|
CNN's Debate Performance Was Villainous and Shameful |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51548"><span class="small">Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 16 January 2020 09:26 |
|
Taibbi writes: "It's elite messaging in numbing quantity, to the point where you feel like screaming, 'We get it!'"
CNN journalist Wolf Blitzer arrives onstage to moderate the seventh Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season, co-hosted by CNN and the 'Des Moines Register' at Drake University, on January 14th, 2020. (photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
CNN's Debate Performance Was Villainous and Shameful
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
16 January 20
The 24-hour network combines a naked political hit with a cynical ploy for ratings
 NN debate moderator Abby Phillip asked Bernie Sanders in the Tuesday debate in Des Moines:
“CNN reported yesterday — and Senator Sanders, Senator Warren confirmed in a statement — that, in 2018, you told her you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”
Not “did you say that,” but “why did you say that?”
Sanders denied it, then listed the many reasons the story makes no sense: He urged Warren herself to run in 2016, campaigned for a female candidate who won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and has been saying the opposite in public for decades. “There’s a video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States,” he said.
Phillip asked him to clarify: He never said it? “That is correct,” Sanders said. Phillip turned to Warren and deadpanned: “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”
That “when” was as transparent a media “fuck you” as we’ve seen in a presidential debate. It evoked memories of another infamous CNN ambush, when Bernard Shaw in 1988 crotch-kicked Mike Dukakis with a question about whether he’d favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, Kitty.
This time, the whole network tossed the mud. Over a 24-hour period before, during, and after the debate, CNN bid farewell to what remained of its reputation as a nonpolitical actor via a remarkable stretch of factually dubious reporting, bent commentary, and heavy-handed messaging.
The cycle began with a “bombshell” exposé by CNN reporter MJ Lee. Released on the eve of the debate, Lee reported Warren’s claim that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t win in a December 2018 meeting.
Lee treated the story as fact, using constructions such as, “Sanders responded that he did not think a woman could win,” and “the revelation that Sanders expressed skepticism that Warren could win.”
Lee said “the conversation” opened a window into “the role of sexism and gender inequality in politics”: The conversation also illustrates the skepticism among not only American voters but also senior Democratic officials that the country is ready to elect a woman as president …
Although Lee said she based the story on “the accounts of four people,” they were “two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter,” and “two people familiar with the meeting.” There were only two people in the room, Sanders and Warren. Lee’s “four people” actually relied on just one source, Warren.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same construction that’s driven countless other shaky stories in the past, from WMD reports to Russiagate speculations. An unconfirmable hearsay story is conveyed by one source, who gives the reporter the numbers of two or three other people in the office who’ve heard the same tale from the same place. Voilà: A one-source pony is now factual “according to several people familiar with the matter.”
CNN hyped the “feud” between Sanders and Warren the whole day before the debate. “This is a heavyweight match tonight. This is going to be frisky, it’s going to be competitive,” former DNC chair and commentator Terry McAuliffe said. This was the ratings-humping aspect of this gross episode.
On The Lead With Jake Tapper — where the anchor was forced to play devil’s advocate and bring up the “did it even happen?” question — there was scoffing about the senator’s denials. Here’s an exchange between Tapper and Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic strategist:
Jake Tapper: Hilary, let me start with you. The explanation that we heard from the Sanders campaign last night was basically, ‘Look, they got their wires crossed.’… What Senator Sanders was trying to say was Trump will exploit misogyny and sexism and make it difficult for a woman to win.
Hilary Rosen: Yes.
Jake Tapper: He wasn’t saying he doesn’t believe a woman will win.
Hilary Rosen: What they were saying is the little lady misunderstood. [Laughter]
The debate preview show hosted by Anderson Cooper and featuring the likes of McAuliffe, former Clinton comms person Jess McIntosh, and former senior adviser to Barack Obama David Axelrod, was full of hand-wringing about how the Democratic Party is moving too far to the left. Panelists worried aloud about how more “moderate” candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Amy Klobuchar (the recipient of obsessive attention within media circles despite a comically consistent absence of real-people support) might get traction through the debate.
