You Will Anyway: When you lie down with dogs

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

When you lie down with dogs

An indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, said he discussed Ukraine with the president at a private dinner for super PAC donors in Washington, according to The Washington Post.

Lev Parnas, who, along with his business partner Igor Fruman, has been indicted in connection with an alleged campaign finance fraud scheme, has told associates that the two told Trump at the 2018 dinner in his Washington hotel that then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was hostile to his interests, the Post reported on Tuesday.

Parnas has said Trump responded by suggesting Yovanovitch should be fired, according to the Post, citing people familiar with his account.

After the two men were indicted, Trump denied any connection to them, saying, “It’s possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. ... I don’t know what they do, but, I don’t know, maybe they were clients of Rudy.”

[...]

“It’s just not true that he had no idea who these guys were. He knew Lev particularly,” a former senior administration official told the Post. The two met with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in February, according to Parnas’s lawyer Edward MacMahon Jr., who said they met at the request of Giuliani, who was in turn acting on Trump’s orders.

“There isn’t anything that Parnas did in the Ukraine relative to the Bidens or the 2016 election that he wasn’t asked to do by Giuliani, who was acting on the direction of the president,” MacMahon said.

During the meeting, MacMahon said, the two proposed a state visit in exchange for Poroshenko announcing investigations into both former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and a conspiracy theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections, the same matters Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about.

Giuliani has declined to comment on his relationship with the men amid an ongoing investigation but told the Post that Trump already knew them by the time Giuliani met them.

The Hill

Rudy is going under the bus right after Mulvaney. He's after saving his own skin right now.

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.