January 15, 2020

Parnas: Trump Knew Everything

Lev Parnas and Rudy Giuliani at the funeral of George H.W. Bush in December.Alex Edelman/ZUMA

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I’ve been asleep nearly all afternoon—thanks, dex!—and upon waking up I find that Rachel Maddow is interviewing Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s many shadowy accomplices in the Ukraine affair. And Parnas is . . . just absolutely dumping on every single person associated with Ukrainegate. Giuliani. Trump. Bill Barr. Devin Nunes. Mike Pence. He’s implicating them all massively in the plan to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation of Joe Biden. This goes along with the huge dump of text messages from Parnas and others released today by House Democrats.

This post is just a placeholder. Parnas’s interview with Maddow has been detailed and it seemingly matches up with what we know. But I have no idea how much of it will eventually be corroborated. For now, then, all I can say is that this looks explosive, but it’s best to wait a bit before automatically believing everything Parnas has said. More later.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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