Impeachment Day 17- Giuliani’s Guys Rooting Out Corruption Are… Corrupt
Things got real interesting this morning on the impeachment beat, as the indictments of four men were announced. Two of the men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican campaigns, dined with the president, and set up meetings in the Ukraine for Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Parnas and Furman were arrested Wednesday night at Dulles airport as they waited to board an international flight. Earlier in the day, they were seen lunching with Rudy Giuliani at the Trump Hotel. They’d both announced earlier this week plans to refuse to cooperate with three House committees overseeing an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
https://twitter.com/ShimonPro/status/1182355623775744000?s=20
Simultaneously with harvesting information they believed could be weaponized in the 2020 presidential race, the two men, along with Ukrainian-born Andrey Kukushkin and Florida businessman David Correia were running a straw donor scheme on behalf of foreign interests.
It’s too early in the game to sort all this out, so I’m just going to list all the known connections between these four men, assorted Republican entities, a natural gas exporter, and a failed bid to establish marijuana businesses in states where legalization was in progress.
From Buzzfeed News, which ran this story in advance of the news of the indictments:
The first public glimpse of Parnas and Fruman’s work emerged in May of this year, when Giuliani told the New York Times that Parnas had helped arrange a trip for him to Ukraine, where he hoped to meet with the newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, about matters that could help Trump. Critics said that amounted to evidence of foreign meddling in US elections, and Giuliani quickly announced that the meeting was off.
But the full extent to which the two unofficial envoys had inserted themselves into America’s diplomacy with Ukraine — a country both at war with and deeply compromised by Russia — has never previously been revealed.
What I’m certain will be established as leads from the indictments are followed, up is a wide ranging network of corruption overlapping with the White House’s back channel effort to legitimize the President’s belief in various conspiracy theories about the 2016 and 2020 elections.
As they carried out their campaign, they used their proximity to the White House to tout a new business they set up to sell natural gas in Ukraine, with photos posted on Facebook showing Parnas posing with President Trump in the White House and top House members on Capitol Hill.
Continuing with the Giuliani angle, the indictment alleges Parnas met with Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions seeking his “assistance in causing the U.S. government to remove or recall the then-U. S. Ambassador to Ukraine… ...Parnas’ efforts to remove the Ambassador were conducted, at least in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials.”
https://twitter.com/TexasTribAbby/status/1182309501522923522?s=20
From the Dallas News:
Parnas and Fruman started gaining notoriety in recent weeks for their work with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to investigate former vice president and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden over Biden’s son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Efforts by Trump and his allies to pressure Ukrainian officials over Biden is now the source of a formal impeachment inquiry that House Democrats are pursuing against Trump.
Sessions, a longtime GOP lawmaker, lost office last year to Democratic Rep. Colin Allred. The Republican is now seeking to revive his political career by launching a campaign in a neighboring congressional district where the sitting GOP lawmaker is retiring.
Sessions and GOP House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy both benefited with maxed out donations from the donor scheme.
The former Texas Congressman has previously acknowledged meeting one of the businessmen and writing in May 2018 to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to ask for US ambassador’s removal.
Sessions, for readers who might not remember, had an odious record while serving in the House. In addition to being one of the NRA’s top ten campaign donation recipients, he sponsored an anti-birthright citizenship bill, led the floor fight against laws easing marijuana penalties, and gained notoriety a decade ago over an earmark funding an embarrassing incident with a U.S. Army blimp.
In addition to the various connections to the Ukraine, there was another hustle aimed at hiding Russian investment in legal marijuana businesses.
From the Washington Post
The plan, according to prosecutors, was to acquire retail marijuana licenses in Nevada and other states. In September 2018, Parnas, Fruman, Correia, Kukushkin, and the foreign national met in Las Vegas to discuss the venture, the indictment charges. However, the group made efforts to hide the foreign national’s role due to what Kukushkin allegedly described as the businessman’s “Russian roots and current political paranoia about it.”
To fund the effort, the Russian businessman allegedly gave the others two payments totaling $1 million, and the American partners set out to try to win political support for their business plan. The four defendants “used those funds transferred by Foreign National-1, in part, to attempt to gain influence and the appearance of influence with politicians and candidates,” the indictment charges.
In October 2018, Parnas, Fruman, and Kukushkin attended a campaign rally for an unidentified political candidate in Nevada, an event also attended by a different Nevada state politician, according to the indictment. They sent their Russian moneyman photographs of themselves posing with the second candidate, officials said. After the event, Fruman donated $10,000 to that second candidate, but authorities say it was actually the Russian’s money.
The planned marijuana business faltered, however, when the men did not apply in time for a recreational marijuana license, missing a September 2018 deadline. Kukushkin told the Russian that they were “2 months to late to the game unless we change the rules,” and suggested a particular Nevada state official’s support was needed to take it further.
Let’s visit the archives (November 5, 2018) of the Nevada Independent to learn just who those candidates were:
An Eastern European businessman who made headlines for his links to a large contribution to a pro-Donald Trump Super PAC has contributed maximum donations to Republican candidates for governor and attorney general.
Igor Fruman, an Eastern European businessman tied to the “virtually unknown” company Global Energy Producers LLC, made maximum $10,000 contributions to Adam Laxalt and Wes Duncan on Nov. 1, according to their most recent campaign finance reports filed with the secretary of state’s office.
A company called “Global Energy Producers LLC” with links to Fruman and executive Lev Parnas made a $325,000 contribution to pro-Trump Super PAC America First Action in May, making them one of the largest contributors to the PAC. The group was accused of breaking campaign finance law in June after the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint asserting that it was highly unlikely the company would have enough capital to make such a large political contribution only one month after it was founded.
Holy cow! You’d think this would be enough Trump-related corruption for one day. But you’d be wrong.
Here’s Bloomberg News reporting about a meeting in 2017 between Trump and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson where a favor for a certain Rudy Giuliani was requested:
President Donald Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help persuade the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, according to three people familiar with the 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.
Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.
Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal. Neither episode has been previously reported, and all of the people spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the conversations.
So much corruption, so little time. But WAIT! There’s more, and this time it involves China, via the Financial Times:
Michael Pillsbury, an informal White House adviser on China, said he received information about the business activities of Hunter Biden during a visit to Beijing in the same week Donald Trump urged China to probe the son of Joe Biden. “I got a quite a bit of background on Hunter Biden from the Chinese,” Mr Pillsbury told the Financial Times.
****Department of Sour Grapes News****
https://twitter.com/billritter7/status/1182339146414804993?s=20
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Image Credit: From left to right: Vice President Mike Pence, Igor Fruman, Lev Parnas, President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. [Miami Herald]