainians to chip in $300,000. That way, he and the boys would have the cash they needed to battle the criminals. 

 

Can you guess who gave Yanukovych an “extreme makeover?” 

At this point, the story takes a few more twists and turns. Lutshenko is a famous corruption fighter in his own right – and it was a shame back in 2012, when he was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to spend time in prison. Then it sucked when he got sentenced to spend time behind bars again on other charges. Then Victor Yanukovych, the President of Ukraine, pardoned him in 2013. Then the president decided shortly after that he might need to go after corruption by fleeing to Russia. Then Reuters described Mr. Yanukovych as a “toppled ‘mafia’ president,” which was mean, and reported that he had been fighting corruption by absconding with billions of dollars, which only technically belonged to the Ukrainian people. 

Now, for just a moment, we must back up a little. Can you guess who – according to a U.S. State Department cable in 2006 – helped give Yanukovych an “extreme makeover” when he was running to be president in Ukraine?  

 

You will never guess. So, I will tell you. It was Paul Manafort! Did we already mention Manafort’s lobbying firm, and its fine reputation?  Manafort was the perfect man for this clean-up job. 

As Time explained, in those days, Yanukovych was head of the Party of Regions, which the U.S. State Department described as, 

“a haven” for “mobsters and oligarchs.”

 

Making things harder for Manafort were the candidate’s rough manners and criminal past, which had dimmed his chances of winning elections. Oafish and inarticulate, Yanukovych had served jail time in his youth for theft and battery. He also had a hard time speaking Ukrainian – the national language – as he had grown up in the Russian-speaking province of Donetsk. Yet Manafort accepted the challenge of trying to make Yanukovych electable. The man paying the exorbitant bills for these efforts was an early backer of the Party of Regions, the coal and metals magnate Rinat Akhmetov, who soon began calling Manafort his friend.

 

And the man who really hoped Yanukovych would win? Time to guess again! 

Putin.

 

Manafort and Akhmetov were now corruption-busting pals, even though Akhmetov had to flee to Monaco to avoid arrest by Ukrainian authorities. Then he returned once Yanukovych took charge. And he prospered. By 2014 his estimated wealth was $11.2 billion. But when Yanukovych fled, Akhmetov took a few financial lumps of his own, and decided he’d rather live in England. 

By the way, we haven’t forgotten Firtash. Back to him shortly. 

Akhmetov (sometimes spelled “Akhmedov”) settled in England. He and his wife began fighting. Divorce resulted, followed by a battle over assets. The courts ordered Mr. Akhmetov to turn over the couple’s yacht, named Luna, to his ex-wife, as part of the settlement. It’s a nice little pleasure craft, worth half a billion dollars. (See 7/24/18.) 

Anyway, you start digging into this story and pretty soon you turn up all kinds of elite corruption fighters. Many have interesting connections to that paragon of clean government, Mr. Manafort. If you look at a list of billionaires drawn up by the U.S. Treasury Department for sanction, you notice names that pop up here and there in the Mueller Report. The now-yachtless Mr. Akhmetov made the sanction list. So did Aras Agalarov, who helped broker the famous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016.

 

Who was in that meeting?

 

Manafort.

 

Don Jr.

 

Jared Kushner.

 

Also making an appearance on the list of fantastically rich people, now under U.S. sanction, but people you just knew really wanted to end corruption: Sergei Gorkov, a banker with whom Kushner met secretly in early 2017. There was Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought, at a highly-inflated price, a Palm Beach mansion from Donald J. Trump some years back. And you had Viktor Vekselberg, who met in secret with Michael Cohen in January 2017.

 

Nor should we forget Oleg Deripaska, who had worked on all kinds of projects in tandem with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates. True, the Russian oligarch’s reputation as a crime fighter took a hit when he was accused of bribery, money laundering, extortion, and ordering the murder of a business rival.

 

But these guys couldn’t be stopped. The fight to drain the international swamp continued apace.

 

*

 

NOW, TO PROVE our point, that President Trump wants to tear up corruption, root, branch, leaf, and even birds in the tree, we return to Mr. Firtash. In April 2018, a U.S. senator, Roger Wicker, a Republican, sent the Justice Department a letter. He was curious why Firtash had not yet been extradited, since he had been out on bail, living in luxury in Austria, and fighting to stay out of reach of U.S. authorities for four years. In October 2019, Sen. Wicker got tired of waiting for response and pointed out to reporters that his letter had not been answered. That seemed pretty weak on the part of DOJ since Wicker had also pointed out that Firtash was piling up “hundreds of millions” in additional “illicit profits” while hanging out with the other corruption-clobbering crusaders. You know who we mean: Rudy and Lev and Igor and the married couple lawyers who always enjoyed showing up to talk to Lou Dobbs at Fox News.

 

In any case, we should probably note again that bail for Firtash had been set in 2014 at $174 million.

