A grinning U. S. President Donald J. Trump beamed happiness on Dec. 10 as he sat at his Oval Office desk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov standing to his right. It was a sickening picture of a sick and corrupt president who not only does the Kremlin’s bidding, but is proud of it. This is Lavrov’s second White House meeting with Trump, the first coming in 2017 when Trump shared classified intelligence with the Russians and then defended his right to do so.
Contrast this easy access with the fact that Trump will soon be impeached by the U. S. House of Representatives for actions relating to his refusal to grant Volodymyr Zelensky a similar White House meeting unless his Ukrainian counterpart announced investigations into a political rival, former Vice President Joseph Biden, and into whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. Both Democrats are the focus of ridiculous and debunked conspiracies invented to confuse the American electorate about the Russia-Trump alliance against Ukraine, for sure, but also against worldwide democracy. Trump also withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine from July 18 to Sept. 11 to drive home his demands.
With that photo, Trump was effectively giving the one-finger salute to Ukraine and to democrats the world over. His contempt is boundless. He went on to swamp his toxic Twitter feed with the ridiculous “investigations” from another Trump-Kremlin propaganda outlet, the One America News Network. The series, narrated breathlessly by an unjournalistic correspondent, Chanel Rion, followed Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on his three-day visit to Ukraine and Hungary in search of more dirt on Biden and the Democrats. To cut to the chase, Giuliani gathered up as many discredited sources as he could find, including ex-prosecutors general Yuriy Lutsenko and Viktor Shokin, lawmakers Andrii Derkach and Oleksandr Dubinsky, and political consultant Andrii Telizhenko.
The ludicrous network turned this pile of garbage into a three-part “exclusive” series in which the frantic correspondent hilariously claims that 1,000 police officers, the billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk and billionaire philanthropist George Soros were hot on their tail — so they had to rush to the airport and charter a plane to safety in Vienna. Here’s news for you, One America News: You have no idea what’s going on in Ukraine, and nobody cares whether you come or go. A little elemental research would show why nothing that Lutsenko, Shokin, Telizhenko, Dubinsky or Derkach says can be trusted.
As Trump’s impeachment advances, prosecutors alleged that Lev Parnas, a Trump friend and Giuliani client, concealed $1 million he received in September from an account in Russia and may be concealing more. Parnas is under criminal indictment for violating U.S. election laws barring foreign contributions. Prosecutors are seeking to have his bail revoked.
Are there any dots left to connect here?
Russians gave Parnas $1 million. Parnas gave Giuliani $500,000, and a pro-Trump political action committee $325,000. Parnas’ long association with Trump is well-documented with numerous meetings and photos. Parnas also received $200,000 from exiled Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash, holed up in Austria fighting U.S. extradition on bribery charges that he denies. The theory that Firtash — described by prosecutors as an upper-echelon associate of Russian organized crime — is fueling the anti-Biden, anti-Ukrainian conspiracies to curry favor with Trump and bring his legal troubles to an end is looking more valid every day.
But none of this excuses the blind loyalty of the Republican Party or the moral disgrace of their members of Congress and the Trump administration in promoting falsehoods about Ukraine — chiefly, that it interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election against Trump, is hopelessly corrupt, and that Biden forced out Shokin because the prosecutor tried to investigate the vice president’s son, Hunter, for his role on the Burisma board of directors.
Trump is helping Russia so much they should pay him (if the Kremlin isn’t already). He’s damaged U.S. standing in the world, shaken trust among allies, including Ukraine, and promoted corruption instead of democratic values.
Russia can even save money on disinformation, now that the Kremlin has the services of the spineless and immoral Republican Party for free. No wonder Trump’s party has no problem with Russian interference — in Ukraine or in American elections.
