White nationalists lead a torch march through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 11. Andrew Shurtleff—The Daily Progress
In recent weeks, right-wing extremists, furious that Democrats have finally won control of Virginia’s state house and plan to pass a series of rather minor gun control laws, have whipped themselves into a frenzy online, spreading outrageous rumors — such as claims that all self-defense training, even in martial arts, will become a felony — in an effort to stoke mass hysteria. There are real concerns that this could turn into another situation like the one that unfolded not far away in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, when a white supremacist rally descended into a riot, resulting in multiple injuries and one murder.
Naturally, the choice of MLK Day is no coincidence.
The timing of this rally on MLK Day is, of course, eyebrow-raising, as many of the people hyping it are blatant white nationalists. Virginia Citizen Defense League, unsurprisingly, claims innocent motives in choosing this day for its annual pro-gun rally, saying that “date is picked because it is a federal holiday, which allows more gun owners to be able to come.” But given that King was assassinated in 1968 by a gun-wielding right-winger, it’s hard to imagine there was no ulterior purpose in using this day as one where gun-wielding right-wingers celebrate themselves.
In other words, for these guys, it’s really James Earl Ray Day:
Amanda thinks it’s possible it may not get violent:
There’s certainly room for hope that, for all the chest-thumping from gun nuts, this Richmond rally will peter out without any real trouble. Unlike the white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville a few years ago, who tended to be much younger on average than conservatives generally, the radical gun-loving world tends to be on the grayer side. No matter how many memes suggest they are seeking a violent confrontation, these people are probably not inclined to provoke situations where they’re likely to get arrested or injured. It’s easy to talk big on social media, but most will likely chicken out before trying to bring weapons into a heavily barricaded and policed gun-free zone.
Following the rules of an anachronistic 18th-century ritual, the House managers walked in formation to the Senate to deliver the articles of impeachment on Thursday. The sergeant at arms informed the senators that if they speak during the trial they could be imprisoned, and then the chief justice arrived in his robes accompanied by four senators. He then administered the constitutionally prescribed oath to deliver impartial justice to the assembled senators, after which, one by one, they signed their names to a book. The only thing missing was the white wigs.
Meanwhile, the president was shriek-tweeting in all caps, “I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!”
It was weird. But then, what isn’t weird in this administration?
Only in the Trump era would we have a bombshell witness appear on the night before the trial, loaded down with pictures and video and written evidence, much of it in Russian. I’m speaking of Lev Parnas, of course, who served as Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s bagman in the plot to extort a political smear job against Joe Biden from the Ukrainian government.
Parnas was arrested in October for campaign finance violations, along with his partner Igor Fruman. But until federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York returned records they had seized during the arrest, and a judge cleared them to be sent to the House Intelligence Committee last week, we didn’t know specifically what he’d been up to in the Ukraine scandal.
On Monday, the House released some of the documents to the public, which included text messages — lots of text messages — between Parnas, Giuliani and any number of other players. The trial starts on Tuesday so presumably, the lawyers working for the House managers are pulling all-nighters to put together the timeline based upon all the records provided by their own witnesses, FOIA requests and Parnas to both corroborate his story and present an understandable narrative of what happened in Kyiv and in Washington.
They have not interviewed Parnas, as far as I know, but he’s been giving TV interviews so they should be able to determine some of what they can corroborate and what they can’t. He’s an accused criminal, but as TV prosecutors have been saying on a loop for the past few days, it’s usually criminals who give evidence against other criminals. They’re the ones who know where their fellow criminals buried the bodies.
Parnas revealed a lot of juicy details in his interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. It’s hard to know right now what was most important. There’s a ton of color about the Trump hotel in Washington being essentially like a mobsters’ “social club” where hangers-on gather in the lobby and the bar, while insiders get invited into the inner sanctums where the real deals are made. It’s a GOP power center that just happens to put money directly into the president’s personal bank account. Imagine that.
