17 January 2020

A Man Named Lev

Against the backdrop of the President's impeachment, Lev Parnas, a former associate of both Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Guliani, has given a series of media interviews with explosive revelations (details here, here, and here).

These have resulted in several big takeaways, including that Trump has always been completely in the loop on everything that was happening with the Ukraine extortion scandal and that there were multiple other incidents of Trump and his people squeezing the Ukrainian government for election help.

Parnas is under indictment and some of his claims have not been confirmed. At the same time, he has been providing explosive document releases that are confirmed and suggest he's telling the truth.

Nevertheless, Senate Republicans are pretending he doesn't exist. They may do so at their peril. Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg wrote an excellent piece about this (link here).

"Republican senators don't even know what they're covering up for, or at least what they would be covering up for if they follow the White House's preference to rush through the Senate impeachment trial that starts next week and refuse to hear from relevant witnesses and collect relevant documents," writes Bernstein.

For his part, Trump insists he does not know Parnas. And Parnas, angered at that, keeps releasing photos of himself with Trump.

Richard Nixon made the big mistake of treating some of his bagmen like shit. They turned against him. Trump is making this same mistake. Of course, if he read any history, he would know this, but then Trump thinks he's too smart to learn anything.

As one pundit said on Twitter yesterday, "when Trump says he knows everything, he knows nothing. When Trump says he knows nothing, he knows something. And that something is bad."

No comments:

Post a Comment

Speak up!