It’s pretty obvious to any fair minded observer that Trump was caught red-handed leaning on the Ukrainian president (actually two presidents as it seems this effort started under Zelenskyy’s predecessor). We’ve got tapes, transcripts and testimony from a wide range of non-partisan State Department officials and even corroboration from the very partisan Republican Gordon Sunderland.
But while Republicans are busy pretending that all those words and witnesses are somehow mushy, there’s the matter of everyone’s favorite geniuses, Lev and Igor, getting caught (though they have so far plead not guilty) laundering $325,000 through a cut out to Donald Trump’s America Russia First Action SuperPAC. While not publicly established, it appears the money came directly or indirectly from Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with strong ties to Putin and the Russian Mob who is ankle-braceleted in Vienna fighting extradiction to the U.S. on bribery charges. Lev and Igor were nabbed with one way tickets to Vienna while Rudy was ticketed to, coincidentally I’m sure, fly to Vienna the following day. It further appears that Lev and Igor were on Firtash’s payroll and that Rudy — who says he’s working for Trump for free — was paid $500,000 by Lev with money from Firtash.
I’ll bet the ranch that this was not the only money laundered from Firtash/Moscow to Republicans. We already know that Russia had funneled money through the NRA to Republicans around the country before the NRA’s spectacular implosion.
So not only did Trump/Rudy/Sunderland lean on the Ukranian president for an arms for dirt deal, they were simultaneously CHEATING by taking foreign money from a Putin-aligned Ukrainian mob boss trying to get out of facing American justice. I’m a little surprised this part of the story has not been getting a lot of attention. I sure hope the Dems go into this as it is possibly far more difficult to spin and likely splatters onto a wide range of Republicans.
Follow the money.