Actually just Lev this time.

(Ol’ Igor is keeping a low profile.)

Parnas poses an extreme risk of flight, and that risk of flight is only compounded by his continued and troubling misrepresentations”

The government’s position is based on Parnas’s misrepresentation of his financials and a failure to disclose vast assets, including a recent million-dollar deposit from Russia into his wife’s bank account.

Probably just his wife’s birthday. Russia really goes all out on birthdays.

From the article:

Trump had been repeatedly told that US freedom of action against North Korea was constrained by the fact that the regime’s artillery could demolish the South Korean capital in retaliation for any attack, inflicting mass casualties on its population of some 25 million in the total metropolitan area.

“They have to move,” Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. “They have to move!”

Trump then told his national security team: “I want an evacuation of American civilians from South Korea.”

A senior official warned that such an evacuation would be interpreted as a signal that the US was ready to go to war, and would crash the South Korean stock market, but Trump is reported to have ignored the warning, telling his team: “Go do it!”

Alarmed Pentagon officials ignored the order.

I wonder if she can outlive Chuck. Will she be succeeded by her grandson?

That’s still no record. France’s Louis XIV outlived his sons and his grandsons. He reigned 72 years and 110 days. His great grandson, Louis XV, in his own turn, ruled for 59 years and was succeeded by his grandson.

A long-awaited Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia rebuts allegations of illegal spying and that political bias played a role in the probe begun ahead of the 2016 election, but finds serious faults in other areas.

From the report:

“The decision to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was made by the
FBI’s then Counterintelligence Division (CD) Assistant Director (AD), E.W. “Bill” Priestap, and reflected a consensus reached after multiple days of discussions and meetings among senior FBI officials. We concluded that AD Priestap’s exercise of discretion in opening the investigation was in compliance with Department and FBI policies, and we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced his decision.”

Remember when lenders made all those mortgage loans to people who couldn’t possibly make the payments, especially to minorities? Those were some good times when that came to a head.

Guess what’s going to happen when lenders realize that they have made student loans to people who can’t possibly make the payments, especially to minorities. One major complication: this time, in a great number of cases, the lender is the government.

“Already in the student loan world, we are seeing default levels that approach what there was in the subprime mortgage world.”

Just like the 2008 crisis, this one reverberates through the housing market. Late or defaulted payments hurt young people’s credit scores, and that prevents them from getting mortgages.

Forget the new movies. Spend a few hours with “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.” (2019 version, no nudity)

What a page-turner!

And in case you hate all the reboots today, here’s the original 1974 version. (SPOILER ALERT for the original: the bad guy high-tailed it out of Dodge before the marshall arrived. It was the only plot with less development than Picnic at Hanging Rock.)

The House gave him no choice. They stripped away his right to vote, so he needed to resign in order to get that vote back onto his party’s side.

That means that the first two congressmen to endorse Donald Trump have now both pled guilty to felonies. The charges against them have been known since the summer of 2018, but they were both re-elected in November of that year!

“And in some places, it doesn’t even make sense to try.”

The evidence of this has been significant for decades now, but Americans have kinda sorta ignored it since it always seemed to affect faraway places like the Solomons and Maldives, or little-known island countries with exotic names, like Nauru and Tuvalu.

Now, however, some of America’s natural treasures, the low-lying Florida Keys, are in immediate danger, and their county is evaluating engineering projects that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit very few people – in one case affecting only 20-30 homes. Their decision will likely be to give up.

“How do you tell somebody, ‘We’re not going to build (up) the road to get to your home’? And what do we do?” Mr. Gastesi asked. “Do we buy them out? And how do we buy them out — is it voluntary? Is it eminent domain? How do we do that?” Administrators and elected officials are going to have to start to rely on a “word nobody likes to use,” Mr. Gastesi said, “and that’s ‘retreat.’”

“The impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection.”

The House Intelligence Committee voted 13-9 to adopt the impeachment report. which will now go to the Judiciary Committee.

If you have been following the story closely, you won’t find much new about Trump in the report, although it does a nice job of outlining the timeline.

However …

Here are some things you may not know:

The committee hit the jackpot by subpoenaing phone records from AT&T and Verizon. The evidence showed that Devin Nunes spoke several times to Rudy Giuliani earlier this year, around the same time that Giuliani was publicly attacking Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. The records also show that in April, Nunes spoke to Giuliani’s recently-indicted henchman, Lev Parnas, whose lawyer has claimed he was explicitly tasked by Trump to investigate the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine. Nunes never disclosed his calls with Giuliani or Parnas, although he obviously realized that both of them figure prominently in the impeachment proceedings and therefore that any dealings with them could be perceived as a conflict of interest.

(Here is the WaPo’s take on the call records.)