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. |