Parnas also claimed that the shocking texts between him and a fringe character named Robert Hyde, in which Hyde indicated that he had Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, under surveillance, were all just a joke. Apparently, both the U.S. government and the Ukrainian government weren’t entirely convinced, since the FBI “visited” Hyde on Thursday and the Ukrainians finally gave Trump his investigation, although not quite the one he wanted. They have also announced they are looking into this allegation.
The new information I find most interesting at first glance is that we now know the withholding of military aid and a White House visit in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into Biden and the 2016 election was only one of three different quid-pro-quos in this plot.
It’s been a puzzle from the very beginning as to why the administration was so determined to push Yovanovitch out of her post. She was something of an anti-corruption crusader, but it hasn’t been clear exactly why Giuliani and his henchmen pushed so hard to get her fired.
According to text messages provided by Parnas, it was just another transaction. Getting rid of Yovanovitch was the price they had to pay to obtain the cooperation of one of the crooked Ukrainian prosecutors, Yuri Lutsenko, who agreed to investigate Biden if they delivered. Despite all their hard work getting Yovanovitch fired — and it was really hard, according to Parnas — Lutsenko’s patron, then-President Petro Poroshenko, lost the election and was replaced last year by Volodymyr Zelensky. (Out of office, Lutsenko later pulled a Trump and reneged on the agreement, telling the press he never found anything on Biden.)
The other quid pro quo is more sinister. Giuliani got word that Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian gas oligarch with ties to the Kremlin, had dirt on Burisma, the firm that had Joe Biden’s son Hunter on its board. Naturally, Giuliani was excited. Firtash was being represented by Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, two long-time GOP legal operatives who had been involved in the Ukraine plot, along with a right-wing reporter John Solomon. Firtash wanted to avoid extradition from Austria to the U.S., where he is wanted on bribery and racketeering charges. According to Parnas, Firtash agreed to share his information in exchange for having his extradition order lifted. Giuliani, Toensing and diGenova all worked together to try to make that happen.
Elements of this story were already known, but Parnas suggested in his interview with Maddow that Attorney General Bill Barr was also “on the team.” He didn’t offer any direct evidence of this and the Department of Justice denies knowing anything about it. But it once more raises the question of why Trump told Zelensky during the “perfect call” to cooperate with both Giuliani and Barr.
Parnas said he came forward because he’s afraid of Barr’s Justice Department, which is astonishing considering the lowlife elements he’s been palling around with. Since Parnas is under federal indictment that seems like a reckless thing to say. But he says everyone is running scared since Trump managed to consolidate power after naming Barr, so his only real hope lies in going public.
This is a crazy story but we already knew that most of it is true. As tantalizing as these new details are, they don’t entirely fill in the picture of Rudy Giuliani’s scheme and how Trump’s Washington works. What was true a month ago remains true today: The president of the United States and his personal lawyer plotted to extort the leaders of a foreign country into interfering in the presidential election by smearing his political rival. New information comes out every day and none of it will ever change that fact.
Attorney General William Barr. Photo by: Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
Lev Parnas is scared. Scared of what may happen to him and his family. But mostly he’s scared of what Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice could do to him.
In the second part of his interview with Rachel Maddow Thursday, the indicted Rudy Giuliani employee/client got to the point of why, while under federal indictment in New York for separate campaign finance violations, he is speaking publicly about his role in the Ukraine conspiracy. Describing Trump more as “a cult leader” than an organized crime figure, Parnas told Maddow (emphasis mine):
“There’s a lot of Republicans that would go against [Trump],” Parnas continued. “If you take a look, the difference between why Trump is so powerful now, he wasn’t so powerful in ’16 and ’17, he became that powerful when he got William Barr.“
“I think I’m more scared of our own Justice Department than I am scared of these criminals right now,” Parnas said. “The scariest part is getting locked in some room and being treated as an animal when you did nothing wrong. That’s the tool they’re using. They tried to scare me into not talking.”
“With God’s help and my lawyer next to me who I know will go to bat for me no matter what with the truth,” Parnas added, “I’m taking a chance. My wife is scared. My kids are nervous.”