A consistent question was whether Warren would “engage” Sanders on the “women can’t win” story, or whether someone else like Klobuchar might:
Gloria Borger: In the fight between, you know, between Warren and Sanders over gender and whether he told her that a woman couldn’t win, I don’t think they’re going to engage on that tonight. That took place —
Anderson Cooper: Governor McAuliffe was out here earlier saying that he thinks they may not engage on it, but that Senator Klobuchar …
David Axelrod: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s right.
Sanders wasn’t always mentioned by name in exchanges about the party’s unfortunate extremist drift, but we know who Axelrod was talking about when he suggested that Klobuchar or Buttigieg might say, “We can talk about Medicare for All. But here on planet Earth …”
Of course, there were times when Sanders was mentioned, like when Dana Bash offered this gibberishy mouthful about the “commander-in-chief test”:
Do [voters] want a Bernie Sanders anti-interventionist, or do they want somebody who has experience and who has — as I’m sure you will hear behind us — voted for things like the Iraq war and maybe has made other decisions that he doesn’t regret and has been a leader on national security, but also has some that he does?
CNN factory-produces these banal meanderings, worrying over the chances of establishment candidates and how they might overcome the irrational urges of the electorate (“It’s head or heart,” as Bash put it). It’s elite messaging in numbing quantity, to the point where you feel like screaming, “We get it!”
This continued during the debate, with the chryon featuring questions like, “How will [Sanders] avoid bankrupting the country?” Or: “Does Sanders owe voters an explanation of how much his health plan will cost them and the country?”
After Phillip pulled the “When Sanders said that horrible thing we can’t prove happened, how did you feel?” trick with Warren, she moved to Klobuchar, who by coincidence was the person panelists predicted might “go for the jugular” over this story: “Senator Klobuchar,” Phillip said, “What do you say to people who say a woman can’t win the election?” Again, the sleazy construction of the question presupposed that someone actually did say it.
I wondered online how long it would take for someone after the debate to declare Klobuchar the winner. It turned out to be the very first comment on Anderson Cooper’s wrap-up show, from Gloria Borger: “Well, I think that Amy Klobuchar tried her hardest to distinguish herself as a pragmatist who can tell the rest of the Democrats to get real.”
Then McIntosh said this: I think what Bernie forgot was that this isn’t a he said/she said story. This is a reported-out story that CNN was part of breaking. So, to have him just flat-out say no, I think wasn’t — wasn’t nearly enough to address that for the women watching.
Poor Anderson Cooper was forced to intercede and point out that it literally is a he said/she said story (and not remotely “reported out,” I might add). Soon after, Bash said it was an “out-of-the-park moment” for Warren, adding that the story was a litmus test for gender solidarity:
And so she is trying to use that moment and explain why, not just a woman, but her as the woman in that position, should be really seriously considered. And it was a clever way of doing it because she also brought in the other woman on the stage, almost — a sister in solidarity.
Rounding out the cycle of completely predictable messaging, Van Jones said, “There was a banana peel sent out there for Bernie to step on when he came with his comments about women. I think Bernie stepped on it and slid around.” He concluded, “[Warren] knocked that moment out of the park.”
After the debate, Trump fans online were in full schadenfreude mode, crowing about how “the left” finally understood that CNN really is fake news. Overall, #CNNisgarbage trended and #fuckCNN wasn’t far behind.
If the network doesn’t see trouble in this, it’s delusional. Voters on both sides of the aisle have changed since the Bernard Shaw days. They pay more attention to media manipulations, and it doesn’t get much more manipulative than punching above the facts to advance transparent political narratives, which is a new and accepted habit in the commercial news landscape.
We’ll find out in Iowa and New Hampshire what Democratic Party voters believe about that Warren-Sanders meeting, but that grimy story pales in comparison to the bigger picture: Episodes like this are why people hate the media.
 |
|
FOCUS | Surprise: Trump Himself Is the Deep State |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568"><span class="small">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 15 January 2020 13:07 |
|
Gordon writes: "This seems like a strange moment to be writing about 'the deep state' with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability."
