Slop, slop, slop, shit, fart, piss. That’s the order of the day at MSNBC with Rachel Maddow’s ethnocentric rehabilitation of the gangster Lev Parnas, which has been screening in various places, including in DC last night, where it was attended by Rep. Raskin. We had a little bird there. It has about the same factual basis as RuPaul’s “Trump: The Rusical,” in which she also had a star turn.
The ostensible personal drama at the heart of this is that Parnas was involved in digging up dirt on the Biden family, and in it he and Hunter reconcile, so this is also sort of Parnas’s moment of bending the knee to the Bidens. The trouble is it’s all bullshit. The charges against Hunter, the gun ones for which he was convicted, and the tax charges for which he pled guilty, have nothing to do with any of this.
The actual story with a lot of these Ukrainian mob types is that they’re being forced to turn by the strengthening Ukrainian state. I’m all for them choosing the right, but we should recognize that these are vicious and amoral men who have been forced to do so. The question is always what gets hidden in the turn, for instance Parnas’s closeness to the Champlain Towers collapse, and the documentary team allows him to get away with a surfeit of lies, inaccuracies, and omissions.
The Ron DeSantis stuff is, if anything, some of the most interesting here. Parnas says he helped make DeSantis governor, which is the sort of thing DeSantis had better hope is false.
What the Dems are trying to do with this story is take a guy who was probably working for the GRU, and use all the Russian money he was perhaps intentionally tainting Republicans with, and use it against them. These intrigues are well beyond the ken of “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani, even if he sobered up long enough for the DTs to set in. The absence here of the weird stuff going on in the Republican Attorneys General Association is rather conspicuous, Parnas was using Russian money to pay Adam Laxalt, the Nevada attorney general, with the hope of obtaining cannabis licenses. Rob Hyde is also omitted.
Volodymyr Zelensky is a leader of his people who is doing the best he can, referred to here as a “stand-up guy.” But Zelensky’s relationship with Ihor Kholomoisky, who is now on trial for treason, is substantially understated in this story. It doesn’t really reflect badly on Zelensky, it actually speaks well of him: he was put up by a gangster in a corrupt country, and then he turned on him. It poses problems for the propagandistic narrative about Ukraine that’s been promoted by neocon types for many years.
Because NBC, like all the networks, is unable to be honest about some of the Israeli angles, the true story cannot be told here, either. John Solomon, a gross man out of his depth who is integral to all this, works for the Likud faction. Sean Hannity, who Parnas fingers in his conversation with Hunter Biden, has long had ties to the Adelsons too.
Igor Frumin is described as Ukrainian, but he’s actually from Belarus. There’s the question of why he recorded everything at the dinner on April 30.
Frumin and Parnas were arrested fleeing the country with one-way tickets, and this is made out to have something to do with all the intrigues in Ukraine, but the charges had to do with campaign finance, here, for which they were probably working for the Russians. Giuliani, despite his many flaws, had nothing to do with this. There’s an aspect to which this reads like NBC trying to put a bow on their grand Russiagate narrative.
Giuliani only started pushing the Ukraine stuff after he met with Parnas, what Parnas describes as being recruited by the Trump team is more like an offer to them which he made. Giuliani’s role here is anything but a criminal mastermind, he’s a bungling drunk.
Much is made of the request to fire Marie Yovanovich in Ukraine, but Trump only did that at the behest of Frumin, Parnas, and Giuliani. This is another example of him getting bad advice from mobbed-up Jews. There isn’t good evidence to back up a number of the actual conversations with Trump. There are timeline issues, for instance here’s Parnas with a bulletproof vest before his meeting with Kholomoisky on May 14 that went south, and shortly thereafter Giuliani responded:
The big question here is whether Parnas and Frumin were acting as cut-outs for Kholomoisky until it went bad, seeking American protection which he didn’t get. They both visited him in Israel first, where Kholomoisky has a house in Herzliya.
Kholomoisky is one of the biggest money launderers in world history, with a private army that included neo-Nazis. Casey Michel’s book suggests he laundered as much as half a trillion dollars, much of which was spent destroying American industrial capacity in the midwest. That’s why we can’t lionize these guys, as MSNBC is attempting to do. They have been very close to a Ukrainian Jewish scheme to deeply harm the United States.
It has been suggested to me that one of the reasons Parnas turned to the Dems was that he didn’t listen to John Dowd, and had the cannabis attorney Joseph Bondy negotiate it for him instead.
In any case one knock-on effect of the interminable conflict in Israel is that all the details of this stuff, the Eastern European money laundering that everyone knows goes on there, is not getting a look. As much as anything else, this is why the Netanyahu government needs to go, to begin cleaning up all this mob stuff.