Parnas felt he’d done nothing wrong and felt himself under the White House’s protection of Trump’s lawyers. Until Trump attorneys John Dowd and Kevin Downing came to him in jail:
“I called Dowd to come there. And I started seeing in the process of the bail stuff, the way things were going on … I didn’t feel they were trying to get me out,” Parnas said. “John Dowd instead of comforting me and trying to calm me down and telling me I’m going to be OK, he started talking to me like a drill sergeant.”
Parnas quickly realized they were not there on his behalf but to protect the president. They were there to keep him quiet.
In Part 2 of the Maddow interview, Parnas claims that John Dowd –after Trump green-lit him to represent Parnas — told him to be a "good boy" after he was arrested.
Maddow: Were they telling you to sacrifice yourself to protect Trump?
Parnas is speaking publicly because he fears his fate is in William Barr’s hands. Southern District of New York prosecutors (DOJ) have his materials and can hang him out to dry if Barr involves himself in the case. Parnas is trying to set the public narrative on his role in the conspiracy before Barr can. And perhaps to earn himself some form of indemnity on other charges by giving up bigger fish before that happens.
Untangling the Gordian Knot of Donald Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy will take more space and time than we have here. Some of what he told Maddow is self-serving and false, journalist Marcy Wheeler believes.
Wheeler fact-checked the interview in real time and notes that Parnas’s claims that he got his negative views of Ambassador Yovanovitch from those around him are untrue. “He was a leader, not a follower, on attacking Yovanovitch,” Wheeler writes, and was active in that effort long before it began in earnest with Giuliani’s involvement.
With the impeachment case focused on Trump and the Biden-Burisma smear campaign, people are missing how much this conspiracy began as an attempt to discredit the Mueller investigation, Wheeler adds. Constructing an interlocking set of attorney-client and executive privileges had helped the Trump team fend off Mueller. (Read her analysis of their effort to “throw everyone into the same conflict-ridden Joint Defense Agreement, and sink or swim together.“)
He's trying to tell a story that will make him a viable impeachment witness bc it's the one way he won't be the scapegoat in SDNY. He needs to force Barr to 1) recuse (ha!) or 2) indict Rudy.
Parnas’s “silences–eg, abt Firtash–are all the more telling,” Wheeler tweeted about Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with Russian mob connections. Firtash is holed-up in Vienna fighting extradition to the U.S. on bribery conspiracy charges.
Josh Marshall adds detail on how Parnas’s revelations regarding Firtash implicate Barr in a deeper conspiracy:
The allegation is this: Trump and his legal team offered to have federal foreign bribery charges against Firtash dropped if the oligarch, described by federal prosecutors as an “upper-echelon” associate of the Russian mafia, helped Trump discredit the Mueller investigation and Joe Biden.
If corroborated, Parnas’ allegations would implicate Attorney General Bill Barr in the scandal in a deeper way than previously known, and would suggest that federal indictments are up for grabs as a bargaining chip for Trump’s political fortunes.
Firtash is represented by Fox News lawyers Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing via a Parnas introduction. Three people familiar with their meeting with Barr told the Washington Post Barr declined to intercede.
I must add that based on the allegation of Lev Parnas, our esteemed Attorney General should probably retain a criminal defense attorney. What a conspiracy to bribe mess. Is our country’s AG the second coming of disgraced former AG John Mitchell? Crazy times. https://t.co/KUEht2d8Py
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David Graham at the Atlantic compares the dilemma we face in whether to believe Lev Parnas with the Michael Cohen situation. We all knew Cohen was basically a cheap hood. But when he testified, it seemed clear that while he was working very hard to get a better deal, he felt personally betrayed by Trump whom he had worshipped for years.
But he showed up with documents. And his testimony has substantially turned out to be true.
Graham notes something else that I don’t think we should forget. Donald Trump is surrounded by thugs and he has been from the beginning.
