What A Day - Lev Parnas Alone!

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

The House of Representatives turned in the articles of impeachment to the Senate on Wednesday, kicking off the next phase of the trial of President DJT. That, plus a bombshell MSNBC interview with Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, will give you twice your daily dose of Ukrainegate.  Virginia has voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, helping it cross the threshold of three-quarters of states needed to ratify it nationwide.  And in headlines: WBNA players score a salary slam dunk, sword divorce, and an injunction on a bad executive order.

It's Thursday, January 16th. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, or as our Jeopardy fans like to call us, What Is A Day. I'll take hard-hitting daily news for five mil, Alex. I don't think the numbers go that high. Yeah, they do. On today's show, we have our impeachment managers. We'll be talking about the crazy interview with Lev Parnas. Yeah, where he basically gave the entire game away with receipts, names. He named everybody. Yeah. So we'll definitely be talking about that a bit later.

Then Virginia passes the Equal Rights Amendment. And as always, some headlines. The House of Representatives has formally turned in their book report on President Trump and his alleged crimes. After a long back and forth, the House delivered the articles of impeachment. You might remember those were obstruction of Congress and abuse of power. So they delivered those to the Senate on Wednesday and approved seven Democrats to serve as impeachment managers in the trial. Congratulations, members of the House. That's right. I've taken over the soundboard at WOD and dropping sick Alice Cooper tunes on you. All right. Before we go further here, let's do a really quick recap on the role of impeachment managers and what they actually do. Sure. So basically, these individuals will serve as the

prosecutors of the House's case in the Senate. They're going to argue for Trump's removal during the trial. And for this impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi selected seven members. That's compared to the 13-member group in the trial of President Bill Clinton back in 1999. The emphasis is on litigators. The emphasis is on comfort level in the courtroom. The emphasis is making the strongest possible case to protect and defend our Constitution, to seek the truth for the American people. I'm very proud and honored that these seven members, distinguished members, have accepted this serious responsibility. That was Pelosi discussing the members and sort of why she ended up selecting them. Let's run through this starting lineup really quickly. Let's do it. All right. There's Adam Schiff, the House

Intelligence Committee chairman who has been deeply involved in the process so far. Then Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the person who helped draft the actual articles following Schiff's work. Yeah, these two seem sort of like natural choices, given what they were doing, you know, start to finish on your television in the committee hearings. These are the impeachment boys as we're referring to them now. The rest of the list includes Zoe Lofgren, senior member of the House Judiciary Committee. Interestingly, she was a Judiciary Committee staffer during the Nixon impeachment and a member of the committee during the Clinton impeachment. So again, makes sense that she would be involved

in this too. Hakeem Jeffries, he's the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Val Demings, a member of the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. She has an interesting background compared to the other folks that are in the mix here. Law enforcement also, first woman to serve as Orlando's chief of police before she was in Congress. Wow, so she's hard on that law and order. And then there's a couple of freshmen. There's Jason Crow, who's a freshman member of the House Armed Services Committee. And finally, another freshman member, Sylvia Garcia. She's from House Judiciary. We'll have to figure out an easy mnemonic device for this next time because, you know, a lot of initials happening.

One year and out the other. So the articles have been formally walked over to the Senate. But there are still some unresolved issues about whether there will be witnesses and recent news has added a little bit of urgency to that. Yeah, that's for sure. And we alluded to this on yesterday's show, but the House released a set of documents on Tuesday that further implicate Trump in this whole Ukraine scheme. They came from Lev Parnas, who is this peculiar character associated with Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer, another one of these random guys whose name you see everywhere that is in the mix on both dictating how they were going to execute this Ukraine kind of bribery scheme and also involved in, you know, foreign

policy when he shouldn't really be. Among the initial items that were released from Parnas was a note from a Ritz Carlton in Vienna saying, literally, quote, get Zelensky to announce that the Biden case will be investigated. So this is written down what the impeachment trial was seeking to accuse Trump of through tons and tons of witness interviews and testimony. Like it was written right there. Yeah, it's just really dumb Watergate. Yeah, absolutely. Everything has a literal paper trail with handwritten notes that like, he might as well sign them. What's the difference? Right. And there might be more to come also from all of this, like the House is saying that they

could release more of the documents in the future. We're meant to understand that this isn't the end of this. And there was a really pretty shocking interview with Parnas on Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night. And he basically went into great detail about the fact that Trump was aware of what he was doing, what Giuliani was doing the whole time, the highest levels of government were essentially dictating and in on this entire scheme. And he also stated something that has become pretty apparent throughout the course of this investigation, that what Trump and the administration were seeking out of Ukraine was never this sort of rooting out of corruption, if you will. It was

always about the Bidens and always about sort of exacting that over a political rival. What do you think is the main inaccuracy or the main lie that's being told that you feel like you can correct? That the president didn't know what was going on. President Trump knew exactly what was going on. He was aware of all my movements. I wouldn't do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president. I have no intent, I have no reason to speak to any of these officials. I mean, they have no reason to speak to any of these officials. I mean, they have no reason to speak to me.

