EYE OF THE CROSSFIRE HURRICANE (profanity alert):

In 2018, Giuliani, working on behalf of Trump, dispatched Parnas to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton (!), following a right-wing conspiracy theory that somehow the real corruption in the 2016 campaign wasn't about Trump and Russia, but about Hillary receiving help from Ukraine. Parnas worked to get U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch fired, because her loyalty to Trump was alleged to be questionable. (She was accused, falsely, of refusing to hang Trump's photograph in her ambassadorial office in Ukraine.)

What was really going on was that Trump and people close to him wanted Yovanovitch out because she was working with Volodymyr Zelensky's administration on anti-corruption matters that had entangled people like Firtash and Deripaska in investigations in Ukraine.

There then developed what might be called a fellowship of interests between Donald Trump and Putin-friendly forces in Ukraine. Trump sent Giuliani and Parnas and others over there to dig up dirt on Biden. He recalled Yovanovitch from her post and in July of 2019 had his infamous phone call with Zelensky during which, among other things, Trump asked the Ukrainian president to help him find Hillary Clinton's emails, which a right-wing conspiracy theory said were being held on a server in Ukraine.

The real push Trump made, however, was to get Zelensky to initiate an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. To that end, Trump famously threatened to withhold $400 million in military aid that had been appropriated by the Congress to help Ukraine fight Russian aggression on its eastern border. Trump had previously directed his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to withhold the funds. Mulvaney directed the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of State, and the Defense Department to put the funds on hold. In the call with the Ukrainian president, Trump repeatedly told Zelensky to contact Giuliani, who had no official role in the U.S. government, and William Barr, who did, as Attorney General.

The Trump phone call with Zelensky was revealed by a whistleblower, and the whole Trump-Ukraine scandal took off. On September 11, the military aid funds for Ukraine were released from the hold, and on September 24, the first impeachment inquiry against Trump was initiated by the House of Representatives. Hearings by the House Intelligence Committee took testimony from Yovanovitch, William Taylor, the acting ambassador who replaced her, and from several other witnesses about the attempts to influence the government of Ukraine to do Trump's will.

The Judiciary Committee took the report of the Intelligence Committee and after a short period of hearings, voted to impeach Trump. On December 18, the House approved the articles of impeachment. Trump went to trial before the Senate and was found innocent, but the die was cast. Donald Trump had attempted to blackmail the president of Ukraine into helping his reelection by withholding military aid at a time when Ukraine had already lost Crimea to Russian aggression and was actively involved in a war on its eastern border with separatists supported and armed by Russia.

Parnas was indicted and convicted on federal charges of illegally funding the campaign of a congressman, Rep. Pete Sessions, to influence the firing of Ambassador Yovanovitch. Today, sitting at home in Florida under house confinement after spending four months of a 20 month sentence behind bars - as you can see, Parnas was not among the buddies Trump pardoned - he is reevaluating what happened not only to him, but the entire matter of the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

In an op-ed he wrote for Time magazine published yesterday, Parnas wrote, "I was used by Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in ways that helped pave the way for Putin to invade Ukraine, my native land. If Trump and Giuliani's plans had worked, the Ukrainians might not have had the necessary weapons, medical equipment, and other supplies they needed to fight back. I had no official position, but my primary task was to be their go-between with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and government officials. In retrospect, I concluded that my real job was to help undermine and destabilize the Ukrainian government."

Parnas is right about the real job he was doing for Trump. Sure, he was trying to get dirt on Biden and Hillary from Ukraine, but what he was also doing was enabling Vladimir Putin's continuing efforts to take over the country of Ukraine. Parnas helped to get the anti-Putin American ambassador fired. Trump tried to withhold military aid that had been appropriated by Congress to help Ukraine fight off Russian aggression on its eastern border. His own campaign manager in 2016 was working for Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and friend of Putin who has been sanctioned for his involvement in anti-Ukraine corruption. Manafort even shared Trump campaign information with Deripaska in 2016 through Konstantin Kilimnik, whom he knew to be a Russian intelligence agent. Despite agreeing to cooperate with Robert Mueller's investigation of Russia's connections to Trump and his campaign, Manafort reneged on that agreement, was pardoned by Trump, and has remained silent to this day about the connections between himself, Trump, Russia, and Ukraine.

Putin's attempts to destabilize Ukraine date back to his connections with Yanukovych when he was briefly president of Ukraine in 2004, and when he was elected in 2010 running as a pro-Russia candidate. Manafort was working for and being paid by Deripaska when he ran Yanukovych's campaign in 2010.

Tweet   @brothersjudd