LEV AND IGOR

| 7:49 pm EST December 20, 2019
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Last night the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates held their sixth debate. One of the topics discussed was campaign financing. Some of the Democratic candidates are accepting Super PAC donations in an attempt at building a competitive war chest to defeat Donald Trump, while vowing to ban Super PACs once they’re in office. Some Democratic candidates are refusing to accept Super PAC donations to begin with.

It’s a worthy debate, and one that should be had. There are good points on both sides. Here’s what stands out, though. The Democrats running for president are debating whether or not to use fully legal campaign finance tools in order to accept fully legal money from American donors. At the same time, some Republicans – including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy – have been taking campaign donations from Lev and Igor.

That’s right, Republicans have been caught taking dirty foreign money from Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the recently arrested henchmen from Donald Trump’s Ukraine extortion scandal. McCarthy and others have insisted that they didn’t know the money was foreign, and they’ve given it back, or given it to charity.

It’s only considered a crime to take foreign money if you know it’s foreign money, but still. The Republicans have been busy taking money from Lev and Igor, at the height of the Lev-Igor-Rudy-Trump international crime spree, even as the Democrats try to figure out how best to adhere to the spirit of campaign finance rules. if that doesn’t delineate the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans these days, nothing does.