Lev Parnas
Lev Parnas is a Soviet-born American businessman and former associate of Rudy Giuliani. Parnas, Giuliani, Igor Fruman, John Solomon, Yuriy Lutsenko, Dmytro Firtash and his allies, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, were involved in creating the false Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, which is part of the Trump–Ukraine scandal's efforts to damage Joe Biden. As president, Donald Trump said he did not know Parnas nor what he was involved in; Parnas insisted Trump "knew exactly what was going on".
In October 2021, Parnas was found guilty in U.S. Federal Court on six counts related to illegal donations to the 2020 campaign of Donald Trump. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, three years of supervised release and $2,322,500 in restitution on June 29, 2022.
Early life and education
Parnas was born in Odesa, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1972 to a Jewish family. His family brought him at the age of four to the U.S. via the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, first to Detroit, and later to Brooklyn. He was a student at Brooklyn College and Baruch College. He also worked at Kings Highway Realty, where he sold Trump Organization co-ops.Career
Parnas moved to Florida in 1995. He later founded Parnas Holdings. After a failed film project, he partnered with Igor Fruman in an energy-related venture. The Miami Herald reported that he "left a long trail of debts in Florida and beyond."In 2019, Parnas served as a translator for a legal case involving Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin and self-admitted Russian mob connections, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. to face bribery charges. Firtash has been free on bail in Vienna since 2014. According to prosecutors, Parnas was paid by diGenova & Toensing, LLP as an interpreter to communicate with their client, Firtash. A Swiss lawyer for Firtash loaned $1 million to Parnas's wife in September 2019, according to Federal prosecutors.
Trump–Ukraine scandal
As early as April 2018, Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman began assisting Trump's re-election efforts and they identified Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as being an obstacle. On January 24, 2020, during the Trump impeachment trial, ABC News published a recording that Parnas's attorney claimed was made by Fruman and shared with Parnas. The recording appears to be from a small gathering with Trump, apparently during a dinner held April 30, 2018 at Trump Hotel Washington. A voice identified as Parnas's is heard to say to Trump: "The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the Ambassador."Late in 2018, Giuliani dispatched the two to Ukraine to search for damaging information on Trump's U.S. political rivals. According to The New York Times, "Their mission was to find people and information that could be used to undermine the Special Counsel's investigation, and also to damage former Vice President Joseph R. Biden." Both were at the center of the pro-Trump forces' push to remove Ambassador Yovanovitch, because her loyalty to Trump was deemed insufficient. It was reported the two also pressed for support for allegations that former Ukrainian officials schemed to manipulate the 2016 election to support Hillary Clinton, by revealing adverse information about Paul Manafort, chairman of Trump's campaign, which became a central element in Mueller's special counsel investigation.
Over the course of a year beginning in 2018, Parnas and Fruman assisted Giuliani and his associates to contact Ukrainians who were working on finding alleged corruption surrounding Hunter Biden and Burisma. These included Yuriy Lutsenko, then the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, who was crucial to Giuliani's efforts to produce damaging information. Viktor Shokin, a former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, was part of this group.
In late September 2019, the whistleblower report was released, which characterized Parnas and Fruman as "two associates of Mr. Giuliani."
On September 30, 2019, Adam Schiff of the Democrat House Intelligence Committee requested documents from Parnas. Parnas was initially represented by John M. Dowd, who was Trump's personal attorney during part of the Mueller investigation in 2017–18. Trump consented to this representation, as evidenced in an email from White House Counsel Jay Sekulow to the president. Parnas later disclosed that they met with Dowd in Dowd's home and conducted a conference call with Sekulow and Giuliani. According to revelations disclosed on The Rachel Maddow Show by Parnas in 2020, they decided to claim immunity and not cooperate on the basis that Giuliani was the President's attorney, protected by attorney-client privilege, and they were working under the direction of Giuliani. On October 7, 2019, Dowd informed the Miami Herald newspaper there would be no cooperation, Mike Pompeo made a similar announcement, and State Department employee Charles Kent failed to appear before the House Intelligence Committee. On October 8, 2019, White House counsel Pat Cipollone issued a document that confirmed that Trump and his administration would not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry in any manner.
Arrest and prosecution
Parnas and Fruman were arrested on the evening of October 9, 2019, at Dulles International Airport, and charged with planning to direct funds from a foreign government "to U.S. politicians while trying to influence U.S.-Ukraine relations". They had one-way tickets to Frankfurt, Germany, and were reported to be going to Vienna, Austria. The head of the New York FBI office described the investigation as "about corrupt behavior, deliberate lawbreaking".The charges alleged Parnas and Fruman were involved in the campaign to oust Ambassador Yovanovitch from her post and have her recalled. In 2018, the operation included Parnas and Fruman donating funds and pledging further additional moneys to an unnamed Congressman, who was allegedly recruited for the campaign to oust her. The funds were allegedly funneled through a shell company, Global Energy Producers, and some violated campaign limits. Parnas and Fruman were also charged with unlawful campaign contributions. Based on campaign finance filings, former congressman Pete Sessions was identified as the unnamed recipient. In 2018, as the Chairman of the House Rules Committee, Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying that Ambassador Yovanovitch should be fired for privately expressing "disdain" for the Trump administration.
