Corruption in plain sight

I read the transcript for another episode of the Gaslit Nation podcast. This one is titled The GOP is an Unregistered Foreign Agent: Part I. The hosts are Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior. The audio for it is 54 minutes.

This episode seems to have a slow start, talking of a few other things before getting to the GOP. This is the first episode with Chalupa back from maternity leave (episodes for August and September were recorded in July) and she talks about why she didn’t disclose the pregnancy until after the baby was born. One reason is her sister Alexandra Chalupa blew the whistle on Paul Manafort and there was (perhaps still is) an effort to say Alexandra had colluded in Ukraine in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton. All lies. Andrea goes into this in more detail at the end of the episode. Yeah, an attempt at a distraction and to investigate the investigators.

They talk about Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and dissident, how he was thrown into prison by the Russians, and how defiant he was. He sang the Ukrainian national anthem in a Russian courtroom. He’s been freed. Ukraine has been giving our hosts a lot of hope.

About investigating the investigators, Chalupa said:

So the overall trend we’re seeing is that people are being punished by Trump and Putin for simply following the law. That’s it. It’s like a letter, for instance, by Democratic senators asking the Ukrainian government why they halted cooperating with Robert Mueller and what information they have on Paul Manafort in regards to Mueller’s investigation, that is suddenly framed, even though those Senators are acting according to the Constitutional duty and obligations they have to the American people, that letter is suddenly framed as, Oh, look at these Democrats trying to frame Trump and trying to undermine our President. They’re traitors. So what we’re seeing is a continued pattern, whether it’s in the United States or Russia, and in Russia’s case you have people being arrested and in many cases sadistically beaten by riot police, for just exercising their Constitutional right to protest, to assemble. And to run for office. And they’re being arrested for just trying to carry out the law. That’s at the heart of all of this, is those who are trying to carry out the law are being arrested. Those who are just following proper protocol are being targeted. The checks and balances have never been more strained but we just have to remind ourselves that we are on the right side of the law. We are following the law.

We need to learn how autocracies work, because our country is beginning to work that way.

The talk turns to Rudy Giuliani. I covered his protection of the Russian Mafia while Mayor of NYC in a previous post, based on a previous Gaslit Nation episode. Kendzior and Chalupa had predicted the current Ukraine mess because they’ve been studying Giuliani.

Giuliani was carrying out acts of corruption in plain sight. You know, Giuliani was an object of a Senate investigation spearheaded by among others Elizabeth Warren to decide whether he’s a foreign agent. They officially declared that. They wrote letters about that. This has all been happening. It’s just that the media, generally speaking, has not been covering it and certainly not covering it with the urgency that it warranted.

Ukraine has been a laboratory for the Kremlin’s aggression. Things Russia might try on the West to destabilize they try on Ukraine first, things like cyberattacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid and hacking Ukraine’s election (which they caught and stopped). Ukraine is quite good at resisting Putin’s aggression. They have to be. And if America had been as observant and as resisting as Ukraine Hillary Clinton would be president now. So it’s in our interest to have a healthy and independent Ukraine.