Trump in the presidential limo. (photo: Kevin Wolf/AP)
Surprise: Trump Himself Is the Deep State
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
15 January 20
Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, offers us a striking look at the term the president and his men have been tossing around endlessly these last years: the “deep state.” Actually -- no surprise, given TomDispatch and our world -- the deep state’s been on the collective mind of this website for the last 17 years. At least, that’s true if what we’re talking about is this country's ever more powerful national security state and not just whatever government officials Donald Trump has felt frustrated by in the last 24 hours.
As it happens, though, in the privacy of my own thinking, I have another term for it entirely. I think of it as the “shallow state.” Because to me, the deep state implies something hidden, something hard to see. In these years, however, the national security state, which Pentagon experts William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger estimate had a combined annual budget of at least $1.25 trillion in 2019, has become remarkably visible. It has, in essence, become the fourth branch of government.
In a sense, there’s nothing deep or hidden about it. In a sense, in fact, that “state” couldn’t be more seemingly proud of its visibility. Consider that, as far back as 2010, in “Top Secret America,” a revealing series at the Washington Post, William Arkin and Dana Priest reported that, “in Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.” And we’re not talking about hidden structures either. Take just two examples: in 2011, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency opened a gleaming $1.7 billion headquarters, then the third largest building in the Washington area (the Pentagon being the first), for its staff of 16,000. And only last April, the Department of Homeland Security did the same. In a public ceremony, Kirstjen Nielsen, its departing secretary, cut the ribbon on a staggeringly over-budget $5 billion headquarters and “campus” in southeast Washington for 14,000 of its employees. By the way, it just happened to be the “largest construction project in the Washington metropolitan area since the Pentagon was built during World War II.”
So no shrinking violets, much less hidden worlds there. Talk about in your face: the shallow state is right in front of you daily and growing fast. And with that in mind, consider with Gordon where the very term “deep state” came from and what it means today.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 his seems like a strange moment to be writing about “the deep state” with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that the president is, in effect, under congressional indictment, just as we had settled into a more or less stable stalemate over when (and if) the Senate will hold an impeachment trial, the president shook the snow globe again, by ordering the assassination of foreign military officials and threatening the destruction of Iran’s cultural sites. Nothing better than the promise of new war crimes to take the world’s attention away from a little thing like extorting a U.S. ally to help oneself get reelected.
On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the moment to think about the so-called deep state, if by that we mean the little-noticed machinery of governance that keeps dependably churning on in that same snow globe’s pedestal, whatever mayhem may be swirling around above it. Maybe this is even the moment to be grateful for those parts of the government whose inertia keeps the ship of state moving in the same general direction, regardless of who’s on the bridge at any given time.
However, that sometimes benign inertia is not what the people who coined that term meant by deep state.
What Is a “Deep State”?
The expression is actually a translation of the Turkish phrase derin devlet. As historian Ryan Gingeras has explained, it arose as a way of describing “a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” In the Turkish case, those “unacknowledged persons” were, in fact, agents of organized criminal enterprises working within the government.
Gingeras, an expert on organized crime in Turkey, has described how alliances between generals, government officials, and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” allowed the creation and execution of “policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” In the Turkish case, the history of such alliances can be traced to struggles for power in the first decades of the previous century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The interpenetration of the drug cartels and government in Mexico is another example of a deep state at work. The presence of cartel collaborators in official positions and in the police hierarchy at all levels makes it almost impossible for any president, even the upright Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to defeat them.
The term “deep state” has also been used to characterize the role of the military in Egypt. As Sarah Chayes has written in Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, Egypt’s military has long been a state-within-a-state with its own banking and business operations that constitute 25%-40% of the Egyptian economy. It’s the country’s largest landowner and the ultimate maker and breaker of Egyptian presidents. In 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising forced President Hosni Mubarak, who had run the country for 30 years, to resign. The military certainly had something to do with that resignation, since he handed over power to Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
When, however, a nascent democracy brought their longtime opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, to power with the election of Mohamed Morsi, that was too much for the generals. It helped that Morsi made his own missteps, including the repression of peaceful protesters. So there wasn’t much objection when, in 2012, his own minister of defense, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, led a military coup against Morsi. Sisi and the Egyptian military have run the country directly ever since, making the state and the deep state one and the same.
