John Cassidy of The New Yorker wrote about the indictment and arrest of two men who were leaving the country with one-way tickets. Photographs of these men have been published showing them having a meeting at the White House with Trump and on another occasion, dining with Rudy G. at a Trump hotel and also a photo of them with Don Jr.
Cassidy writes:
What’s the most arresting detail that’s been unearthed so far in the unfolding scandal of Rudy Giuliani and the Ukrainian grifters? The more you delve into the story, the more it reads like something Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen cobbled together after a guys’ getaway to Kiev. To make the selection a bit easier, let’s make it a multiple-choice question:
(a) Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, whom the Wall Street Journalpolitely describes as “Florida businessmen who are U.S. citizens born in former Soviet republics,” were both carrying one-way tickets out of the country when federal agents arrested them at Dulles International Airport, on Wednesday night, and charged them with breaking campaign-finance laws by disguising donations from foreign entities.
(b) Parnas, a forty-seven-year-old native of Ukraine who arrived in the United States in 1976, owns a company called Fraud Guarantee. Evidently, it’s some sort of fraud-prevention advisory service. According to the Times, this company paid Giuliani hundreds of thousands of dollars for “business and legal advice.”
(c) According to Buzzfeed News, Parnas has in the past “worked for three stockbrokerages that were later expelled by regulators for fraud and other violations—though he was never individually charged—and racked up nine court judgments for failing to pay loans and other debts.”
(d) Parnas once tried to produce a movie called “Anatomy of an Assassin.” It didn’t go well. “Mr. Parnas is a con man, he is a crook,” Dianne Pues, a New Jersey woman who invested in the project, toldthe Miami Herald. “He conned us from day one. . . . He financially ruined us.”
(e) As he travelled around doing whatever he did, Parnas didn’t stint on expenses. “There were bills running to hundreds of dollars at exclusive restaurants such as Novikov in London and BLT Prime in Washington,” Buzzfeed reported. “During one of his many trips to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, there was a $657 charge at Tootsie, the popular strip club in the heart of the city.”
(f) Fruman, a fifty-three-year-old native of Belarus, apparently runs an import-export business that ships goods to and from Ukraine. He also reportedly owned, or owns, a beach club in the Black Sea city of Odessa, which has long been a stronghold of organized crime. The name of the club: Mafia Rave.
(g) In the spring of last year, after the dynamic duo donated three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to America First Action, a super pac that supports Donald Trump, they were invited to the White House, where they had dinner with the President and got their pictures taken with him. “Thank you President Trump !!! Making America great !!!!!! incredible dinner and even better conversation,” Parnas posted on his Facebook account.
(h) On Thursday, Trump said, “I don’t know those gentlemen.”
As I said, it’s a tough choice. On human-interest grounds, I’m choosing Option D, but the grip-and-grin picture of Parnas and Trump at the White House is also priceless—as is a picture of him having coffee with at Giuliani the Trump International Hotel in Washington last month. And let’s not forget the shot of Fruman and Parnas having breakfast in Beverly Hills last year with Donald Trump, Jr., and Tommy Hicks, Jr., a friend of Trump, Jr., who was then running America First Action.
But humor and Schadenfreude aside, this is a deadly serious matter. While there is still a good deal of murk surrounding the activities of Fruman and Parnas, we do know that they were two very busy and well-connected fellows. In addition to doing some of Giuliani’s bidding in Ukraine, as he sought to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Parnas got hired by a law firm run by two other Trump supporters and frequent Fox News guests, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the law firm “hired Mr. Parnas in July to serve as an interpreter related to their representation of Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, who was detained in Vienna, in 2014, on corruption charges filed in the U.S.”
Meanwhile, Parnas and Fruman were also representing, and acting at the behest of, at least two Eastern European parties who haven’t yet been identified. The indictmentsays that their political donations, some of which were routed through shell companies to hide their identities, “were made for the purpose of gaining influence with politicians so as to advance their own personal financial interests and the political interests of Ukrainian government officials, including at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working.”
