“President outsources his foreign policy to gangsters” is the sort of charge that ought to draw more attention than it has. jonathanchait writes
Photo: Twitter On October 10, federal agents arrested Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman at the airport, where they had one-way tickets to Vienna. President Trump feigned disinterest. “I don’t know those gentlemen,” he told reporters. “Maybe they were clients of Rudy. You’d have to ask Rudy, I just don’t know.”
Trump’s dishonesty is so comprehensive that the revelation he lied about knowing Parnas and Fruman — the sort of lie that would badly damage a normal president — barely registers. The fact that he allegedly commissioned Parnas’s work directly might prove more damaging. Here Trump recruited a pair of sleazeballs with ties to the Russian mafia to communicate with the Ukrainian government on his behalf.
Giuliani is the target of a federal investigation that centers on his role in a side shakedown that Parnas and Fruman were running in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal reported Parnas and Fruman, who pushed Ukrainian officials to give them a natural-gas contract, told the Ukrainians that Giuliani was their partner.
The main story line Democrats have focused on in the impeachment proceedings is Trump’s twisting of government power for political gain. That is a clear-cut abuse of power that has been amply demonstrated by a parade of witnesses. But lurking in the shadows of the scandal is an ulterior motive: Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman were extorting Ukraine in the traditional, moneymaking way also.
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