Donald Trump and the “Deep State”
From his earliest days in the White House, Donald Trump and his officials have inveighed against what the president has regularly labeled the “deep state.” What he’s meant by the term, though, is something different from its more traditional use. Rather than referring to a “shadow or parallel system of government” operating outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government -- or at least those parts of it that frustrate him in any way.
When, for example, the judicial system throws up barriers to government by fiat, that’s the deep state at work as far as he’s concerned. Want to proclaim “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” but the courts put a hold on your executive order? Blame the deep state.
Did anonymous government officials tell the press that your National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, lied about his contacts with Russian officials? Blame the deep state for the leaks.
As early as March 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged that the administration did indeed believe in the existence of a deep state, a shadow operation that had infiltrated many of the offices and activities of the federal government. A reporter asked him, “Does the government believe that there is such a thing as a ‘deep state’ that is actively working to undermine the president?”
Spicer replied:
“I think that there’s no question when you have eight years of one party in office that there are people who stay in government -- affiliated with, joined -- and continue to espouse the agenda of the previous administration, so I don’t think it should come to any surprise that there are people that burrowed into government during the eight years of the last administration and may have believed in that agenda and want to continue to seek it.”
In other words, for the Trump administration and its supporters, the deep state is any part of the apparatus of government itself that doesn’t do their absolute bidding.
The HuffPost has assembled a convenient list of some of Trump’s tweets invoking the “deep state.” Here’s a summary:
- In November 2017, he blamed unnamed “deep state authorities” for a failure to continue investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling those authorities “Rigged and corrupt.”
- That same month, he tweeted that the FBI and the Justice Department were withholding information about “surveillance of associates of Donald Trump.” This was, he said, “Big stuff. Deep State,” and he demanded that someone “Give this information NOW!”
- In January 2018, he accused Hillary Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin of putting “Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents.” Did this mean, he asked, that the “Deep State Justice Dept must finally act”? If it were to “finally act,” he added, it should be “Also on Comey & others.”
- In May 2018, he accused the “Criminal Deep State” of going after “Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam” and “getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!” Apparently the president was referring to a conspiracy theory of his that the Obama administration had embedded a spy in his campaign operation in order to ensure a Hillary Clinton victory.
- In July 2018, he was ruminating about a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server that the FBI, he believed, had failed to impound. Was this failure, he wondered, an action of the “Deep State”? (Yes, this is the same nonexistent server he later asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look for in his country as a precondition for releasing U.S. military aid.)
- In September 2018, he inveighed against the deep state in general, suggesting that it and its allies were upset at his policy achievements. This time he suggested that the deep state does have its extra-governmental allies, “the Left” and “the Fake News Media”: “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy -- & they don’t know what to do. The Economy is booming like never before, Jobs are at Historic Highs, soon TWO Supreme Court Justices..."
Trump, in other words, sees the U.S. government as infected by “Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters, to push their own secret agendas.” Those "operatives," he told a rally in 2018, are “truly a threat to democracy itself."
Does the United States Have a Deep State?
The November House impeachment hearings brought us the testimony of a number of career diplomats and civil servants like Marie Yovanovich, the former ambassador to Ukraine, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council. Their appearance led John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA, to exclaim in a speech at George Mason University, “Thank God for the deep state.”
He meant it as a joke, but he was also pointing out that their dignified testimony might serve as a reminder of the value of government service. "Everyone here has seen this progression of diplomats, and intelligence officers and White House people trooping up to Capitol Hill right now,” he explained. Those who watched that progression, he said, certainly recognized that “these are people who are doing their duty." McLaughlin told National Public Radio's Greg Myre and Rachel Treisman that he had received some “blowback” from his joke, and added:
"I think it's a silly idea. There is no 'deep state.' What people think of as the 'deep state' is just the American civil service, social security, the people who fix the roads, health and human services, Medicare."
I’ll give one cheer for that kind of deep state: not a secret, extra-official shadow government, but the actual workings of government itself for the benefit of the people it’s meant to serve. Personally, I’m all for people who devote their lives to making sure our food is as safe as possible, the cars we drive won’t kill us, our planes stay up in the air, and roads and railways are built and maintained to connect us, not to speak of having clean air and water, public schools and universities to educate our young people, and a social security system to provide a safety net for people of my age -- all of which, by the way, is in danger from this president, his administration, and the Republican party.