Why would President Zelensky's inner circle or Minister Vakov or all these people or President Poroshenko meet with me? Who am I? They were told to meet with me. And that's the secret that they're trying to keep. Wow. Well, if Lev's going to tell it, then he's got to tell it all. He's a big fan of Usher's Confessions Wow. Well, if Lev's gonna tell it, then he's gotta tell it all. He's a big fan of Usher's Confessions album. Same, Lev. So anyway, this begs the question, where are we at on the witnesses thing? Is Mitt Romney just Mitt Romney-ing like,

oh, I wish people would do the right thing. I'm not going to do anything to force it. Honestly, that's what I'm going to believe until I see more. But basically, this group of Republican senators, including Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Lamar Alexander, they all wanted this vote on whether to call witnesses farther down the road. The whole fight that we've talked about on the show previously was Democrats wanted that promise up front and wanted to hear from people before, you know, this whole trial got kicked off. Now, these senators, these Republicans are saying that they got that for later on. And, you know, according to Collins, they're going to have witnesses like John Bolton come and testify, you know, seemingly that would be pretty damning to the president.

We also need to get witnesses like Hunter Biden in sort of a quid pro quo type scenario. For her part, Collins responded to the Parnas News on Wednesday by saying that the revelation of this at this time suggested that the House hadn't done a complete job in their investigation. I'm rolling my eyes. Yeah. And I mean, the thing to note here is that this material was subpoenaed last October. So there was an effort to get it and a judge only granted permission for it to be shared with investigators pretty recently. So the timing of it is not because they were like, oh, gee,

I don't know what to do here. Yeah, Susan, I hope you heard that. Hope you know that now. Well, what more do we know now about how the trial's actually going to go? I hear rumors Ted Cruz has to duct tape his mouth. Wow. Yeah. What is the worst? That's not exactly what I've heard, but, you know, things could change.

It's basically, you know, any AMC theater type rule. Like senators have to remain in their seats the whole time there's no that is not a rule at any theater it is a rule well like i think you could get up and go to the bathroom oh yeah you're not yeah well whatever i mean listen some of us some of us go to more stringent theaters and others i understand anyway uh there's also a rule about no electronic devices so none of the senators can be texting, posting or gramming throughout the trial proceedings. Couldn't be me. Yeah.

But, you know, after all of this, there's going to be more procedural stuff over the next couple of days. And then we're finally anticipating that the trial will formally begin next Tuesday. We'll keep you updated on that and, you know, what type of theater rules they're sticking to. In exciting, wow, this should have happened a long time ago, but let's just shut up and enjoy it news. The newly Democratic Virginia House legislature has voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. That makes it the 38th and final state needed to ratify the constitutional amendment that would guarantee equal rights to all Americans, regardless of sex. I've heard more train in this job than I have in my entire life before it. It's my favorite sound effect we have ever done. Okay, so the air horns are totally warranted

because this is a huge victory and also a watershed moment for the women's rights activists who've been fighting for this, you know, for nearly a century. So House Speaker Eileen Fillicorn, she is the state's first female speaker in, you know, the 401 year history of Virginia's state legislature. So she said, quote, For the women of Virginia and the women of America, the resolution has finally passed. Every Democrat and four Republicans voted to ratify the amendment. Here's Virginia House Delegate Danica Rome speaking just before the vote took place. As I think about what brings people together, as I think about where do we find common ground, I just think back home. And I think to the fact that my mom and I, we probably agree on about three pieces of public policy. If you work 40 hours a week,

you should be able to make enough money to take care of yourself. Scottish independence, no one ever sees that one coming. And ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, it's like such an easy and obvious thing that should have existed in the world long ago. But unfortunately, proponents of the ERA are still in for a lengthy legal battle due to the original deadline to get the amendment ratified in the U.S. Constitution. Akilah, can you just explain what this fight actually might look like? idea of the ERA has been around for almost 100 years. And it finally went to states to ratify in the 70s after Congress finally allowed that. But there was the caveat of a deadline. And so basically, 38 states had to ratify it within a certain time period. 38, by the way, is three