Who was this Ukrainian official, and what did he or she want? That’s one of the things we don’t know yet, but the indictment says that Parnas met with a U.S. congressman, widely believed to be the former Texas Republican congressman Pete Sessions, and sought his “assistance in causing the U.S. Government to remove or recall the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine”—Marie Yovanovitch—and these “efforts to remove the Ambassador were conducted, at least in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials.”
We also know that the other Eastern European who was employing Parnas and Fruman is Russian. The indictment says that some of the donations that Fruman, Parnas, and two other individuals made in 2018 were really funded by a certain “Foreign National-1,” with a view to obtaining licenses for a recreational-marijuana business in certain U.S. states, including Nevada. One of the other conspirators is quoted in the indictment, and he says Foreign National-1’s identity was kept hidden because of “his Russian roots and current political paranoia about it.”
What does all this add up to? Although Parnas and Fruman hardly appear to fit the bill of men of international intrigue, they clearly played significant roles in the Giuliani-inspired effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, get rid of Yovanovitch, and help Donald Trump get reëlected. That means they are potentially important witnesses in the Presidential-impeachment inquiry.
The House Democrats who are investigating Trump will most certainly want to hear what Parnas and Fruman have to say. (At least one House committee has already served a subpoena on them.) And, according to ABC News, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the campaign-finance case against Parnas and Fruman, is also investigating their business relationship with Giuliani. That’s not good news for Rudy or Trump.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered the pair to be held in detention until they secure a bail bond of a million dollars each. Right now, they are being represented by John Dowd, a former lawyer for Trump, which would suggest they aren’t about to turn on their former associates and spill. But, like Michael Cohen, they could always have a change of heart.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One more piece we need to add to the new national curriculum: a semester on corruption, mafias, and the many kleptocracies in the world. Average Joe is blind to what we and Cassidy see.
Trump could always pardon them. Then they could use their one-way tickets, fly away, and go into hiding somewhere.
If Rudy gets convicted, Trump will probably pardon him. But right now he is saying, “Rudy Who?”
These Ukrainian grifters and their dark money from outside the country are another example of why we must rid ourselves of Citizens United. It’s a matter of national security.
Well, here we are. We’ve become one part banana republic, one part Russian kleptocracy, and Teflon Don the Con will keep getting away with it, as a reporter said of Roy Cohn, until he doesn’t. This will all catch up to him eventually. And then he will go to prison–he and a lot of his capos like Guiliani. Trump is a traitor who just sold out our allies, the Kurds. He’s golfing and attending his Praise Me rallies while those who fought alongside us die. Eventually, much of the long, sordid story of Trump’s sell-out to the Russian kleptocracy will be told. Will people remember his apologists and enablers?
Bob,
I feel certain that the curtains shielding Trump’s actions will in time fall away and the public will learn the full truth about his kleptocracy.
I do not doubt that he sacrificed the Kurds because of his business interests in Turkey.
And because removal of the Kurds from Northern Syria removes the last vestiges of American control from Syria, where the Russians have a major naval base. Please forgive my language, but Trump is a POS. He is golfing while our allies die.
The motive for his behavior can be found in two places:
1) greed
2) pleasing Putin
The blood of the Kurds is on Trump’s dirty little hands.
The Kurds did fight on the side of the allies in WWII. They fought with the British in Iraq against a Nazi backed coup. Some Kurdish troops fought with British in Greece and Abania.https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/10/9/1891413/-The-Kurds-did-help-the-Allies-in-WWII
But Trump said they did not participate in the Normandy landing (only the UK and Canada did) so we owe them nothing. Said Cadet Bonespurs.
No matter what happens to the Traitor and Liar in Chief, he will always have a rabid following that thinks he is the chosen one and that the Deep State got him.