But there’s another way of thinking about the deep state, one that suggests an ongoing threat not to Donald Trump and his pals but to this democracy and the world. I’m thinking, of course, of that vast -- if informal, complex, and sometimes internally competitive -- consortium composed of the industries and government branches that make up what President Dwight Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex.” This was exactly the “state” that I think President Obama encountered when he decided to shut down the George W. Bush-era CIA torture program and found that the price for compliance was a promise not to prosecute anyone for crimes committed in the so-called war on terror. January 2009 was, as he famously said, a time to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
Here is Mike Lofgren, a long-time civil servant and aide to many congressional Republicans, writing in 2014 about that national security machine for BillMoyers.com. In “Anatomy of the Deep State,” he described the power and reach of this apparatus in chilling terms:
“There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol...
“Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
Lofgren was not describing “a secret, conspiratorial cabal.” Rather, he was arguing that “the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.” This has certainly been the experience of those who have, in particular, opposed U.S. military adventures abroad. They discover that many of the lies, deceptions, and crimes of that “state within a state” are openly there for all to see and are being committed in the equivalent of broad daylight with utter impunity.
This, by the way, creates certain obvious problems for those of us who oppose the presidency and the striking new militarism of Donald Trump -- if, at least, it means embracing such representatives of Lofgren’s deep state as that old war criminal, John Bolton. He has not become a progressive hero just because he’s suddenly proclaimed himself ready, if subpoenaed, to testify in the Senate impeachment trial of his former boss. If Bolton chooses to do so, you can be sure that he will not be motivated by a devotion to democratic government or the rule of law.
Trump’s own relationship to the national security deep state has been ambivalent at best. It’s clear that many of those officials initially thought he might be a weapon they could aim and shoot at will, but he’s turned out to be far more bizarre and unpredictable than any of them expected. There’s evidence, for example, that the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani was presented to Trump as the most extreme option possible -- in a bid to convince him to act against Iran, but in a less drastic way. As the New York Times reported recently, “Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable,” but they don’t expect presidents to choose the decoy. Donald Trump is clearly not one of those presidents.
There is a sense, however, in which the United States under Trump does resemble the original Turkish conception of a deep state, that “kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” That’s a pretty apt description, for instance, of the actions of the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in relation to U.S. policy towards Ukraine, which he’s been coordinating and in some sense directing for some time.
The only difference in this case is that Trump has been fool enough to acknowledge his personal lawyer’s role. May that foolishness get him turned out of office, one way or another. In the meantime, I’ll keep giving my one cheer for the civil servants who keep the wheels turning. I suspect, however, that as the world awaits developments in the Middle East now that Trump has followed 18 years of U.S. state (and deep state) disaster there with his own impetuous intervention, few people will be offering many cheers for the United States of America.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
|
|
|
FOCUS: I Don't Think the Lev Parnas Texts Are the Last Hound to Be Unleashed |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 15 January 2020 11:43 |
|
Pierce writes: "At the end of the day on Tuesday, just as the Democratic presidential candidates were taking the stage in Des Moines and the president* was taking the stage in Milwaukee, the House Democrats unleashed the hounds."
Lev Parnas. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
I Don't Think the Lev Parnas Texts Are the Last Hound to Be Unleashed
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
15 January 20
The House dumps a whole lot of damning evidence that Trump associates Parnas, Rudy Giuliani, and a guy named Robert Hyde had an ominous plan for Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
 s it turns out, Marie Yovanovich was even braver than she looked in front of the House Intelligence Committee. And, as it turns out, Speaker Nancy Pelosi really knows what she’s doing. At the end of the day on Tuesday, just as the Democratic presidential candidates were taking the stage in Des Moines and the president* was taking the stage in Milwaukee, the House Democrats unleashed the hounds. They dumped a whole truckload of ugly from the files of Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s great and good “associate” and, apparently, one of the great sleazebags of the western world.