fourths of the states in this country. There are 50. It's really 37.5. But that's just math. Anywho, that's the threshold to add a new constitutional amendment. They missed the deadline by several decades. With Virginia, we're at 38 states. But as I said, the deadline is passed. And now some of the states that deadline and whether it can be enforced because there actually isn't anything legally binding in the text about the deadline. And ERA supporters say that states can't really unratify what they've already ratified. There are no takebacks, right? So ERA supporters say, you know, let's get this thing going. But I imagine that they're probably going to be challenged on it. Yeah. So I mean, right now, we have this progress in Virginia that is happening, but it definitely sounds like the constitutional amendment status of it will be decided later in court. For sure. Well, we will keep you all posted, but that is not all of our Virginia news today. We've got one more story to share.

Yesterday, Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency because a not at all well-regulated militia of white extremists has planned an armed gun rights rally on Monday's MLK holiday in the state. And fearing a repeat of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville back in 2017, Northam has called on the organizers to disavow hate groups from other states that have planned to join the rally. State intelligence listed credible threats similar to the ones made prior to the Charlottesville rally as a reason for the state of emergency. So yes, we're going to let you know what happens, but stay safe out there and maybe just avoid Richmond on Monday. And now for some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. The WNBA and its players union finalized a deal on Tuesday that will triple the salaries of top players and increase average salary above six figures for the first time ever.

Slam dunkers of the world unite. I count myself among them. Apart from a new max salary of $500,000, benefits include full salary during maternity leave and an annual child care stipend of $500,000. Benefits include full salary during maternity leave and an annual child care stipend of $5,000. So if your mom's in the WNBA, you can ask for more presents now. The agreement comes among a rising tide of athletes across women's sports demanding fair compensation. Massive congrats to the players. Please consider using your extra income to buy what a day mugs on store.cricket.com. Thank you in advance. President Trump signed what his administration is calling part one of a major trade deal with China on Wednesday.

Parts of the deal include the United States agreeing to reduce tariffs on Chinese goods and China pledging to more than double its purchases from American farmers. Now, as a refresher, this deal comes after nearly two years of a vicious trade war that Trump started. It hit soybean farmers in the United States especially hard and cost taxpayers $28 billion. Critics are saying that those costs outweigh the benefits of this new deal, especially considering Trump wanted bigger structural changes from China that weren't included. Some updates to something we discussed on Monday. Earlier this week, we told you that Texas Governor Greg Abbott was taking advantage of a Trump executive order to completely block the settlement of refugees in his state.

Really nice guy. Well, he's not doing that anymore because on Wednesday, a federal judge suspended the Trump policy on grounds that it's probably illegal. The judge says the order will likely be found unconstitutional because it puts authority over immigration policy in the hands of states and localities rather than the federal government. The injunction will remain in place while a legal challenge against the order plays out. It's been brought by three faith-based nonprofits that work on refugee resettlement. Tough to know who's in the right here, but I'm guessing it's the folks who are led by a higher power to do charity. Yeah, just a shot in the dark. Here's something terrifying. A guy in the midst of a messy divorce asked the court to pursue a trial by combat,

which would involve him using a katana to sword fight against his ex-wife or her lawyer. I believe this was the original plot of the movie Marriage Story. The man, whose name is David Ostrom, apparently got the idea from Game of Thrones and says trial by combat was used as recently as 1818 in British court. Very recent. Yes. It's funny until you realize he's fighting for custody of his child, meaning someone will have to tell this guy's son or daughter, your father loves you so much he wants to

kill someone with a sword for you. Obviously, this is a stunt and the judge is not taking it seriously. Some advice for you, Mr. Ostrom. I know this is an insanely difficult time, but if you're not happy with the custody ruling, you can always get more time with your child by simply putting on a mask and pretending to be their elderly British nanny. And lastly, some more good news. I think that the knife thing is fine. I think that's good news. Whatever. An appeals court in Wisconsin put a hold on purging over 200,000 people from the state's voter rolls.

This means at least one barrier that could have disproportionately affected minorities and low-income voters is out of the way. Go get it. That's right. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, give us a rating, make an IG filter that lets you impersonate us on social media, and tell your friends to listen.

By the way, if you're into reading and not just subtitles like me because I was instructed to by Bong Joon-ho, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And that's how you nail a Mrs. Doubtfire reference after 27 years.

You for Janiyah Doubtfire. What a day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tunn is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein and our senior producer

is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.