Parnas is like Cohen in another way: Each was once a part of the Trump circle, and the president and his defenders now dismiss him as a liar and scoundrel. And as with Cohen, the defense is troubling even if true. If Cohen and Parnas are such obvious villains, how is it that they came to be close to the president, putatively working as part of his legal teams? The same question applies to any number of other criminals, con men, and charlatans we’ve come to know over the past four years as Trump associates. The fact that he is surrounded by such people says a great deal about either his judgment or his probity. (Probably both.)
How can it be that the president constantly finds himself in the company of these shady people? Well, if you want something shady done you need shady people to do it.
It may not be necessary for an impeachment — we know that “high crimes” refers to presidential abuse of power — but at least this might shut up the bleating of Republicans who insist that unless the president broke the law, it’s not an impeachable offense. He did:
The agency, the Government Accountability Office, said the White House’s Office of Management and Budget violated the Impoundment Control Act when it withheld nearly $400 million this summer for “a policy reason,” even though the funds had been allocated by Congress.
The decision to freeze the aid was directed by the president himself, and during the House impeachment inquiry, administration officials testified that they had raised concerns about its legality to no avail.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the accountability office wrote in an opinion released Thursday. “The withholding was not a programmatic delay.”
The GAO is a non-partisan agency (which means it’s the left-wing socialist Deep State according to the Republicans.) But it has no history of overtly political behavior, and it is one of the most unlikely agencies to interfere in an impeachment trial for partisan purposes.
Here’s the kicker:
“When Congress enacts appropriations, it has provided budget authority that agencies must obligate in a manner consistent with law,” said the ruling, which was signed by Mr. Armstrong. “The Constitution vests lawmaking power with the Congress.”
Armstrong also has some choice words for the State Department for refusing to answer questions about its own handling of money for Ukraine:
“We consider a reluctance to provide a fulsome response to have constitutional significance,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. The G.A.O.’s role, he said, “is essential to ensuring respect for and allegiance to Congress’ constitutional power of the purse.”
Notice he keeps talking about the Constitution. That’s not an accident.
Trump spoke at a meeting of religious leaders today. He said a lot of stupid things, as usual. But especially note what he says about Rudy and Parnas:
Asked directly if he authorized Giuliani to send President Zelensky a letter seeking a meeting, Trump says "I don't know anything about the letter" & then slathers praise on Giuliani.
"He's a very legitimate guy… if he wrote a letter it wouldn't have been a big deal," he adds pic.twitter.com/05hG27lfkG
Here's Trump claiming he doesn't know Lev Parnas, who he posed for numerous photos with, thirteen (13) different times in a video clip that ends with him shushing a reporter pic.twitter.com/awwOqx343D
Everyone is warning us not to believe a word Lev Parnas says, so I’ll leave that alone and just talk about the documents for now. Here’s one example of the criminal behavior coming from the Trump team as they tried to get Ukrainians to smear Joe Biden on behalf of Donald Trump. Some of them had different prices:
The materials show that Parnas, a Russian-speaker who helped coordinate Giuliani’s outreach to Ukrainian sources, was directly communicating with an array of top Ukrainian officials. Among them was Yuri Lutsenko, at the time Ukraine’s top prosecutor and a close political ally of then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who was running for reelection.
Lutsenko wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador, in part because she had been critical of his office and supported a quasi-independent anti-corruption bureau he despised. The messages, written in Russian, show Lutsenko urging Parnas to force out Yovanovitch in exchange for cooperation regarding Biden. At one point, Lutsenko suggests he won’t make any helpful public statements unless “madam” is removed.
“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are calling into question all my declarations. Including about B,” Lutsenko wrote to Parnas in a March 22 message … It’s unclear if ‘B’ is a reference to Biden or Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served from 2014 to 2019.
Four days later, Lutsenko told Parnas that work on the case against the owner of the gas company is proceeding successfully and evidence of the money transfers of “B” had been obtained. “And here you can’t even remove one fool,” Lutsenko laments, using a sad-face emoticon as he again appeared to push for Yovanovitch’s ouster.
“She’s not a simple fool[,] trust me,” Parnas responded. “But she’s not getting away. Parnas, days later, told Lutsenko that “soon everything will turn around and we’ll be on the right course.” Lutsenko responded that he has copies of payments Burisma made to the investment firm co-founded by Biden’s son Hunter.
