Another Ukrainian shoe drops
Reuters dropped a little report that nobody noticed but could end up being important:
Andrew Favorov, the No. 2 at Ukraine’s state-run gas company Naftogaz, says he sat on a red leather bench seat and listened wide-eyed as the men boasted of their connections to President Donald Trump and proposed a deal to sell large quantities of liquefied natural gas from Texas to Ukraine.
But first, Favorov says, they told him they would have to remove two obstacles: Favorov’s boss and the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
[...]
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 are now part of a broad federal criminal investigation into the two men and their close associate, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.
Giuliani's out there giving drunken interviews calling the Southern District federal prosecutors a bunch of "liberal", "idiots" while Bill Barr is running an official cover-up for the president. It's hard to say where that case will end up.
We are in the middle of a presidential impeachment process and every single day new evidence emerges that shows this abuse of power for political purposes was being gamed by payoffs and business deals to sweeten the pot. It's much, much dirtier than just that phone call or Gordon Sondland's efforts. Rudy's end of this scheme was criminal and the president was almost certainly in the loop. He and Rudy are thick as thieves.
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