Day 1189 Where’s Jared?
Saturday December 28, 2019
316 Days until the 2020 election and 397 days until the Inauguration
That’s where I started this morning, lying in bed wondering why Jared Kushner has been so quiet recently. I gotta hand it to him, he manages to stay quiet while the rush of oxygen being sucked out of the room is going by him. Let’s not forget that Donald put him in charge of the whole domestic agenda, and he took on solving the middle east. I think it’s time to take a look at how he’s done. Well, if he’s in charge of the domestic agenda then he’s the one responsible for the stock market rise, the low unemployment, and all the winning our economy has been doing. (That ought to get him tweet savaged by the orange one.)
Okay, seriously, what has he done? Well according to headlines I’ve seen he got a security clearance when the intel community was screaming don’t give him one. What has he done with that? Apparently, he gave intel to MBS, which MBS used in part to find, kill, and dismember Khashoggi. He and sweet little Ivanka have made $60-80 mil this year. Doing what exactly is not clear. We know that Ivanka had a crappy jewelry line that was being made in China and when retailers could sell the sh*t she decided to close it down and concentrate more on her duties in the White House. What are her duties? When I’ve seen her being interviewed she seems lost. Like big words seem to not register in her brain. So Jared seems to have done nothing of any good and Ivanka has done slightly less. Next topic.
Trump and corruption – Trump has been investigating corruption. You bet he has. He has had his point man Rudy Giuliani going over to Ukraine to investigate. Because Trump wants to know why he hasn’t been getting more of the gravy train. He wants to make sure he’s being cut in on the deal. That’s the only investigating he’s doing. Well, not entirely, he wants to smear Joe Biden too, but that’s secondary. Drain the swamp? Ha. He want to plug up the pipes and raise the dam.
Okay, if you’ve been paying attention to the Ukraine stuff there are some simple facts you need to keep in mind. If you’ve been listening to Fox News or reading right wing media sources these facts may come as shocking revelations that will make your skin crawl and you’re screaming to denounce them as fake news, and folks out to get the beloved president, and want to make you introduce “alternate facts.” But hang with me dear friends because corruption in the Ukraine started way before Donald Trump got involved. See? Clean bill of health on Donald and the Ukraine. So relax. But therein lies the problem. Let me explain.
John McCain once said Russia was a gas station masquerading as a country. What do they have? Lots of gas and not much else. There economy is the size of Italy. Why? Well, they don’t have much developed to sel to others and what they do have gets ripped off by whomever is in charge. Currently, the man in charge is Putin and he has been doing an outstanding job of taking his cut. It has really hobbled the country. There is so much oil and gas in Russia that Exxon Mobil concluded a huge deal with the country, earning then CEO of E/M, Rex Tillerson, the star of Russia from Putin. Exxon has a reputation for getting oil and damn the consequences. It’s interesting that resource rich countries tend to have some of the most impoverished populations. Why? Well, someone comes in and gobbles up all the resources and don’t give the people living there a cut. That would be socialism or worse communism and we all know that’s bad – right boys and girls? See under socialism the people running the government say platitudinous things to the people while keeping all the wealth for themselves, kind of like the Roman Catholic Church. Better to have a dictator do it. Like that little country in Africa where the son is living the high life in LA and buying Michael Jackson’s glove and having a sable of fancy cars while the people of his country live in corrugated metal roofed shacks, but the money from Exxon for its oil keeps coming.
Okay, where was I? Oh yes. Russia wants to export its oil. Ukraine has a long border with Russia and it’s the easiest way to get oil to other countries in Europe so Russia wants to sell Ukraine oil and put pipelines into the rest of Europe. Russia wants to keep Ukraine addicted to their oil and to extend this dependency to the rest of Europe. How to do this if you are corrupt? Well, first clean up your image, deny you are doing anything like what you are doing, bribe whomever you need to get your way (this extends your circle of corruption – a big win). Okay, let’s look at the score card. Well, if you’re Putin you make sure whomever is running the country is corrupt and therefore your puppet (he did that). Next you make sure whomever is running the gas company in the Ukraine is corrupt and lets you siphon money off to put in a giant slush fund to use to bribe others and extend the corruption (he did that.) Make sure the military and the lawyers and judges are corrupt (he did that.) Bingo! Now you can do things like invade parts of the country of Ukraine. You’ve always liked Crimea – take it.
Whoops, problem. That guy in the U.S. Obama doesn’t like it. He and the rest of NATO and the EU have come down hard on you. Bummer. Don’t worry, you’ve got a man on the inside, Paul Manafort. He, like Trump, have been laundering money for you for years. Not only that but Manafort was instrumental in getting your guy elected president of Ukraine. Perfect have Paul work on the Trump campaign. Meanwhile Obama is sending Joe Biden over to the Ukraine to denounce the corruption there. How corrupt is it? Well, the U.S. won’t send certain military aid there – like Javelin missiles, because it is so corrupt. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, you have to understand how the corruption works. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and as such had many of the old line corrupt officials.
One of the corrupt gigs was in the judicial system. There were, and maybe still are, prosecutors who would bring a case against you. They’d throw you in jail. The case was bogus, but what could you do? Well, for a fee the prosecutor would let you go. If you are an investigative reporter and you land on the ground in Kiev, Ukraine it takes – literally – twenty to thirty minutes of asking questions to know who these dirty prosecutors are. This is what Joe Biden was talking about. This is what our State Department under Marie Yovanovitch was fighting.
