More on Lev Parnas

Look, I get that everything Lev Parnas says should be taken with a substantial quantity of salt.  His unsupported word should never be accepted.  Instead, we should insist on corroboration of all his claims. 

And some we have.  We have corroboration that Rudy Giuliani made clear he was acting as Donald Trump's personal lawyer and not in any official capacity, in the form of a letter from Giuliani saying so.  We have corroboration that the impetus for firing Marie Yovanovitch came from Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin and not from Giuliani or his associates, in the form of texts from Shokin saying so.  We have texts corroborating that Parnas was in regular contact with Devin Nunes' aid, which raises at least a reasonable inference that Nunes knew what was going on and just wanted to preserve plausible deniability.  And we have texts corroborating Parnas associates at least claiming that they were stalking Yovanovitch.  The parties claim they were joking and/or led on by the other.  No doubt further investigation will shed some light on this.

On the other hand, what Parnas says about contacts with Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, or the alleged role of Mike Pence or William Barr should await confirmation before we believe him.

But I whole-heartedly believe at least part of this Daily Beast article.  Not so much the specific allegations about back door diplomacy in Venzuela,* or attempts to protect Firtash from extradition, or any other specific conspiracy.  Those, by all means, should be treated as subjects for further investigation, but not to be believed without corroboration.  But what I do believe is the general paranoid among Giuliani and his associates:

[Parnas] said they also angled to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to force at least two people out of his own orbit: former journalist Serhiy Leshchenko and then-national security adviser Oleksandr Danylyuk. The reason? In Parnas’ words, they were “Soros people.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“Soros became Enemy Number One, and it was understood that Soros infiltrated the U.S. government and State Department over a certain period of time,” Parnas said.

“He employed different prosecutors in different states, different congressmen, and the biggest thing was they thought Victoria Nuland was his person in the State Department and then let him control Eastern Europe by naming ambassadors and stuff, and then opened up this anti-corruption-type of system to cover up, actually, his corruption. That’s what we were running with.”

. . . . . . . . . 

“The consensus was that the reason Trump had the Russiagate and everything that was happening was because Soros and the Democrats controlled certain U.S. embassies in Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukrainian one, and were able to help with the Manafort stuff and all other kinds of stuff that basically caused problems in the Trump World,” he said. . . . In retrospect, Parnas said, the Soros focus grew out of an atmosphere he described as cult-like.

We have ample verification of this based on public statements made by Team Giuliani and others.  Go ahead and read the thread.  Short version:  everyone and everything who opposes Trump is part of a vast conspiracy orchestrated by George Soros.**  The author of the thread ends by saying:

Republicans have basically pulled off a major con to get it covered as "a Ukrainian ambassador wrote a critical op-ed" and "Biden got the prosecutor general fired while his son worked for Burisma."

 That last is maybe about half-true.  It seems fair to say that Republicans can be divided into two groups -- ones who believe all this, and ones who don't.***  The significant part of the Daily Beast article is that Team Giuliani is part of the former group.  When they say this stuff on Fox, they aren't just telling lies to fool the gullible rubes, they actually believe it themselves.  There was ample evidence of that to begin with; the article merely confirms it.  Sean Hannity at least appears to believe it.  Another who believes it is Donald Trump himself. 

Congressional Republicans (with the possible exception of Devin Nunes) know better, but they don't dare contradict the big guy, so we hear a lot about Ukrainian interference really just consisting of a hostile op-ed and stories about payoffs to Manafort.  That is an attempt to avoid offending the base by not contradicting Trump but also not to sound too ridiculous to the general public by not spouting insane conspiracy theories.

So which are worse, Republicans who are lying (or at least letting lies stand) to fool the gullible rubes, or ones who actually believe that.  Which is worse, to be such a knave, or such a fool.  And in the end, I would say I prefer the ones who are knowingly lying.  At least they can be rational if it is in their best interest.

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*Probably a good idea, actually.
**Who turns 90 this year.  I am genuinely curious to see what these guys come up with when Soros dies.
***Actually, there is a third category of Republicans who haven't come down firmly in either camp.  Willian Barr is one such example.  While he seems to accept the findings of the Mueller report that there was large-scale Russian interference in the election, he also appears to believe that the decision to investigate the Trump campaign at all was sinister.