On Sunday, Chris Wallace had Kapo Stephen Miller on his show, where he pushed back on Trump's racism by telling Miller that "There’s no question that he is stoking racial divisions," referring to Trump's repulsive lies about The Squad. Meanwhile, another Fox personality, Geraldo Rivera, told the NY Times that Señor Trumpanzee's recent attacks on The Squad have shown him that critics of Trump "were much more right than I... My friendship with the president has cost me friendships, it has cost me schisms in the family, my wife and I are constantly at odds about the president." He's coming to his senses and added "as much as I have denied it and averted my eyes from it, this latest incident made it impossible to defend him."Trump was at it again when he woke up yesterday; he just can't stop himself. And it's dangerous, not just to himself and his party-- like, who cares?-- but to his targets. The Illinois Republican Party produced the sickening, not funny poster above. And guess what inspired Gretna, Louisiana police officer-- fired on Monday-- Charlie Rispoli to respond to some fake Facebook bullshit by threatening to shoot AOC? Who is inspiring this kind of thing? You know who... you know exactly who.So what was Trump trying to distract from yesterday when he woke up? There's so many possibilities that God only knows, but it certainly could have been the story BuzzFeed broke about how Giuliani has been trying to get Ukraine to illegally help Trump's 2020 election bid. A BuzzFeed team reported that "Two unofficial envoys reporting directly to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer have waged a remarkable back-channel campaign to discredit the president’s rivals and undermine the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian meddling in US elections. In a whirlwind of private meetings, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman-- who pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican campaigns and dined with the president-- gathered repeatedly with top officials in Ukraine and set up meetings for Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, as they turned up information that could be weaponized in the 2020 presidential race. The two men urged prosecutors to investigate allegations against the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden."
Meanwhile, the two men-- who both have troubled financial histories-- rose to prominence in Republican circles, meeting with party leaders while injecting hundreds of thousands of dollars into top Republican committees and dozens of candidates’ campaigns.As they carried out their campaign, they used their proximity to the White House to tout a new business they set up to sell natural gas in Ukraine, with photos posted on Facebook showing Parnas posing with President Trump in the White House and top House members on Capitol Hill.Their work proved influential. Prosecutors in Kiev announced in March they would investigate the officials accused of trying to steer the election in Clinton’s favor-- a month after meeting with Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani-- and Trump applauded the plan in an interview with Fox News, calling the allegations “big” and “incredible.” The next month, Attorney General William Barr announced he had appointed a federal prosecutor to lead a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation.Parnas said he expected the information that he and Fruman advanced to become an important focus of Barr’s inquiry, and to dominate the debate in the run-up to the 2020 election. “It’s all going to come out,” he said. “Something terrible happened and we’re finally going to get to the bottom of it.”In an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed News at the Trump International Hotel, the 47-year-old former stock broker insisted he and Fruman were not paid for acting as intermediaries between the Ukrainian officials and Giuliani. “All we were doing was passing along information,” he said. “Information was coming to us-- either I bury it or I pass it on. I felt it was my duty to pass it on."...Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor who once represented Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said Parnas and Fruman were “playing with fire” by carrying out their campaign in the US and Ukraine without registering as foreign agents or being vetted by the State Department.“Trump has either authorized Giuliani to engage in private diplomacy and deal-making, or even worse, remains silent while Giuliani and his dodgy band of soldiers of fortune engage in activities that severely undermine US credibility and are contrary to fundamental US interests,” he said....What’s clear is that, for Parnas and Fruman, the stakes were more than just political. While they launched a new energy company to operate in Ukraine, large sums of money were flowing into various bank accounts belonging to the men that are now the focus of legal complaints.In one transaction in 2018, more than $1 million was wired to a bank account belonging to Parnas from the client trust account of a Florida lawyer specializing in real estate and foreign investments. Parnas and Fruman then redirected $325,000 to a Trump-supporting super PAC-- without declaring the original source of the funds, records and interviews show.The money is now the target of a complaint before the Federal Election Commission by a non-profit watchdog group.
None of the crooked politicians who have taken bribes from Parnas and Fruman have returned the money. Aside from about $10,000 to the NRSC and RNC, here are some of the suspicious characters who got maxed-out contributions from Igor Fruman in 2018:
• Rick Scott (R-FL)- $5,400• Señor Trumpanzee- $2,700• Pete Sessions (R-TX)- $2,700• Joe Wilson (R-SC)- $5,400
Lev Parnas donated tens of thousands to Republicans in 2018 also, but most of it went through Party committees, like the RNC ($33,400) but also Republican state parties in New York, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, California, North Dakota, North Carolina, Louisiana, Wyoming, Alabama, Virginia, Connecticut, Kansas, Minnesota, and Illinois. He also mixed-out to Trump and Pete Sessions, bringing the bribes to the two of them to $5,400 each for 2018 from Parnas and Fruman. Such nice generous Ukrainians. I hope someone asks Mueller tomorrow if his investigation looked into this money trail.Or maybe what got his goat was something much more prosaic, a new Marist poll for NPR that shows Trump with horrifying re-elect numbers. Registered voters were asked if they would definitely vote for or definitely vote against Trump in 2020. Only 8% were unsure. 53% said they would definitely vote against him and just 39% said they would definitely vote for him. Even among 2016 Trump supporters, just 89% said they were definitely going to vote for him again. He is also underwater in every section of the country. The South is his strongest region but even there just 44% said they re definitely onboard for 2020, while 50% they will definitely vote against him. In the West, that jumps to 57% definitely against and his definitely vote for him contingent sinks to just 33%. That would have sure been enough to make him start cursing out AOC, Ilhan, Rashida and Ayanna again.