There’s a last piece in this puzzle and that’s Dymtro Firtash. He’s a guy installed by Putin into the Ukraine gas business. More correctly, he was in charge of the gas from Russia that flowed into Ukraine. His job? No one seems very clear as to what he actually did or was supposed to be doing. His only job seemed to be to take a percentage of the money for gas from Russia that Ukraine was buying, and they bought a lot of gas. This made Firtash very very rich. How rich? Well, he was arrested in Europe and let out on bail for $172,000,000.00. He wrote a check. He’s been fighting extradition to the U.S. for years. His main way to fight this is to hire the faciest lawyers in Washington and to bribe officials outside the U.S.
As I have stated in other screeds old Dymtro admits that none of his “success ” would be possible without the help of Semion Mogilevich, the godfather of Russia’s mafia. Shockingly, each has been linked to Putin.
What was Firtash’s job in Ukraine? It seems his main job for Putin was to bribe officials both inside and outside of Ukraine.
Just to make sure enough money was floating around Putin or someone inside of Russia was giving money to two Ukranians turned U.S. citizens named Lev and Igor. Now they seem clownish, like maybe they were the basis for Home Alone’s bad guys, but make no mistake one has threatened his landlord and carries a number of large unregistered handguns. It was so bad that the landlord had to get a restraining order. What was the problem? Oh, the landlord wanted Igor to pay his rent. Igor’s response? “I’m not going to warn you again.” Then got into to his high end Porsche and drove away. (Just to be clear. In case you don’t understand. The landlord was watching a tenant, who obviously had the money, drive off in a fancy car, and not only did the guy refuse to pay, he refused to get out, and threatened the landlord with physical harm. That’s called “battery” I believe.)
What did Lev and Igor do? They pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into various Republican and Trump organizations. They pumped millions into the Republican party. When they were stopped at Dulles Airport and arrested they were on their way to Vienna where Dymtro Firtash lives. Rudy Giuliani also had a ticket to Vienna. Now maybe some want to say it’s all a coincidence. That they weren’t going to see Firtash who gets his marching orders from Putin. But there’s the nagging little fact that on Rudy’s last trip to Ukraine he flew back on one of Firtash’s private jets. Just a coincidence.
Why was Rudy in Ukraine? To try and dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Where did he go to do that? To one of the dirty prosecutors of course. I should say former prosecutors. See Joe Biden and Maria Yovanovitch and others had been working to root out corruption in Ukraine. It had been working. It got to the point where the military was cleaned up enough that we could trust them with Javelin missiles. (So despite what Jim Jordan and other nutty Republican congressional stooges claim it was because the military was dirty during Obama that they didn’t get the missiles sooner. And it was because of the concentrated efforts of his administration that they got cleaned up.)
Also the Ukrainian Gas Company had gotten cleaned up too. In fact, the head of the gas company was saying they would be able to produce enough gas in Ukraine for Ukrainians and they’d be able to export it to Europe. This must have sent a cold shiver down Putin’s back. (See Ukraine is a big source of money for Russia due to their buying Russian gas. If that was to stop, Russia would be hurting. I know, Fox News doesn’t tell you this.) The Ukrainian gas company is called Burisma and they hired Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Why? Well, when they were still dirty (I think they were still dirty) they hired Hunter to clean up their image. It’s an old game in the world. Hire someone close to the wheels of power to try and influence that person to go easy on you. It didn’t seem to work. Joe Biden didn’t stop calling out Ukrainian corruption and Hunter did little or nothing to earn the huge monthly stipend he got from Burisma. But he did did something. I mean he is in the business of advising international companies. As for Joe, what do you expect him to do with his son? Tell him he can’t have the gig? In fact, he may not have know about it, at first, or even for most of the time Hunter was being paid. (Compare this to Ivanka and Jared who are making 60 to 80 million a year, most of it for similar gigs.)
So Trump is outraged that this is going on. You’re darn right he’s outraged. He wasn’t getting a cut. He sent Rudy over to find out why. Where does Rudy go? To the former corrupt prosecutor. I mean it wasn’t enough that he was making millions from the money being siphoned by Putin or Firtash to him via Lev and Igor. Donnie wasn’t getting any of that, except for Rudy’s free legal advise because Lev was paying Rudy.
What we need is Francis Ford Coppola or Roger Stone to do a movie about this.
Okay, let me sum up. Based on the evidence and the facts: Rudy and Trump are pawns of Putin and Firtash. They will do whatever they can to get their cut. Sell out your old prosecutorial group, launder money. lie, cheat, steal, pull out of Syria, whatever they can get away with. They are Russian agents.
You have been told. Don’t say you didn’t know. The facts are impossible to ignore. Unless, you are Moscow Mitch or Jim Jordan and crew.
Will the Senate stand up to the Russians and Trump or will they cave. Lord knows they’ve gotten a ton of money from the Russians. Was the bribe big enough? We’ll have to wait for the impeachment trial to see how many traitors to the Constitution there are in the U.S. Senate.
I hope, I’ve made the case clear enough. It’s hard to say given the overwhelming noise from the far right and the Russian disinformation campaigns.
316 Days until the 2020 election and 397 days until the Inauguration
PS The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. Saqqara is an area of the Egyptian Desert, like the Giza Plateau. It is slightly south of The Giza Plateau, about twenty miles. I use the term Giza Plateau to differentiate it from the city on the west bank of the Nile River called Giza. The east bank city is called Cairo. Who knew? (I didn’t until I visited.)
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