Also released were a bunch of texts from a Trumper in Connecticut named Robert Hyde. He was in touch with Parnas, and there were text messages between the two in which Hyde seemed to indicate that, at the very least, Yovanovich was being monitored—which, I will grant you, sounds a bit grandiose coming from a landscaper from Connecticut. Nevertheless, this stuff is positively ominous. From CNN:
In a series of text messages with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas in March 2019, Hyde, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump who has donated thousands of dollars to Republican politics and the Trump campaign, discussed Yovanovitch's whereabouts in Ukraine. Using coarse language, Hyde suggested to Parnas that Yovanovitch should be removed from her position, and Hyde implied he or his allies were monitoring her...
Hyde's social media accounts are littered with photographs of him with Parnas, Trump and his close allies. In a photo posted on the website of the Connecticut Post newspaper, Hyde posed for a selfie with Trump on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019, the same day Trump first called Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Hyde's exchanges with Parnas, Hyde indicated he had knowledge of Yovanovitch's whereabouts and level of security. "She under heavy protection outside Kiev," Hyde wrote on March 23, 2019, to which Parnas responded, "I know crazy s**t." Hyde replied, appearing to suggest that Yovanovitch was a member of the Russian security agency, "My guy thinks maybe FSB..?”
Two days later, Hyde sent Parnas a series of texts. "They are moving her tomorrow," he said. "The guys over they asked me what I would like to do and what is in it for them." Hyde prodded Parnas: "Wake up Yankees man. She's talked to three people. Her phone is off. Computer is off. She's next to the embassy. Not in the embassy. Private security. Been there since Thursday.” After Parnas responded, saying "interesting," Hyde continued: "They know she's a political puppet. They will let me know when she's on the move." Parnas replied: "Perfect.”
I’m willing, for the moment, to entertain the possibility that Hyde was just being a blowhard here. But Yovanovich previously testified that it was Giuliani’s operation that was trying to get her removed, and that she was peremptorily told to “catch the next plane home” for what was described as “security reasons.” I’m also willing to entertain the possibility that Hyde might have had more to do with the campaign to smear Yovanovich—at least—than we previously knew.
In any event, if there was any remaining credibility remaining to the White House’s defense against the charges that the president* abused the powers of his office, it was shredded elsewhere in the document dump. Lev Parnas, it seems, believes in saving receipts. From the AP (via the NYT):
Among the documents is a screenshot of a previously undisclosed letter from Giuliani to Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskiy dated May 10, 2019, which was before Zelenskiy took office. In the letter, Giuliani requests a meeting with Zelenskiy "as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent." In the letter, Giuliani said he would be accompanied at the meeting by Victoria Toensing, a Washington attorney and Trump ally.
One of the documents is a handwritten note on stationery from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Vienna that says "get Zalensky to Annonce that the Biden case will be Investigated." Trump asked Zelenskiy in a July call to investigate his political rival, Democrat Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. Hunter Biden served on the board of a gas company based in Ukraine. Democrats said that Parnas' attorney confirmed that Parnas wrote the notes.
In several of the documents, Parnas communicated with Giuliani about the removal of Yovanovitch. The ambassador's ouster, ordered by Trump, was at the center of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry. Yovanovitch testified in the House impeachment hearings that she was the victim of a "smear campaign.” Trump on a July 25 call had promised Zelenskiy that Yovanovitch was "going to go through some things." Roughly two months earlier, she was recalled from her diplomatic post. On April 23, just before Yovanovitch was directed to return to the United States, Giuliani texted Parnas, "He fired her again." Parnas texted back, "I pray it happens this time I'll call you tomorrow my brother.”
The text messages show that Parnas consulted Giuliani in Jan. 2019 after the U.S. denied a visa for former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Giuliani replied: "I can revive it.” The following day, Giuliani told Parnas: "It's going to work I have no 1 in it." Giuliani then predicted "he will get one" before giving Parnas the phone number for Jay Sekulow, the leader of the president's personal legal team. Sekulow is expected to be part of Trump's legal team during the impeachment trial.
Removing Yovanovich was a central part of the plan to knuckle the Ukraine government into ratfcking the 2020 election. The business about withholding the military aid came a bit later. Shokin was the corrupt prosecutor that then-Vice President Joe Biden, on behalf of practically every government and financial institution in the world, lobbied to have removed. (This, in the twisted bizarro Republican version of events, was Biden lobbying to have removed the prosecutor who threatened Hunter Biden with something-something Burisma.) That this operation existed is now beyond all question. That the president* himself was involved in it is moving beyond all question, as well. ("He fired her again.") I don’t think every hound has been unleashed yet, either.
