More fringies on the radar
by digby
This scandal is so baroque at this point I've got a headache. I suspect that may be the point:
Just days after launching an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, the House of Representatives issued a subpoena to Rudy Giuliani and letters demanding information from key figures behind a campaign in Ukraine to discredit the president’s chief rival, Joe Biden.
The move to secure critical documents — including financial records — from the president’s personal lawyer and three other men represents the first effort by Congress to uncover details of the brazen effort to pressure leaders in Ukraine to investigate the former vice-president and his son Hunter in the months leading to the 2020 campaign.
“A growing public record including your own statements indicates that the president, you and others, appear to have pressed the Ukrainian government to pursue two politically motivated investigations,” said the letter to Giuliani, signed by the Democratic chairs of three House committees.
Letters were sent to Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Ukrainian-American business partners who arranged the meetings between Giuliani and top Ukrainian prosecutors over the last year during a secret campaign that has now thrust another foreign country into the middle of a presidential race.
Another letter was sent to Semyon “Sam” Kislin, a Ukrainian-born businessman who once served on a New York City economic advisory council when Giuliani was mayor. In an interview, Kislin claimed not to know all of the men he was named alongside, but agreed to appear before the House. He said he had been planning on traveling to Ukraine following Yom Kippur, but may have to change his plans: “A subpoena is a subpoena, if they call I’ll have to go.”
The letters asked all three men to give depositions in October and warned that Congress could "pursue alternative means to obtain the information" if they do not comply.
These people are con artists. Of course.
A joint investigation by BuzzFeed News and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in July found that, under Giuliani’s direction, Parnas and Fruman carried out a whirlwind campaign to unearth information to damage Biden’s candidacy and press Ukraine prosecutors to investigate accusations that Ukrainian agents plotted to rig the 2016 election to favor Hillary Clinton by leaking evidence against Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in what became a cornerstone of the Mueller investigation.
Parnas and Fruman traveled to Kiev, New York, Warsaw and Paris to meet with Ukrainian leaders, raising questions among legal experts about whether they were blurring the lines of what US citizens are allowed to do without registering as foreign agents.
The intelligence committee is demanding that Parnas and Fruman — investors with troubled financial histories — turn over the source of any funds into a joint company they own and disclose whether the money originated abroad.
The committee also demanded records of the sources of hundreds of thousands of dollars the men collectively contributed to GOP political campaigns last year, including $325,000 from a company they own to America First Action, a Super PAC supporting candidates loyal to Trump.
Parnas, who has dined with the president in Washington, could not be reached last night, but in a previous interview with BuzzFeed News said he was not getting any money to carry out the campaign.
“All we were doing was passing along information,” he said. “Information was coming to us — either I bury it or pass it on. I felt it was my duty to pass it on.”
This is what happens when you brainwash large numbers of the population and empower lunatics.
It gets crazier and crazier.
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