Draining Ukrainian Swamps
By 
Let’s see how the highly principled anti-corruption crusade of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani is going:
As Rudy Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials last spring to investigate one of Donald Trump’s main political rivals, a group of individuals with ties to the president and his personal lawyer were also active in the former Soviet republic.
Their aims were profit, not politics. This circle of businessmen and Republican donors touted connections to Giuliani and Trump while trying to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company. Their plan was to then steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.
As much as I hate to besmirch the high integrity of these individuals, I must admit I am reluctantly reaching this conclusion:
If I’m reading this story correctly, it seems possible that the Trump administration is actually *not* as fanatically obsessed with fighting corruption in the Ukrainian fossil fuel industry as I’d been lead to believe. https://t.co/3H0mNBpDUI— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 7, 2019
Yglesias also has a good longer story about how the conspiracy theory Trump consigliere Bill Barr is pursuing is roughly on a par with “Sandy Hook was a false flag operation.”