How many of those idiots are there? We see them show up at his bragging-hate rallies. Most of them are still fighting the Civil War and they are over fifty, white, uneducated, biased, racisits, segregationists and easy to fool because they want to pretend their way of thinking is the right way and DT is their Pied Piper. They would follow him to hell if he led them there and every step of the way they’d believe they are on their way to Heaven.
If DT ever gets out of prison and starts holding rallies again, they will pay hundreds for the tickets that will let them bathe in the glory of their messiah.
Rudy G: Selling favors from the President seems to be quite the lucrative business.
Reality is beginning to resemble an Edward G. Robinson movie.
Interesting that the indictment says that Fruman and Parnas were foreign nationals making illegal contributions to Don’t the Con’s campaign, and they concealed their identities. Nice pictures of Parnas with Trump and Fruman and Parnas with Don, Jr., concealing their identities, huh.
What gives here? Why does the Teflon Don get pass after pass after pass?
Actually, I read that these two gangsters were naturalized citizens. They were funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to ztrump.
Ah, I see. I should have read further in the indictment. They concealed the foreign national source of the funds that they donated.
WHAT GETS ME, IS ALLTHE PEOPLE WHO DO NOT RECOGNIZE THE MOBSTER AND HIS FIXERS IN THE White House!
If anything shows the disconnect that has divided Americans, it is the fact that so many Americans, do not know. the truth, because the GOP has disseminated disinformation.
Now with Trump’s mouth out of control and those gangstas running the show… I do not know whether to laugh, or cry, because THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING…and America will never recover its reposition for the Rule of Law.
Even as I speak, behind the scenes the FED is doing some very, very bad stuff…
Fed Votes to Lighten Regulations for All but the Largest Banks https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/business/economy/federal-reserve-bank-regulations.html
The Fed Is Offering $100 Billion a Day in Emergency Loans to Unnamed Banks and Congress Is Not Curious Enough to Hold a Hearing. https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/09/the-fed-is-offering-100-billion-a-day-in-emergency-loans-to-unnamed-banks-and-congress-is-not-curious-enough-to-hold-a-hearing/
It all sounds very…SWAMPY to me. (As in “drain the….”)
Yes, some of the Trumpies would follow their dear leader to the end as noted above. (Washington burning, Trump deep under ground in a bunker raving on twitter though the internet had long ago been destroyed etc…etc…)
Others have been royally duped and/or fooled themselves. They are having a rude awakening that’s for sure.
Case in point: smaller, family farms which are now being thrown under the tractor -despite the fact that rural America voted solidly for the truly unwholesome Groper-in-Chief. (What farmer would let Donald anywhere near his or her daughter? Seriously.)
Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue basically spelled it all out recently: goodbye small farms.
“In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Perdue told reporters after appearing at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, according to The Associated Press. “I don’t think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/463955-trump-agriculture-chief-no-guarantee-small-farms-can-survive
Small farms, neighborhood schools, the family business down the street. Gone! The future model of America for the diehard Trumpies is Wal-Mart with a healthy dose of Chinese and Russian authoritarianism poured on top. All hail the likes of Betsy DeVos.
It’s a grotesquerie.
Ah, I’ve finally found the right word for this era. Now, I can go puke.
Sickening isn’t it?
Thanks, John. On target as usual.
Why are we blaming Trump. Trump is not the problem; he is the symptom. The problem is the entire Republican elected establishment who support him because they are in full agreement with almost everything he has done. Or in the least are not concerned enough to speak up. The problem is all those voters who still support him in spite of the damage done to our Democracy. Hitler did not personally kill one Jew (that I know of).
“Good Germans” committed those crimes. It is time that we hold deplorables responsible for their behavior and call them out for the slime they are.
“No amount of Marxian determinism can explain the actions of his working class supporters”. In fact the arguments fall flat on their face. Romney only received a few percentage points less of the vote in those states. And that may be due to more minorities voting in 2012.
How can one put the word Christian and Trump in the same sentence.
Agreed. The Republican party has become a den of unethical thieves.