The House Intelligence Committee converted their request for documents from Parnas and Fruman into subpoenas on October 10, 2019. The New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with SDNY prosecutors, were conducting a criminal investigation of Giuliani's relationship with Parnas and Fruman. Giuliani was at the time under investigation for potentially violating lobbying laws, but that investigation ended without charges.
Parnas dismissed Dowd and retained Joseph Bondy, who announced on November 5, 2019, that Parnas "is now prepared to comply with requests for records and testimony from congressional impeachment investigators".
On November 22, 2019, Parnas stated to CNN that he would be willing to testify to Congress regarding his, Republican congressman Devin Nunes's, Giuliani's, and Trump's role in the Ukraine affairs. Documents released to a watchdog group showed communication took place between Giuliani and Pompeo shortly before Ambassador Yovanovitch was removed from her post. Memos from Giuliani to Pompeo regarding a January 23, 2019, meeting with Ukraine's former prosecutor general Victor Shokin were included. Giuliani noted that Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas were present at the meeting. Shokin was ousted from his job in 2016 because of his lack of attention to corruption cases.
On January 20, 2020, Bondy filed a motion seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor outside the Justice Department and for U.S. Attorney General William Barr to recuse himself. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman recused himself in the Michael Cohen case owing to his political support of Trump. Trump reportedly asked then acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to override Berman's recusal and to prosecute Cohen. To date, Berman has not recused himself in the Parnas case despite similar potential conflicts of interest as in the Cohen case. Additionally, Berman worked at the same law firm as Giuliani.
In a May 2021 letter to federal judge J. Paul Oetken, Bondy wrote he had seen a government chart detailing the extent to which SDNY investigators had acquired communications of parties related to the Parnas case, and asserted:
The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump.
Parnas asked for the charges to be dismissed, claiming that the Trump administration had prosecuted him to protect Trump against Congressional investigations, but a federal judge rejected this claim as a "conspiracy theory." Parnas was subsequently convicted in March 2022 and sentenced to 20 months in prison. Parnas was released to home confinement in late 2022, and completed his sentence in September 2023.
MSNBC interview
In early January 2020, an attorney for Parnas turned over photos, text messages and thousands of pages of documents to the House Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.On January 15 and 16, 2020 MSNBC aired segments of an interview of Parnas conducted by Rachel Maddow. This was Parnas's first television interview regarding his involvement in the Trump-Ukraine scandal. Some of Parnas's claims were supported by documentary evidence released by the House that same week. Elements of the interview including timelines that were cross-checked by some news organizations against event records such as the date Pence announced he would not be going to Ukraine. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, Pence spokesman Marc Short, and a Justice Department spokesman stressed the fact that Parnas was under indictment and therefore was not credible. Trump repeated the claims he did not know Parnas, and denied he was aware of a letter by Giuliani to the Ukrainian president wherein Giuliani claimed that he was acting on the behalf of Trump.
Parnas made many claims in the interview:
- "Trump knew exactly what was going on" and Parnas's efforts were coordinated with Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani. He also said that "Attorney General Barr was basically on the team" and conferred with Giuliani frequently.
- Trump's counsel Jay Sekulow was also aware, however he "wanted to stay away from all this stuff involving Ukraine".
- Parnas met in Ukraine with a top Ukrainian official and informed him he was speaking on Trump's behalf; Parnas warned that all aid to Ukraine, as well as Pence's attendance at the inauguration of the new Ukrainian President, were contingent upon an announcement that Biden was being investigated.
- Pence was "in the loop" and knew the reason his trip to Ukraine was cancelled after the Ukrainian government failed to comply with Trump's demand as communicated by Parnas.
- The motivation to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch was to obtain negative information about Joe Biden. Specifically, former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko claimed he would deliver evidence of improper behavior about "B" after a decision was made about "Madam". This particular claim was backed by a March 22, 2019, text from Lutsenko that was released by the House and discussed in the interview. Trump removed Yovanovitch from her post in May 2019.
- Parnas described a dinner with President Trump where the Ambassador was discussed and Trump said to fire her. This claim was substantiated further by an audio recording of this meeting released on January 24, 2020.
- Ukrainian businessman Firtash claimed he could help discredit the Mueller investigation if charges against him were dropped.
- Parnas claimed he met Congressman Devin Nunes "several times at the Trump Hotel", but that most of his interactions were with Nunes's aide Derek Harvey. Parnas's claim that "they were involved in getting all this stuff on Biden" was substantiated by records released by the House after the interview.
- Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who did attend the Ukrainian President's inauguration, informed the Ukrainians that there would be no aid unless an announcement was made to investigate Biden.
- Parnas was initially pleased to have Trump's former adviser Dowd represent him and believed that it demonstrated he had the President's support. However, it became clear Parnas's interests were not in mind when Dowd visited Parnas in prison. Parnas claimed Dowd "basically start talking to me like a drill sergeant and telling me, giving me orders, like, you know, be a good boy, like, you know."
When asked by Rachel Maddow, Parnas claimed that his decision to speak out was made to protect this country from President Trump and his allies, stating that they are all part of one large "cult."