All the Chickens, Kiev and Otherwise, Are Coming Home to Roost

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Oh, all the chickens, Kiev and otherwise, are coming home to roost, it seems. First, the FBI raids the home of Oleg Deripaska, Paul Manafort’s old 2016 running buddy. Then, on Friday, Rudy Giuliani’s good tovarich, Lev Parnas, gets convicted in federal court of violating a whole truckload of campaign finance laws on behalf of…well, you know. From CNBC:

Both men were accused and convicted of using money from a Russian man named Andrey Muraviev for donations to U.S. political candidates in a purported effort to start a recreational marijuana business. Foreigners are barred from making political donations in the United States. Parnas, 49, also was convicted of making illegal donations to PACs that supported Republicans, committees, which included a Trump super PAC. A Florida resident who was born in the former Soviet Union, Parnas previously played a role in Trump’s first impeachment, cooperating with Democratic investigators in that case. Parnas had helped Giuliani in an effort to dig up dirt on President Joe Biden in Ukraine.

Trump had withheld congressionally approved military aid for that country while pressuring its president to investigate the Democrat Biden.

I can’t speak to the eventual punishment of the miscreants, known and unknown. But this is the element of the previous administration’s corruption that I think is most likely to come out in close to its entirety. There are cooperating witnesses. It is a matter of money, which most Americans understand. And, frankly, the Volga Bagmen back in Moscow don’t care whether it comes out or not. It can’t touch them, and they got pretty much everything they wanted out of 2016 anyway.

John Eastman, the Thomas Paine of the Camp Runamuck Rebellion, gave a long interview to the National Review in which he described his highly detailed memo on how Mike Pence could overthrow the government as merely a woolgathering intellectual exercise that never was intended to be a plan of action.

But Eastman now tells National Review in an interview that the first of the two strategies Giuliani highlighted on stage — having Pence reject electoral votes — was not “viable” and would have been “crazy” to pursue.

What makes that admission remarkable is that Eastman was the author of the now-infamous legal memo making the case that Pence had that very power — that the vice president was the “ultimate arbiter” of deciding whether to count Electoral College votes. The two-page memo written by Eastman proposed that Pence reject certified Electoral College votes and then either declare Trump the winner or invalidate enough votes to send the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled a majority of delegations. That memo was first published in September in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril.

Yes, it is a remarkable admission, because, I believe, it is 100-percent Grade-A bullshit.

“They were internal discussion memos for the legal team. I had been asked to put together a memo of all the available scenarios that had been floated,” Eastman says. “I was asked to kind of outline how each of those scenarios would work and then orally present my views on whether I thought they were valid or not, so that’s what those memos did.” Who asked Eastman to write the first memo? “It was somebody in the legal team. I just don’t recall,” Eastman says. “It was by a phone conversation, and I’ve gone back in my phone records, and I have so many calls, I can’t tell, you know, which call it was.”

Here, see if putting your hand on this Bible right here helps your memory a tad.

This reminds me of when, in the middle of the Watergate scandal, we learned about The Huston Plan, a scheme drawn up by an ambitious White House aide named Tom Charles Huston in 1970. It called for an internal security apparatus that would lay waste to every provision of the Bill of Rights. President Richard Nixon loved it and sent it around to the various federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Even J. Edgar Hoover blanched at it. (Not that elements of it didn’t survive long enough to become part of what John Mitchell called “the White House horrors” three years later.) When it came out in the Senate Watergate hearings, the shock wasn’t that it existed, but that it was allowed to exist in an American administration long enough to be discussed seriously. How could officials of an alleged democratic republic even entertain the notion? That’s the question that John Eastman doesn’t answer in his semi-apologia. It’s the only question worth asking.

This is the man who gets to decide who’s president, according to John Eastman.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Royal Garden Blues” (Paul Barbarin’s Jazz Band of New Orleans.) Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans. (Also: I couldn’t find the Barbarin version so I subbed in Louis Armstrong’s.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here from 1966 is the mass funeral of children killed in the horrible coal slurry avalanche in Aberfan, Wales. They built a waste mountain atop an area run through with natural springs. Heavy rain on saturated ground brought the mountain down upon the town. It buried a school and 116 children died at their desks. Queen Elizabeth II declined to come to Aberfan in the immediate aftermath, which she later cited as the biggest regret she had in her reign. And, just as an added note, there are millions of tons of this stuff all over Joe Manchin’s West Virginia. History is so cool, but not when you ignore it.

Hey, nature.com, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Most specimens were found in a restricted area and stratigraphic interval, with some articulated skeletons grouped in clusters of individuals of approximately the same age. Our new discoveries indicate the presence of social cohesion throughout life and age-segregation within a herd structure, in addition to colonial nesting behaviour. These findings provide the earliest evidence of complex social behaviour in Dinosauria, predating previous records by at least 40 My. The presence of sociality in different sauropodomorph lineages suggests a possible Triassic origin of this behaviour, which may have influenced their early success as large terrestrial herbivores.

In other words, Dinos got together to enjoy each other’s company earlier than we silly humans always thought they had.

(WE INTERRUPT THIS FEATURE FOR A SPECIAL REPORT)

This really blows goats. From the BBC:

A private, anonymous collector from the US bought Big John's skeleton, which was put on public display at the Drouot auction house in Paris last week. The collector was "absolutely thrilled with the idea of being able to bring a piece like this to his personal use", Djuan Rivers, a representative for the buyer, said. The palaeontologists who discovered Big John managed to dig up 60% of the dinosaur's skeleton.Its 200 pieces - including the 2m-wide skull of the dinosaur - were painstakingly assembled by specialists in Trieste, Italy. Those bones form a skeleton 8m long by 3m high. There are signs of damage on the skull where researchers believe the dinosaur may have been struck by another in a battle.

Dammit, Big John lived then to make us happy now, not to be some gozillionnaire's garden gnome.

I’ll be back on Monday to see if any more Russians have been introduced to the FBI. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn mask, and for god’s sake, get the shots, and the boosters, too.

Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.