In this week's incremental update to the Trump Russia Corruption Timeline we have this great explanation from Rachel Maddow into the bowels of the latest Giuliani/Ukraine corruption scandal.
So it appears that Giuliani's other clients besides Trump, including two Ukrainians Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested for being involved in a money laundering scheme to provide $325,000 to Trump affiliated SuperPac America F1rst from a mysterious Russian source. It also appears that these guys were deeply involved in the Ukrainian plot to squeeze them into investigating Joe Biden after feeding tons of dirt (lies) about him through Giuliani to Trump. It appears that Parnas and Fruman also contributed heavily to Rep. Pete Sessions and that Sessions wrote a letter to Trump criticizing then Ukranian Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, who recently testified to Congress that she was eventually "pushed out of her position due to wrongful rumors spread about her.""
It seems that those rumors came from Parnas and Fruman, through Sessions, after being originally generated by the Kremlin and spread on Russian State TV.
Russian media monitor Julia Davis writes in the Daily Beast that this is the exact same conspiracy theory that Russian TV hosts have been pushing on their programs for months.
For example, Davis notes that “Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russia’s most popular Sunday news program… urged Trump to keep digging in Ukraine for ‘the sweetest’ kompromat of all: ‘Proving that Ukraine — not Russia — interfered in the U.S. elections.'”
And that’s not all — Davis also found that “pro-government experts on the nightly television show The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev have been openly rooting for the supposed scandal in Ukraine to ‘kill Biden’ politically, and allow Trump ‘to disprove’ Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, and destroy the heart of the Democratic Party in the process.”
So not only did Russia manipulate the 2016 election from behind the scenes, they're continuing to manipulate the situation to make Russia appear to be "innocent" of what they did in 2016 and also are trying to spite the 2020 election by Swiftboating Joe Biden in the same way that they did Hillary Clinton.
Rachel puts together reports that indicate the Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles Airport and were planning to fly to Vienna where they were likely to meet conspiracy theorist Dimitry Firtash who is on House Arrest there after being indicted along with five others with paying $18.5 million in bribes to Indian officials so they could mine titanium and sell it to Boeing Corporation to build the 787 Dreamliner jet. Firtash also has ties to Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates who were named in a racketeering lawsuit involving Firtash, who also has ties to Putin. That suit, which was later dismissed, claimed Manafort and Gates helped Firtash launder ill-gotten gains as part of an $850 million deal to build luxury housing at the site of the Drake Hotel in New York City.
So we have a Putin-linked up money laundering and bribery guy, providing bogus info to the money laundering guys Parnas and Fruman who had named their private company "Fraud Guarantee", had fed that bogus info to Giuliani, who gave it to Trump and then we get the Ambassador shoved out of position in Ukraine and the $400 Million in aid money that Congress had voted to give Ukraine gets mysteriously held up and Trump goes when President Zelensky asks him about Javelin Missiles…
"I need you to do a favor, though...""
And that favor is to investigate Crowdstrike, which for some reason Trump thinks has the "DNC Server" somewhere in Ukraine and also Hunter and Joe Biden. This mess stinks and it getting stinkier as time goes on.
More Maddow on the point that Trump attacked Yovakovich as "bad news" during the Zelensky call.
More and more reports are surfacing that their was a virtual knife fight going on in halls of the White House and State Dept as the Ukranian plot was unfolded. Yovanovich was shoved out of the way, that cleared room to implement the plan using Trump's handpicked/donor for Ambassador to the UN, Gordon Sondland who tamped down complaints by Yovanich's acting replacement at the Ukrainian embassy Bill Taylor who called these efforts "crazy" by telling him "Call me", then later saying "I think you misinterpret the President's intention… there is no quid pro quo" even though it was blatantly obvious, there was a quid pro quo between the aid money and the ask… "do us a favor, though"… that Trump wanted.
Apparently as soon as Trump got off the phone with Zelensky, the fit immediately hit the shan.
Those concerns soared in the call’s aftermath, officials said. Within minutes, senior officials including national security adviser John Bolton were being pinged by subordinates about problems with what the president had said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Bolton and others scrambled to obtain a rough transcript that was already being “locked down” on a highly classified computer network.
“When people were listening to this in real time there were significant concerns about what was going on — alarm bells were kind of ringing,” said one person familiar with the sequence of events inside the White House, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “People were trying to figure out what to do, how to get a grasp on the situation.”
According to the Zelensky Whistle-Blower WH staff members found the call "frightening" and "crazy" The transcript went on "lock down" everybody was scrambling trying to figure out what to do. Why? Because they had just heard the WH resident shake down a foreign President in order to get a request for political dirt on one of his likely 2020 opponents. He had personalized the situation, made it about himself when he was doing the nation's business. Meanwhile the Pentagon was looking at legal action to get the Ukrainian funds released, it was only after VP Pence took a trip to meet with Zelensky to tell him, yet again, that the funds were being held and he needed to "Play ball" that they were finally released.
This was part of a Russia plot, part of their ongoing influence operation starting with Putin, going through Firtash, to Parnas and Fruman and then to Giuliani and right into the ear of Trump.
This is part of the same plan, the same strategy, the same deal. Always spinning, always deflecting, always shifting the sands beneath our feet.
And now Giuliani himself is under investigation by SDNY and Trump is waffling on whether to toss him under the bus.
Good times.
Here are the daily events for the past week:
October 5th —
October 6th —
October 7th —
October 8th —
October 9th—
October 10th —
October 11th —
October 12th —