Left Hand of Dorkness posted a link. I explicitly tried to stay away from posting this in hopes that it wouldn’t become a tangent on the credibility of the evidence revealed so far, which granted is not much. I don’t know if it has been corroborated. So, I tried to keep it purely in the hypothetical. Here is the original source material as well.
OK, thanks.
Anyhow, if it becomes a thing that Trump ordered a hit on a US ambassador, he’d be yanked out of office pronto. It would make Watergate look like nothing in comparison.
Here’s another pretty good explainer. The stuff about the apparent surveillance of Yovanovitch is toward the end of the article.
It sounds to me like Hyde is claiming to have a contact inside the embassy who is able to provide information on Yovanovitch’s movements. On 3/25, he tells Parnas, “she is being moved tomorrow”. The next day Hyde reports to Parnas that Yovanovitch is not being moved. He says his “contacts” can’t keep asking what’s going on because it will draw attention. He then says: “If you want her out they need to make contact with security forces.” I interpret this as meaning, “If you want Yovanovitch to be moved outside the embassy, my contacts can talk to the security forces and make it happen.” How this would be accomplished I have no idea. Hyde is a former Marine, and I believe Marines handle embassy security, so there’s certainly the possibility that he had contacts there who could influence her movements. But if Hyde is telling Parnas he can arranng for Yovanovitch to leave the embassy, I have to ask, “What the actual fuck?” I mean, there’s really no innocuous explanation for that. Whether they’re trying to kill her or simply discredit her somehow, it’s fucked up.
Most people don’t express being agog with “lol”.
Eta: not that this isn’t shady as fuck.
I thought I heard that Hyde is running for Congress from Connecticut. This has got to kill his campaign, if not lead to charges against him. What legitimate reason would he have to monitor the ambassador’s movements? And this damning quote: “They are moving her tomorrow . . . The guys over they [sic] asked me what I would like to do and what is in it for them.” WTF?
Who was directing Mr. Hyde? If it came from the Golfer-in-Chief, I’d like to be the first to call it the Strange Case of Doctor Jackoff and Mister Hyde.
Dick Cheney would be saying that’s going too far.
To be fair, it also looks like Hyde is pretty unstable. His interactions with the media and pretty much everyone appear to be a long stream of profanity. On May 16, 2019, Hyde turned up at Trump Doral Miami and may have had a mental health emergency:
[Cite](New Figure in Ukraine Scandal Was Taken Into Police Custody at Trump Resort Last Year – Mother Jones
scandal-was-taken-into-police-custody-at-trump-resort-last-year).
And, at least from the WhatsApp messages I saw excerpted (I haven’t had a chance to read to source documents yet), it looks like Hyde was sending all these messages to Parnas, and Parnas wasn’t responding much.
Hyde somehow has the means to donate tens of thousands of dollars to various Republicans, and this has got him lots of photos with people like Trump. But now I’m starting to lean to the explanation that he’s a mentally unwell guy who got Parnas’s contact information and Parnas probably wants him to go away. Parnas’s lawyer said as much in a Tweet, denying that Parnas was involved in any surveillance and saying that they believe Hyde’s “activities to be a reflection on his dubious mental state.”
Tough talk is one thing. But Hyde says he was actually talking with people and discussing prices.
And that’s why I’m posted this as a hypothetical. Certainly, the optics for Hyde are really bad. At least you would think so. Even if he was just being an Internet tough guy and didn’t mean anything by it, the level of creepy context in the text messages is not good.
Fixed link: New Figure in Ukraine Scandal Was Taken Into Police Custody at Trump Resort Last Year – Mother Jones
Just to circle back to this; are you saying there might be circumstances in which having an American ambassador killed might be act of war? If so, what would those circumstances be? And what country or group would this act of war be directed against?
He was obviously referring to the Soleimani killing. " on Yovanavitch" didn’t originally appear in the title of the thread. (see post #4)
Hyde does look pretty unstable. But Lev Parnas was communicating with Hyde and was aware enough of what Hyde was saying to respond to him even after Hyde outlined his plans.
If Hyde was some lone nut who started this all on his own, Parnas should have contacted the State Department and told them there was a crazy man stalking Yovanovitch.
“There is nothing in the Constitution prohibiting the assassination of the ambassador to Ukraine.”
— Mitch McConnell, probably
Sure it’s impeachable.
If there was undisputed evidence that Trump seriously ordered the US ambassador to the Ukraine to be murdered, then I’m sure the US House would vote to impeach.
And then Moscow Mitch and the rest of the traitors would not convict him in the senate.
I disagree. Republicans would circle the wagons, as usual.
Lies would be told. Stories muddled.
“BOTH SIDES! HILLARY MURDERED PEOPLE!”
Moscow Mitch would come to Trump’s defense.
Yovanavitch would be smeared by Fox News.
Republican politicians would humph and haw and say “that’s not a good thing, but…”
In short; Nothing would change.
Hyde must have trouble with metal detectors what with all the loose screws in his head. However, Parnas had a reason not to attract attention of authorities. He was already in well over his head with Giuliani’s plot.
I don’t know what to make of this story. Hyde seems to have a few screws loose, so it’s possible he imagined he was part of a plot against the ambassador. But if I understand the timeline correctly, there was only a few weeks between these messages and the ambassador leaving the country because her life was in danger. Is it just a weird coincidence that Hyde was sending messages about an imaginary assassination plot just a few weeks before she was forced to leave? Or was he part of something that was very real? It’s interesting too that Parnas mostly didn’t respond to Hyde’s messages? Was that because he thought the guy was insane and had no idea what he was talking about? Or did he not want to leave an electronic trail? He did respond to one message which indicates he was at least reading them, not completely ignoring them like you might expect if they were the ravings of a lunatic. It’s understandable that everyone from the Democrats to the media are being cautious with this story for now.
The real crux of the biscuit is Giuliani inserting himself into the proceedings, “with the knowledge and consent”, etc. They may have been trying to make her a mite nervous, supply a bit of motivation to get the Hell out of Dodge. But nothing more than that,
The Republicans will probably shift the conversation to what a horrible person she was and how she deserved to be murdered and present these fictional bad acts as a valid defense.
And they’re not going to get Trump on this without a full scale RICO investigation and no one’s going to go there while he’s in office. Look how long it took the feds to nail John Gotti. Trump has the crime boss methodology nailed down, he’s not going to instruct anyone to do anything illegal, he’ll merely mention illegal things that he thinks should happen and that will inspire his cronies to act on their own.