Here’s the cherry on top of that quid pro quo sundae
Lutsenko later said publicly that he found no evidence of wrongdoing under Ukrainian law by Hunter or Joe Biden.
Look, I get that Parnas is a shady character. He’s probably going to jail, that’s how shady he is. But he was intimately involved in all this so he’s worth listening to and attempting to corroborate with the documents he provided as well as other testimony and documents that have been released through the FOIA.
Dismissing him out of hand is just as wrong as taking his word as gospel. Keep an open mind and see where this leads.
She’s kissing up to Trump and signaling to his cult that she’s one of them. She had her own people filming.
Manu Raju is a straight CNN reporter. He’ as dull as dishwater and the farthest from being some sort of “hack” as you can get. We know hacks when we see them. It’s allegedly straight news reporters like this:
That’s Fox News’ Ed Henry with Robert Hyde, the latest misfit criminal tied to Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Mr. Bolton’s book, due to be published by Simon and Schuster, is almost finished, according to people familiar with his plans, and is set to be on sale well ahead of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this summer. The book is going to describe Mr. Bolton’s time in the Trump White House and expand on at least some of what he saw regarding Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden.
The book will describe other global controversies related to Russia and Venezuela, and Mr. Bolton plans to detail his interactions with key figures in Mr. Trump’s administration. Some officials do not come off particularly well, according to the people familiar with the plan. They include the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who held the job Mr. Bolton did during President George W. Bush’s administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff. A spokesman for Simon and Schuster did not respond to an email seeking comment.
This is ridiculous. If he’s writing about these people and these events in his damned book he can testify in the Senate impeachment.
On the other hand, it’s always possible that Bolton is not planning to say anything useful that relates to the impeachment. He’s hardly a trustworthy actor. Nonetheless, I don’t see how they can fail to call him after all we’ve seen, especially after Parnas last night:
MADDOW: Add to the pressure that people like you, the Vice President, Mr. Giuliani, everybody else involved was putting on Ukraine. When you say “Mr. Bolton may have something to say”, did Mr. Bolton know that Vice President Pence was supposed to secure that agreement?
PARNAS: I don’t know exactly, but I know Mr. Bolton was definitely involved in the loop because of thes firing of Marie Yovanovitch. and he was not — they started butting heads, and from Bolton did not agree with Giuliani on the way of dealing with it, so there was tension there. There was definitely tension there.
MADDOW: But you believe he knows what the administration was pressuring Ukraine to do?
PARNAS: Bolton? 100%. He knows what happened there.
I think it’s obvious that we should all remain skeptical of lev Parnas as Tom counsels below. Shady operators often have good reasons for lying or embellishing when they are in the crosshairs.
The main takeaway from all this so far is that the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was engaged in a sleazy operation in Ukraine that appears to be linked to a lot more shady activities in this Ukraine gambit than we knew. It’s not credible that the president wasn’t okaying it ever step of the way. If they ever arrest Rudy and he has to save himself a lot of people will undoubtedly be in big trouble. That’s what Rudy was talking about when he said he has “insurance.” If Bill Barr was involved in all this, it may explain why Rudy has so far not been indicted by SDNY.
Maybe.
The good news is that there are documents that can corroborate much of what Parnas said. They are still being looked at.
Yesterday, one watchdog group took a quick look at a few and shared what they found on twitter:
We lined up the newly released Parnas messages with the records we obtained from the State Department through FOIA litigation, as well as other records and reports. The timeline is troubling.
On Tuesday, the House released new evidence provided by Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, which included disturbing text messages that suggest the movements of former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch were being tracked. intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/…
Many of the messages between Parnas and Robert Hyde, a Trump donor who was apparently assisting Parnas in Ukraine, were sent in late March 2019 — dates when Giuliani was in touch with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo, according to records we obtained. americanoversight.org/state-departme…
March 24: Donald Trump Jr tweets about Yovanovitch at 12:12pm EDT twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr… About 20 minutes later, at 4:34pm UTC, Parnas sends Hyde the same article that Don Jr tweeted.
