Republicans Are Far From Ready To Give Up On Trump-- Or Trumpism-- Yet

 

We didn't do much coverage of the manufactured Hunter Biden scandal here, not even when we were pushing Bernie in the primaries. As disgusting as it has always been that Biden has so many sleazy lobbyists in his family and that DC functions like that, the whole "scandal" generally reeked of bullshit. On the other hand, we consistently warned that if Biden was handed the nomination, the general election would devolve into-- among other things-- a discussion of whose family is more repulsively corrupt... and that's a battle in which no one could ever top the Trumps.

Earlier today, London's Times published a piece by Manveen Rana about how a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch and Giuliani "associate," Dmytro Firtash, was involved in a Trump campaign conspiracy to manufacture "evidence" against the Bidens.

Assorted Dildoes by Chip Proser

According to Lev Parnas, one of Mr Giuliani’s associates, they had sought help in their quest for a scandal that would damage Joe Biden’s run for the presidency from Dmytro Firtash, a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch.

Mr Firtash, who has faced extradition to America since 2014, had cut a deal, Mr Parnas claimed, that would quash his extradition order in return for any evidence of scandal surrounding the Bidens. Mr Firtash, who was shown to have extended a $1 million loan to Mr Parnas during this period, has always denied any involvement in the smear campaign directed at the Bidens.

The allegations come from Hares Youssef, a Ukrainian businessman and close friend of Mr Firtash. An adviser to Viktor Yushchenko, the former president of Ukraine, Mr Youssef said that he was asked to invent links between Hunter Biden and a business deal with one of his former associates that had gone wrong.

“The deal was to lie,” Mr Youssef claimed. “I had never even met him. But the hunting dogs were out for Hunter Biden.”

Mr Youssef, who was born in Syria and is a dual national, invested just under $3 million in mbloom, a tech start-up fund backed by Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner.

The details of mbloom’s investments were always obscure. Mr Youssef claimed that he believed his investment would be used to create a gold-backed virtual currency named Golden Hearts, a project he has long wanted to get off the ground. The managers of mbloom, however, used the fund to invest in their own start-ups.

Mr Youssef lost the bulk of his investment when the fund was shut down in 2016 after Mr Archer was accused of fraud in a separate and unrelated case.

Hunter, the youngest son of Mr Biden, now the president-elect, had previously been on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, with Mr Archer and had become involved in his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, one of the main funders behind mbloom.

Hunter had ceased any association with the company before Mr Youssef made his investment in mbloom.

Yet last year, Mr Youssef briefly courted journalists with a story about Hunter’s links to the now-defunct mbloom fund and claims that he had promised businessmen access to his father in 2015, when Mr Biden was vice-president under Barack Obama. Mr Youssef had no evidence at the time to support his assertions and now he has admitted that it was all untrue.

...Youssef claimed a member of Mr Firtash’s team approached him, saying: “We can solve this relationship with America if you can help us.” He said that he was told his friend’s extradition order could be rescinded if he could find enough evidence against Hunter Biden.

He claimed that knowing that Mr Youssef had been involved with mbloom, the Firtash team asked him to create a story about Hunter Biden being linked to the doomed fund.

“But I told them Hunter Biden wasn’t linked to mbloom,” Mr Youssef insisted. “I said it was absolutely impossible because the documents I signed with this investment could appear anywhere and they would show Hunter Biden was not involved. It would break the story because it’s not true.”

...“Somebody from Firtash’s team asked me if I wanted to get my visa back and to be able to travel to the United States again,” Mr Youssef claimed. “They said if we solved the problem in the United States, we can solve the problem of your visa, you can even get immunity, if we can use your investment in mbloom in this Hunter Biden case.”

...Firtash, a billionaire who is closely linked to the Kremlin, made his fortune acting as a middleman for the Russian government’s gas interests in Ukraine.

The US Justice Department has alleged that Mr Firtash was also heavily involved with “Russian organised crime.”

...Firtash has been a frequent presence in the controversies surrounding Mr Trump. Paul Manafort, the Republican strategist who was Mr Trump’s campaign chairman during the last election before he was convicted of fraud, had also worked for Mr Firtash, who hired him to help with the campaign for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president. Mr Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 and has since lived in Russia. He has links to President Putin.

Mr Firtash also hired two lawyers with links to Mr Trump to present his case to William Barr, the US attorney-general.

That process was halted when the Ukraine inquiry began and Mr Trump was impeached.

The attacks on Hunter Biden’s business dealings took centre stage in Mr Trump’s re-election campaign. However, Mr Youssef said that the election had no bearing on his decision to talk about his own experience of how evidence against Hunter was collected in Ukraine.

Instead it was a report published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project this week that carried evidence from leaked bank records showing Mr Youssef’s investment in mbloom, he said.

Not having learned their lesson yet about involving themselves and their party in the Trump crime operation, Republican aspirants for the 2024 Republican nomination are backing Trump's election fraud lies. In his New York Magazine column this afternoon, Jonathan Chait noted that "watching the Republican Party absorb Trump’s ludicrous accusations has been depressingly instructive. It replicates the process by which Republicans accepted Trump in the first place. It also reflects, in miniature, the process by which the party has surrendered to kookery over several generations... The most revealing responses came from the pool of prospective 2024 presidential nominees. Hopefuls like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, and Josh Hawley endorsed various groundless charges of mass voter fraud gloated by Trump. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem forcefully rejected the premise that Republican secretaries of State have testified to the legitimacy of their election processes. 'The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true,' tweeted Marco Rubio. Lindsey Graham proclaimed, 'Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,' and went so far as to suggest legislators in states won by Biden nullify the vote and appoint pro-Trump electors. 'This is a contested election,' Graham announced on Fox News, adding, 'President Trump should not concede.' 'Every time they close the doors and shut out the lights, they always find more Democratic votes,' declared Cruz-- even though the doors were in fact open to Republican observers and the lights in fact on."