Every time U.S. President Donald Trump’s sympathizers bring up my name, “Leshchenko,” at the U.S. House impeachment hearings, I can imagine the effort it takes. The name has a Ukrainian sound in the middle that for a lack of an English equivalent is transliterated as this complicated combination, “shch.” Not an easy one to say.

So to spare American politicians the trouble of having to deal with the “shch” sound, I want to clarify my actions and respond to the accusations made during the hearing by Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Steven Castor, Republican counsel for the House Oversight Committee.

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Falsehood #1

The first narrative is that I was allegedly a source of information for Fusion GPS, a company that had been preparing a dossier on Trump and his possible connections in Russia. This was claimed by Nellie Ohr in her statement to the U.S. Congress last year.

In their statements, congressmen Jordan, Nunes and counsel Castor assume and sometimes even falsely claim that I was working for the Democrats and “digging” up dirt on Trump and his staff. To stop this flow of lies, I tweeted back at Congressmen Jordan, Nuns and counsel Castor.

I said I’ve never met Ohr or anyone else involved with Fusion GPS. As a member of the Ukrainian parliament, which I had been until August, I have held thousands of meetings over the past five years. But I have never met these people.

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Falsehood #2

The second narrative is that I allegedly tried to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2016 by targeting his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort. I allegedly did so by publishing the papers known in Ukraine as the “black ledger” of the Party of Regions, the party of the former President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.

Representatives of the
Republican Party say that since the documents mentioned payments to Manafort during his work for Yanukovych, it must mean I did it to hurt Trump’s campaign. Yet these statements don’t pass even the most basic fact-checking.

He (Morrison) said he approached White House lawyers after the call ended to ask whether the rough transcript should be closely guarded to prevent its contents from becoming public. The transcript of the call, which was later released by the White House after questions were raised about the conversation, was ultimately placed on a secure server typically reserved for national-security secrets.

11.17.19

Happy Sunday. There are 351 days until the presidential election. Another embarrassing loss for Trumpland, when Trump gave Rudy’s goons a “secret mission” and Barr is a danger to the U.S.

Note: Hey, everybody. How was your Saturday? Ours was great, but we realized that taking a day off from doing this newsletter is a great way to gauge just how much awful stuff Trump is doing on a daily basis. It’s like every day the president of the United States takes a giant shit on the country and we take a big shovel and scoop it out and that’s TBS.

So now that we’re taking Saturdays off, that means an extra day of presidential shit piles up. So like we haven’t even talked about Roger Stone getting the book thrown at him. We haven’t talked about Trump pardoning murderous scum.

And we haven’t talked about this crazy dumb motherfucker trying to intimidate a witness WHILE SHE WAS TESTIFYING. Or the lesson that witness taught this nation about courage. And public service. And doing what’s right. (Don’t worry. We’ll find a way to bring all this patriotic good person talk back to the parable about feces piling up. Because hey, if there’s one thing we know people like, it’s spending part of their Sunday talking about trump taking shits on the country.

And you know you like picturing giant pies as if they came from some kind of human-elephant-cow hybrid. And we really want to dig in on the shoveling part and... ya know what, this has gotten a little out of hand. We’re just gonna stop right there. Hope everyone has a great Sunday. Except, ya know, the shitter.)

Note two: About Trump’s unexpected trip to Walter Reed yesterday for the first “phase” of his physical, yeah, they’re obviously lying. There’s a lot that’s off about this. But there’s a lot that’s off about Trump. He’s always seemed like sick piece of shit to us, so we weren’t surprised to hear something might be wrong. We encourage you all to pray for the president’s health. The outcome you might choose to pray for, however, is totally up to you.