 

Plus, he was forced to surrender his passports – which kind of cramped all the good work he might have done to clean up Ukraine, if, for example, he could only flee, I mean “travel,” to Russia.

 

Speaking of Russia, it would be remiss to fail to mention the greatest-corruption fighter of them all. This would be the man who invaded Ukraine to stomp out corruption, and maybe kill a few thousand Ukrainians while he was at it. We are talking about that not-such-a bad killer fellow, as Trump once described him. This would be the very man who Trump cronies – I mean “corruption-fighting friends” – like Felix Sater thought should be given a penthouse worth $50 million for free to seal the Trump Tower Moscow deal. You might be saying to yourself that this sounds like a bribe. And you might be thinking it would be a huge conflict of interest if Candidate Trump were trying to land a lucrative deal. In Russia! While running for office!! 

But that just proves how little you know about fighting corruption. 

Yes. We are talking about Vladimir Putin, the man, the myth, the foe of corruption on all seven continents, a man willing to toss reporters off fifth floor balconies in an effort to drain the swamps of countries he has invaded. We are talking about a guy who, on a humble government salary, going back to when he worked for the KGB, saved, and saved. And, lo, he came to be worth somewhere between $70 and $200 billion, so carefully did he save his rubles.

 

* 

The only way to clean up all the corruption in Ukraine. 

IN CLOSING this tale of Trump and his unfailing efforts to clean up government, both home and abroad, we should mention two other young men who have dedicated themselves to the same fight. These are two men, unlike Hunter Biden. They would never trade on the family name, just to milk millions out of prospective business partners. Here, of course, we are talking about Eric and Donald Trump Jr., pillars of squeaky clean business and pristine government. 

According to James Dodson, a golf writer, Eric told him in 2014 that the Trump Organization was having no trouble financing new golf courses. They agreed to play a round, as Dodson remembers it: 

So when I got in the cart with Eric…as we were setting off, I said, “Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks – because of the recession, the Great Recession – have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.” And this is what he said. He said, “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia [emphasis added].” I said, “Really?” And he said, “Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.” Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.

 

By the way, it might be worth mentioning here that one fine way to launder money is to sneak it out of, say, Russia, and buy assets like real estate, including golf courses, in, say, the U.S.A. But that could not in any way be the case here, because everyone knows Trumps hate corruption. 

Eric responded, as all Trumps do, by calling Dodson’s story “totally fabricated and just another example of why there is such a deep distrust of the media in this country.” It didn’t help when someone dredged up a quote from his older brother. In 2008, Don Jr. told an audience at a real estate conference in New York City, that the “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

 

Five years later, while running the Miss Universe pageant, which was held in Moscow in 2013, Don Sr. first got interested in cleaning up corruption when he attended a party with all kinds of Russian corruption fighters. “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” is how he put it later. In fact, a more recent review of financial records by Reuters in 2017, found that 63 Russians had invested a total of $100 million in Trump Florida properties. So, the moral of that story is: 63 more corruption fighters, fighting crooks by investing in foreign real estate. 

A story by McClatchy, in June 2018, revealed the names of even more corruption-fighting Russians and Ukrainians, who had seen the wisdom of buying up Trump properties. There was, for instance, Aleksandr Burman, a Ukrainian-born businessman who engaged in a scheme to defraud Medicare of $26 million (or maybe $30 million). Burman is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence. So, his corruption-fighting days may be over. In sunnier times, however, he paid $725,000 in cash for a condo at a Trump Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. Another typical buyer – McClatchy said there were 86 – was Leonid Zeldovich, who had “reportedly done extensive business in the Russian-annexed area of Crimea. Records show he gobbled up four Trump condo units at a cost of $4.35 million, three in New York City, between 2007 and 2010.   

He, too, paid cash.

 

It is alleged that Donald J. Trump got interested in “cleaning up corruption” way back in 1984. At that time, he allowed purchasers of multi-million-dollar condos to pay in cash, by going through shell companies. A gentleman named David Bogaton, said to have been a Russian gangster, was one of his first customers. Bogaton handed over $6 million (equal to something like $15 million today) and snagged five condos in the new Trump Tower in New York City. 

Last, but not least, Trump enjoyed fighting criminals by using banks that would give him risky loans – when many banks wouldn’t – just because a string of Trump casinos ended up bankrupt. That meant Trump worked closely with Deutsche Bank, which fought crookery on all fronts, by laundering Russian money. And also, money for drug cartels. Sadly investigators round the world did not appreciate the sterling efforts the bank was making, because Deutsche had to pay a 15 million euro fine for the Russian business. Then there was the $630 million fine for more money laundering, involving more Russians. And the other fine for laundering drug cartel dollars. 

So, yes. The only way to clean up all the corruption in Ukraine. 

Get Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden.

Rybolovlev's yacht.