In related news, Robert Hyde is running for Congress in Connecticut.
|
|
Rudy Giuliani's Fixer, Lev Parnas, Turned Over Documents. They're Very Ugly. |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33017"><span class="small">Andrew Prokop, Vox</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 15 January 2020 09:38 |
|
Prokop writes: "The House Intelligence Committee quietly released a new batch of impeachment inquiry evidence Tuesday evening: documents provided by Rudy Giuliani's fixer for Ukraine, Lev Parnas. And boy, are they ugly."
Rudy Giuliani. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Rudy Giuliani's Fixer, Lev Parnas, Turned Over Documents. They're Very Ugly.
By Andrew Prokop, Vox
15 January 20
Rudy Giuliani’s fixer, Lev Parnas, turned over documents. They’re very ugly.
he House Intelligence Committee quietly released a new batch of impeachment inquiry evidence Tuesday evening: documents provided by Rudy Giuliani’s fixer for Ukraine, Lev Parnas.
And boy, are they ugly.
The documents, which include Parnas’s handwritten notes, copies of text messages, and other correspondence, reveal some new information — including that Giuliani claimed to be acting with President Trump’s “knowledge and consent” in his communications with the Ukrainian government.
One handwritten note of Parnas’s, scribbled on Ritz-Carlton hotel stationery, clearly states his main objective in his dealings with Ukraine: to get Ukraine’s president to announce “the Biden case will be investigated.”
The documents also provide the strongest evidence yet that there was a corrupt understanding involving prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko (a Ukrainian official in the previous regime). Lutsenko offered to investigate Burisma and the Bidens — and, in exchange, he insisted that US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom he had clashed with, be fired. He made this quid pro quo clear in his messages to Parnas.
Particularly is a set of messages Parnas received from a person named Robert F. Hyde, a Republican congressional candidate. Hyde texted Parnas that he had people tracking Yovanovitch’s movements closely in Ukraine. He claimed he could tell whether her phone and computer were off. And he wrote: “If you want her out they need to make contact with security forces.” (It is not yet clear whether these claims by Hyde were true. On Wednesday morning, Parnas’s lawyer denied they were, and said Hyde had a “dubious mental state.”)
There’s relatively little about Trump specifically here — Parnas was a degree removed from the president — but the overall takeaway is that the effort to get dirt on Biden stunk to high heaven of corruption.
Who is Lev Parnas again?
Lev Parnas is a Soviet-born US citizen now living in Florida who donated large sums of money to Republicans in recent years and became a close associate of Giuliani. Parnas and his colleague Igor Fruman ended up serving as Giuliani’s “fixers” in his search for dirt that would help Trump politically in Ukraine. They talked to Ukrainian officials and tried to help Giuliani get documents and meetings.
In October, though, Parnas and Fruman were indicted by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York on charges of campaign finance law violations, regarding those hundreds of thousands of dollars they donated to Republicans in 2018. Since then, Fruman has been quiet — but Parnas went public, claiming through his lawyer that he had important information about the impeachment inquiry that Democrats would want.
The judge in Parnas’s case gave him permission to turn over some of the evidence prosecutors had obtained to House impeachment investigators. He has done so — and this is our first look at some of what he provided.
Giuliani told the Ukrainians he was acting on Trump’s behalf
First off, the documents make clear that Giuliani told the Ukrainians he was acting at Trump’s behest. He wrote a letter to Zelensky dated May 10, 2019, while Zelensky was still president-elect and shortly before he was inaugurated, asking for a meeting.
“In my capacity as personal counsel to President Trump and with his knowledge and consent, I request a meeting with you,” Giuliani wrote.
Giuliani did not explain what the meeting was about — but the letter’s date is one day after Giuliani told the New York Times he would soon be traveling to Kyiv to try to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens and supposed Ukraine interference in the 2016 election.
