As the Republican-controlled U. S. Senate starts preparing for a cosmetic impeachment trial, at the end of which the spineless majority will likely acquit U. S. President Donald J. Trump, Lev Parnas dropped several bombshells in the form of interviews, text messages, call logs and other documents.
The Odesa-born Parnas worked closely with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and had frequent contact with Trump in furtherance of the goal to get the president re-elected at all costs. For Parnas, this meant playing a lead role in the campaign to manufacture dirt against Trump’s possible Democratic rival, ex-Vice President Joseph Biden.
At Trump’s behest, Parnas & Co. strong-armed one Ukrainian official after another in trying to get them to investigate whether Biden had ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired to derail an investigation against his son, Hunter, who got a 5-year, $50,000 a month contract for doing little for the dodgy Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The facts are wrong here: Shokin was corrupt and useless and allowed the credible criminal case against Burisma to get derailed. Trump also has another strange fantasy in his head: that Ukraine conspired to defeat him in the 2016 presidential election in many ways, including the public release of documents that got Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort convicted and sentenced to prison for money laundering.
Again, Trump twists the facts in an attempt to divert blame from where it belongs: his encouragement of massive, successful Russian interference to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Russian interference apparently continues to this day with the hacking of Burisma, and there’s no reason to expect anything different from the Kremlin.
Ukraine has opened an investigation into Russia’s hacking of Burisma and into whether ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, was under surveillance just before Trump fired her at the end of April. She ran afoul of ex-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who detested her for calling out his ineffectiveness, and many others who saw her principled anti-corruption stand as an obstacle to their wealth and sense of impunity. In other words, they hated her for doing her job properly.
Creepy text messages sent from Robert Hyde, a Republican candidate for Connecticut and Trump supporter, to Parnas suggested that Hyde had people inside the U. S. Embassy in Kyiv who were tracking Yovanovitch. He called her a “bitch” and wrote ominously that he could hire people in Ukraine to get anything done. Parnas, in an interview with Rachel Maddow, dismissed Hyde as “loony” and “drunk all the time.” But there are plenty of shady characters besides Hyde in this cast.
And Parnas, now that he is facing prison for allegedly violating U.S. campaign financing laws, is remorseful, but no angel. He admitted that he was part of the whole campaign to take down Biden and Yovanovitch, even dangling the possibility that he could get U.S. bribery charges dropped against exiled oligarch Dmytro Firtash if he helped them. It turns out that Firtash was of no help and the charges stand.
Amid the sordid details, the U. S. General Accounting Office on Jan. 16 issued a legal ruling that should force Congress to focus on the real issue. The GAO found that Trump illegally withheld assistance from Ukraine and that the public evidence shows that the president himself ordered this illegal act.
Trump has damaged the reputation of the United States in the eyes of much of the Western world, including in Ukraine. That he thought nothing of violating the law to wreck an important relationship with Kyiv shows he is unfit for office — one of many morally bankrupt actions that should lead to his removal.
Despite protests to the contrary, Ukraine and U.S. relations will not recover quickly from the Trump-inflicted damage. The United States has lost a lot of its moral standing in Kyiv because of Trump.
The Republican Party in the United States, especially in the Senate, is compounding the sins with cowardly behavior. Ukrainians have every reason to hope that Americans who care about their democracy will remove Trump at the ballot box on Nov. 3.
