Parnas + Bloomberg + Impeachment = A Pivotal Week For Trump
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | JANUARY 16, 2020
An interview by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and a campaign spending decision by Michael Bloomberg could have a profound impact on Donald Trump’s presidency and his race for a second term.
Maddow’s explosive interview occurred last night with Lev Parnas, who is under indictment for violations of federal campaign finance laws. Parnas worked closely with Rudy Giuliani to implement President Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine President Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Trump political opponent Joe Biden.
Parnas said that “Trump knew exactly what was going on.”
(The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report today finding that Trump broke the law in withholding military assistance to Ukraine authorized by Congress, an action Trump took as part of his campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden.)
While an all-out attack on Parnas’ credibility is coming from Trump supporters, much of what Parnas said in Maddow’s interview fits with testimony given by other witnesses and with documents.
This and other information recently made public is making it exceedingly difficult for Republican Senators to credibly prevent witnesses in the Trump impeachment trial which begins next Tuesday.
Meanwhile, last week, Michael Bloomberg, a Democratic presidential candidate and the eighth richest person in America, worth $53 billion, confirmed that whether he gets the nomination or not, he plans to spend as much as $1 billion to defeat Trump.
If Bloomberg does this, he would wipe out Trump’s current big financial advantage over the Democrats and he could play a decisive role in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The idea of one individual spending $1 billion in a presidential election is beyond imagination. It would be the culmination of a series of Supreme Court decisions that has resulted in candidates spending unlimited personal wealth, Super PACs funded by influence-seeking billionaires and multimillionaires spending huge amounts in federal elections, and presidential candidates raising huge individual contributions for their parties to spend in presidential campaigns.
But these are the rules and until they are changed, candidates, parties, and outside spenders will play by these rules.
This week may go down as pivotal in the history of the Trump presidency.
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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. See previous Notes from Fred here.
