Last week I was asking members of Congress who they thought the impeachment managers would be. No one wanted to say, especially not the potential members of the team. But one senior Democrat who may or may not have been drinking, blurted out, "Oh you know Nancy... two men, two women, two whites, two blacks, a Hispanic, a gay, a straight, girls... boys. The last thing she's ever going to do is pick anyone because they're most qualified for the job. That's against everything she stands for." Oh dear-- but true. Just look at that mess she did pick to back up the totally competent but anti-charismatic Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. Where the hell is Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who knows more about the constitution than the whole batch of them combined? And Pramila Jayapal and Ted Lieu? Joe Neguse? Swalwell would have been a good choice, since he's fast on his feet, a member of both Intel and Judiciary, telegenic and a lot smarter than some of the identity politics picks. But leave off Jamie Raskin, Ted Lieu and Pramila Jayapal? Insane! Pelosi has lost it!That said, Philip Bump's Washington Post column yesterday, With An Impeachment Trial Looming, New Evidence That Trump Sought Personal Benefit In Ukraine, kind of rocked the house... if not Moscow Mitch and the Senate Republicans. Let's start with a look at this document Lev Parnas-- of the infamous team, Lev and Igor-- turned over to the House Intelligence Committee in recent days:The the incomplete transcript-- Trump still refuses to turn over the actual transcript-- of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote Bump, "Trump cajoles his counterpart to start investigations focused on former vice president Joe Biden and an unfounded theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Zelensky agrees to the probes with alacrity, in part, no doubt, because it had already been made clear to his team that agreement was a necessary criterion for a much-sought meeting with Trump at the White House. To move the probes forward, Trump then suggests that Zelensky work with two people: Attorney General William P. Barr, head of the Justice Department-- and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. The inclusion of Giuliani in the conversation has long made it hard for Trump to argue that he was seeking Zelensky’s aid only insofar as it would benefit the United States generally. When he asked Zelensky to 'do us a favor,' he has argued, he meant 'us' as in the United States. That he then suggested Zelensky work with Giuliani, who is not an employee of the United States, and that his request in that specific case focused on his efforts to undermine the investigation into Russian interference that he saw as a cloud over his presidency make it particularly hard to take Trump’s claims at face value."
Giuliani has been central to the campaign to pressure Ukraine for some time. When a group of officials who’d attended Zelensky’s inauguration in May met with the president to brief him on the event, it was Giuliani whom Trump insisted they work with on Ukraine. It was Giuliani who then made explicit a quid pro quo related to Trump’s desired investigations, according to Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. Giuliani pushed Trump’s team to get Zelensky’s administration to announce the same specific investigations that Trump raised on his call-- all while working for Trump, not the United States.He made clear early in the process that his focus was his client and not his country. When he spoke with the New York Times before a planned trip to Ukraine in May, he told the paper that he was “asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”The “investigation they were already doing” was an investigation into a company for which Biden’s son worked. That inquiry is at the center of the impeachment allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine for information that might undercut the political viability of Biden, who then and now was the leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination this year. Giuliani’s presentation of the status of the purported investigation is itself questionable, but the point is how he characterized his work to The Times: of benefit to Trump and, who knows, maybe the country as well.Parnas worked for Giuliani for years, helping Trump’s attorney in Ukraine, including by doing translations. Parnas was asked for documents by House investigators as they began to dig into Trump’s interactions with Ukraine last year but he refused to comply. When he was subsequently arrested and charged with campaign finance violations, Parnas became more amenable to offering assistance and turned over material to House Democrats. On Tuesday evening, some of that material was made public by the House Intelligence Committee.The material included the letter below, sent by Giuliani to Zelensky shortly before the Ukrainian president’s inauguration-- and shortly before Giuliani’s planned trip to Ukraine. In the letter, Giuliani is explicit about the role he plays.“I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump,” he writes. “Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.” He goes on to explain that this seemingly unusual situation in fact isn’t unusual at all-- clarifying for readers in the present moment just how odd Zelensky might have found the letter.“I have a more specific request,” Giuliani writes later, echoing Trump’s language two months later in his phone call. “In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you” during his planned visit. (After The Times reported on his planned trip, he canceled it.)Asked about Giuliani’s planned trip in an interview with Bill O’Reilly in November, the president denied awareness of what his lawyer was up to.“I know that he was going to go to Ukraine and I think he canceled the trip. But Rudy has other clients, other than me,” Trump said. Asked if Giuliani was going to Ukraine on his behalf to try to find negative information about Biden, Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior.”Giuliani told The Times he was going for Trump. He told Zelensky he was going for Trump. But in November, once the impeachment inquiry was well underway, Trump dismissed the idea.As for the part about focusing on Biden, there’s a note written on a Vienna Ritz-Carlton notepad that was included in the material Parnas gave to House investigators.“Get Zalensky [sic] to Annouce [sic] that the Biden case will be Investigated,” it reads-- suggesting that Parnas, the presumed author of the note, understood one key goal of interactions with the Ukrainian president. Who gave Parnas that direction? He worked with Giuliani as well as a husband-wife team of lawyers-- Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. Later notes on the same pad mention Toensing and diGenova in a way that suggests they weren’t the ones offering instruction. (The documents turned over to investigators include another interesting attorney-related message: authorization from the president, through his attorney Jay Sekulow, for Parnas to be represented by one of Trump’s former attorneys, John Dowd.)There are a lot of questions about those notes. When were they written? What was the context? What did Parnas actually do?But there aren’t many questions about the letter from Giuliani to Zelensky. In that letter, Giuliani is explicit about whom he works for and the extent to which Trump was aware of his efforts. While he didn’t tell Zelensky what the purpose of the meeting was, he did tell The Times: the investigation that Parnas’s note refers to as the “Biden case.”It’s right there in the rough transcript, too, of course. But with Trump’s impeachment trial expected to begin in the Senate next week, it’s worth noting that the transcript isn’t the only evidence that undercuts Trump’s assertions.