Giuliani also wrote in the letter that he would be accompanied on the trip by Victoria Toensing, a conservative lawyer involved in the dirt-digging effort (whom Giuliani described as “very familiar with this matter”).
The documents also reveal that when Parnas and Fruman came under scrutiny in the impeachment inquiry (but before his arrest), Trump personally approved his former lawyer John Dowd’s representation of the pair. That’s according to an email from Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow.
Sekulow will be among Trump’s defense team in his Senate trial.
An intriguing note from Parnas
Another interesting tidbit is a note — which the House Intelligence Committee says Parnas has confirmed he wrote — laying out an apparent to-do list.
The note reads: “get Zalensky to Annonce that the Biden case will be Investigated.” That is, get Ukraine’s new president to announce an investigation of the Bidens.
This is significant because several Trump administration officials, such as Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, have long claimed they only discussed the possibility of investigating Burisma, the natural gas company whose board Hunter Biden sat on.
But here is Parnas openly referring wanting Ukraine to investigate “the Biden case,” just as Trump said he wanted on his infamous July 25 phone call with Zelensky. The circumstances in which the note was written — notably, the date and who Parnas may have been talking to while he scribbled the note — are unclear.
An understanding tying Yovanovitch’s firing to Biden dirt
Another batch of the evidence pertains to communications Parnas had with Yuriy Lutsenko, who served as Ukraine’s prosecutor general under Zelensky’s predecessor.
To recap: A prologue, of sorts, to the impeachment saga occurred in March 2019 when Giuliani, Parnas, and various corrupt Ukrainians launched a smear campaign against the US ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.
These (translated) messages suggest that Lutsenko was demanding Yovanovitch’s firing — and that he communicated to Parnas that, in return, he would make allegations about “B.”
Lutsenko tells Parnas that “if you don’t make a decision about Madam— you are bringing into question all my allegations. Including about B.” (“Madam” clearly means Yovanovitch, and “B” is shorthand for either Burisma or Biden, as later messages make clear.)
Lutsenko soon writes about “testimony about transfers to B,” and then about “copies of payments from Burisma to Seneca.” (Rosemont Seneca Partners is the consulting firm Hunter Biden co-founded.) He also complains how Parnas can’t get rid of someone female, to which Parnas responds, “She’s not getting away.”
A Parnas associate claimed to be surveilling Yovanovitch — and asked if he wanted “her out”
Finally, and most disturbingly, is a set of messages Parnas exchanged with a person named Robert F. Hyde, a controversial Republican congressional candidate in Connecticut who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s DC hotel.
Parnas sent Hyde tweets and articles from prominent conservative media personalities — such as Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Dan Bongino — disparaging Yovanovitch and suggesting she was disloyal. “Can’t believe Trumo [Trump] hasn’t fired this bitch,” Hyde responded. “I’ll get right in that.”
About 13 hours later, Hyde reported back to Parnas: “She under heavy protection outside Kiev.” Then, two days later he said he had “guys” there who could “do” something — and that he now knew Yovanovitch’s whereabouts, and that her phone and computer were off.
Hyde went on: “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price.” He added: “Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money... what I was told.”
The next day, Hyde reported back that Yovanovitch would not be moved, and that his contacts were asking “what is the next step.”
He added, ominously: “If you want her out they need to make contact with security forces.”
A few days after that, Hyde reported he had “a person inside,” and asked if Parnas still needed “intel” or if they should “stand down.”
In these messages, there is no response from Parnas after that, for nearly two months.
These messages certainly seem to suggest that Hyde was having Yovanovitch surveilled — and that one ominous message asking “if you want her out” may imply something much darker.
But it is unclear whether Hyde — about whom little is known, other than that he owned a landscaping company in Connecticut — truly had these capabilities, or whether it was some sort of bizarre attempt at braggadocio.
ABC’s Katherine Faulders reached Hyde for comment, and he said he was “absolutely not” threatening to harm Yovanovitch. And Parnas’s lawyer said in a statement Wednesday morning: “We completely categorically deny that Lev was involved in any activities with Hyde to surveil the ambassador and try to harm the ambassador. We believe Mr Hyde’s activities to be a reflection on his dubious mental state.”
In any case, it certainly seems to be something law enforcement should take a look at.
|
|
n 
