WTF Just Happened Today

Thursday, October 10, 2019

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1/ Two men who worked with Giuliani to find damaging information about Biden and his son have been charged with conspiring to violate campaign finance laws that prohibit foreign nationals from contributing to U.S. campaigns. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are two key subjects in the House's impeachment inquiry. They were indicted and accused of making "secret agreements" to hide the fact that they were laundering foreign money into U.S. campaigns through a range of corporate identities by using "straw donors" to make the contributions. Parnas and Fruman allegedly used the agreements to hide their scheme from candidates and federal regulators. The indictment alleges that on one occasion, they lobbied a then-sitting member of Congress at the request of "one or more Ukrainian officials." (BuzzFeed News / Washington Post / ABC News / New York Times / Reuters / Associated Press / NBC News)

• Parnas and Fruman spent lavishly as they dug for dirt on Biden. BuzzFeed News obtained unprecedented access to scores of bank records from private business accounts controlled by Lev Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman as they carried out a campaign now at the center of the first presidential impeachment inquiry in a generation. (BuzzFeed News)

2/ Trump and Giuliani pressured then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during a meeting in 2017 to persuade the DOJ to drop a criminal case against one of Giuliani's clients. The client was an Iranian-Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab, who was facing federal prosecution in New York on charges of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. Zarrab also had ties to top Turkish government officials. Tillerson refused to help Trump and Giuliani make the case go away, arguing that doing so would be illegal and constitute interference in an ongoing investigation. Tillerson told then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly about the incident during a conversation in the hallway after the meeting ended, emphasizing that following through with Trump's request would be a crime. "Suppose I did talk to Trump about it," Giuliani said after initially denying that he ever raised Zarrab's case with Trump. "So what?" Giuliani was not Trump's personal lawyer at the time Trump made the request. (Bloomberg / CNN / Esquire / Vanity Fair)

• Lindsey Graham fell for a prank phone call in August from Russian pranksters posing as the Turkish defense minister. Alexey Stolyarov and Vladimir Kuznetsov are Russian c...

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