March 25: Lev Parnas posts on Instagram from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, where he is with Giuliani for dinner celebrating the release of the Mueller report summary. twitter.com/shelbyholliday…
March 25: At that same time, Hyde is messaging Parnas (just after 2:00am the next day Ukraine time, according to the time stamps) suggesting he has Ambassador Yovanovitch under surveillance: “She’s talked to three people. Her phone is off. Computer is off.”
March 26: A little over 12 hours later, call logs obtained by American Oversight show Rudy Giuliani spoke with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: documentcloud.org/documents/6557…
Also on March 26: John Solomon emailed Lev Parnas, Victoria Toensing, and Joseph diGenova an article advancing a Soros-related conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. documentcloud.org/documents/6557…
March 26: That evening, Giuliani appeared on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s show. It was just after midnight in Ukraine when Hyde messaged Parnas: “If you want her out, they need to make contact with security forces…. From Ukrainians.”
The subsequent exchange between Parnas and Hyde suggests that Parnas was with Giuliani during the Ingraham broadcast. archive.org/details/FOXNEW…
March 27: At 11:28am EDT, Giuliani’s assistant contacts President Trump’s Oval Office secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, asking for help getting in touch with Secretary Pompeo. “I’ve been trying and getting nowhere through regular channels” documentcloud.org/documents/6557…
Later that night, Hyde messages Parnas about Yovanovitch again: “Nothing has changed she is still not moving.” “It’s confirmed we have a person inside.”
March 28: The next morning before 9:30am EDT, Giuliani called the State Department to set up a call with Mike Pompeo. According to emails we obtained, the call was scheduled for the next day. documentcloud.org/documents/6557…
According to news reports, March 28 is also the day that Giuliani delivered the the “packet” he had compiled about Yovanovitch — including the email that John Solomon had sent to Parnas two days earlier. nbcnews.com/politics/trump…;
March 29: At 3:00am Ukraine time, Hyde again messages Parnas: “She had visitors” and “It’s confirmed we have a person inside”
Just under 12 hours later, at 8:14am EDT, State Department call logs show that Giuliani spoke on the phone with Mike Pompeo for several minutes. documentcloud.org/documents/6557…
This gets even more concerning when you add in the records and reports showing contacts with Rep. Devin Nunes regarding investigations of the Bidens. According to CNBC, Nunes’ staff were in contact with Parnas and Ukrainian officials in “late March.” cnbc.com/2019/11/24/giu…
And Pompeo’s call schedule, which we obtained through our FOIA lawsuit, shows a call with Nunes scheduled for April 1 — listed on the log immediately after the March 29 call with Giuliani. documentcloud.org/documents/6557…
All of this calls into question Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s knowledge of the events unfolding in Kyiv surrounding the U.S. ambassador and her eventual ouster.
In June, one of Pompeo’s assistant secretaries would write to top House leaders providing a misleading account of Yovanovitch’s removal: foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/25/tru…
And State Department letters released to American Oversight just this month show Undersecretary Brian Bulatao writing to Yovanovitch’s attorney to instruct the former ambassador not to testify to Congress or provide documents. documentcloud.org/documents/6603…
This is why we’re working so hard to extract the paper trail of the Trump administration’s Ukraine dealings. We have six active lawsuits seeking documents, and more files are scheduled to be released in the coming weeks. Follow our investigation here: americanoversight.org/investigation/…
That was posted before Parnas’ interview in which he indicated that Hyde was just a drunken clown, so who knows? But a timeline is the sort of thing that can draw in the other players and corroborate what he said.
There isn’t a lot of time to get that done but I’m sure the lawyers on the House side are pulling all-nighters to see what they have. It’s not going to be easy because the Parnas evidence is voluminous.
And yes, it would have been nice to have all this stuff earlier but the fact is that the SDNY and a federal judge didn’t release these documents until this week. The media doesn’t seem to know that and neither does Susan Collins. Someone needs to tell them.