But when is the media going to start covering the fact that Giuliani's motivate was to make a few bucks from the Ukrainian gas and energy sector for himself (and for Trump?) That's one of the big untold stories of this whole sordid saga. PBS gave it a try just before Christmas when no one was paying much attention. It starts in Houston with an attempt to bribe by Lev and Igor-- boasting of their relationship with Señor Trumpanzee-- to bribe Andrew Favorov, the number two guy at Ukraine’s state-run gas company Naftogaz. They were proposing a deal to sell large quantities of liquified natural gas from Texas to Ukraine. Keep in mind, the since-resigned Secretary of Energy at the time was former Texas Governor Rick Perry, a very easily blackmailed GOP closet case. They told Favorov two obstacles would have to be removed first-- Favorov's boss and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, corruption-fighter Marie Yovanovitch. Favorov was dumbstruck by not taking Lev and Igor-- who appeared to be more of a clown act that high level White House emissaries-- all that seriously.
Favorov says he hardly took the proposal at the early March meeting seriously. The men, who sported open shirts showing off thick gold chains at a conference where most wore business attire, had zero experience in the gas business. And it wasn’t plausible to Favorov that they would be able to oust his boss, never mind remove a U.S. ambassador.What he didn’t know as he sipped whiskey that evening was that high-ranking officials in the Ukrainian government were already taking steps to topple his boss, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev. And two months later, Trump recalled U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat with a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader.The gas deal sought by Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman never came to pass. But their efforts to profit from contacts with GOP luminaries is now part of a broad federal criminal investigation into the two men and their close associate, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.The Associated Press reported some details in October of the brash pitch that Parnas and Fruman made to Favorov in Houston. But in a recent series of interviews with the AP in Kyiv, Favorov painted a more complete picture of his dealings with Giuliani’s associates.His tale, corroborated by interviews with other key witnesses, reveals that the pair continued to pursue a deal for months. The campaign culminated in May, at a meeting at the Trump International Hotel in Washington that included a lobbyist with deep ties to U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and a Republican fundraiser from Texas close to Donald Trump Jr. Three people with direct knowledge of that meeting described it to the AP on condition of anonymity because some of the players are under federal investigation.The maneuvering over Naftogaz came at the same time that Giuliani, with the help of Parnas and Fruman, were trying to get Yovanovitch out of the way and persuade Ukraine’s leaders to launch an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work with Burisma, a rival Ukrainian gas company.To achieve those ends, they sought to eliminate the safeguards put in place over the last decade at the urging of American and European diplomats to help insulate Naftogaz from the corruption rife in the former Soviet bloc.The story illustrates an essential backdrop of both the impeachment drama roiling U.S. politics and the criminal investigation of Giuliani and his associates: the decades-long tug of war between Russia and the West over Ukraine, in which geopolitical influence, natural resources and corruption are major themes.Yovanovitch is now a key witness in the impeachment inquiry, and federal prosecutors investigating Giuliani have interviewed both Favorov and Kobolyev. Parnas and Fruman were arrested Oct. 9 at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Europe and are charged with conspiracy, making false statements and falsification of records in a case centered on alleged campaign finance violations.It was about seven years ago that Favorov says he first crossed paths with Fruman, who owned the luxurious Otrada Hotel in Odessa, a Ukranian city famous for its opulent Black Sea resorts. Favorov, who ran a gas trading company, was there for a retreat and became friendly with the hotel owner, and the two men have kept in sporadic touch ever since.After Naftogaz announced early this year that Favorov had been appointed its No. 2, he says Fruman, who had emigrated to the United States years earlier, called to chat about the U.S. natural gas business and tout his connections to the Trump administration. Favorov, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen based in Kyiv, had heard that his acquaintance was involved in Republican politics in Florida. Favorov recalls suggesting they meet up at an energy industry conference he was attending in Houston.“Good,” he says Fruman told him. “I want to introduce you to someone.”
