Stop the news, I want to get off. Chapter Two.

This was the Friday news dump to end all news dumps, the news dump equivalent of that giant barge full of garbage from New York that couldn’t find a home back in 1987. In rough order, it was reported:

1) That Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s Volga Bagmen who now sits under federal indictment, has indicated that he can put Rep. Devin Nunes, the famous White House lawn ornament, in the middle of the effort to concoct the Ukrainian Fantasy about the ratfcking of the 2016 election.

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2) That the inspector general of the Department of Justice will produce his report on December 9, and early reports are that, while it will be critical of sloppiness in the FBI, it will state that there was no bias against the president* in how the FBI investigation into the involvement of the Russian ratfckers was launched. Not that this will do anything to silence the screeching of the flying monkeys, but it pretty conclusively slams the door on the notion that the previous administration’s concern for the Trump campaign and Russia was the manifestation of some sort of dark manipulation based on inherent bias.

Mike Pompeo also finds himself in some hot water.

3) That The New York Times reports that the intelligence community has concluded that the entire Ukrainian Fantasy about the ratfcking of the 2016 election is an intercontinental okey-doke perpetrated by the Russian intelligence services.

In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill’s testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair.

4) That a massive release of State Department documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request ropes in practically everyone, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the effort to smear former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich, in order to get her out of the way so that the shakedown might proceed. This, of course, involves Rudy Giuliani, because anything that’s screwed up about this administration now involves Rudy Giuliani.



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You have to admit. That’s one helluva Friday.



Beyond the obvious conclusions—that the president* is guilty as hell, and he is using as his primary defense a disinformation project devised in Moscow, and, in the interest of advancing the latter, he tried to shakedown a vulnerable ally under literal siege by the military forces of the government that dreamed up the president*’s primary alibi—this sudden avalanche of information fairly screams out for the inquiry to play out as it will play out, and that short-circuiting its process is both bad detective work and bad politics.

Just on Friday, we learned that Nunes and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were roped into this mess, too. It’s nowhere near time for the garbage barge to make port. Sail on, brothers and sisters. Sail on.

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