Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas is singing like Aretha Franklin at the Super Bowl, not only is he cooperating fully with US Attorneys in Manhattan, he's giving interviews like the one with Rachel Maddow last night, and as Greg Sargent points out, he's nailing Rudy and Trump to the wall.

There are any number of bombshells in Lev Parnas’s new interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and as we’ve experienced at other major points in this saga, it’s once again hard not to feel overwhelmed by the bewildering scale and magnitude of this scandal.

But the importance of one particular exchange needs special attention: It’s the one in which Parnas flatly accuses Rudolph Giuliani, and also possibly his “client,” as Giuliani likes to put it, of a criminal conspiracy. That “client,” of course, is President Trump.

The exchange in question concerns Trump’s freezing of military aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to carry out Trump’s dirty political deeds. Parnas ties Giuliani more directly to this act than anyone else has, and shares what appears to be new information about it, though this still needs to be confirmed.

The key exchange with Maddow comes after she asks Parnas if he met with Sergey Shaffer, a senior Zelensky aide. Maddow notes that it has been reported that Parnas conveyed to Schaffer that Zelensky must announce an investigation of Biden, in order to get the military aid released.

Then this happened:

PARNAS: The message that I was supposed -- that I gave Sergey Shaffer was a very harsh message. I was told to give it to him in a very harsh way, not in a pleasant way. 

MADDOW: Who told you to give it to him a harsh way? 

PARNAS: Mayor Giuliani, Rudy, told me after, you know, meeting the president at the White House. He called me. The message was, it wasn’t just military aid, it was all aid. Basically their relationships would be sour, that he would -- that we would stop giving them any kind of aid that -- 

MADDOW: Unless? 

PARNAS: -- unless there was an announcement made.

The important thing here is that Parnas is alleging that Giuliani directly told him to convey the message to Ukraine that the military aid was contingent on announcing the investigations Trump wanted — after talking to Trump about it.

Let’s state clearly here that this is just Parnas’s word, and that we need more confirmation. Parnas is a slippery character who’s trying to cooperate with federal prosecutors, probably for a reduced sentence, having been indicted on campaign finance charges last fall.

Giuliani has generally responded that Parnas is lying, without offering a specific rebuttal.

But here’s the thing. We already know for a fact that this message — that Trump made the military aid conditional on announcing investigations that would smear Biden and absolve Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage — actually was delivered to Ukraine, by one of Trump’s top henchmen.

That henchman would be Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who has testified that he told a top Zelensky aide that the money was conditioned on Zelensky announcing those investigations.

Not that the fact Trump directed a criminal conspiracy will matter one bit to his current impeachment trial, and now McConnell has to absolutely bury any hope of witnesses or Parnas will be called, but here we are.

Trump did it.  He's guilty.

And it doesn't matter one bit.