Well now. Remember Rudy's two foreign friends he was working with to fabricate dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine? The ones who ignored House Democratic depositions on Monday?
Yesterday I talked about how Energy Secretary Rick Perry apparently was trying to get two Giuliani associates on the board of Ukraine's biggest natural gas company. Those two associates are now at the center of the latest fight between House Democrats at the Trump regime, with the two men, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, having lawyered up in record time and saying they will not comply with any House Democratic requests for documents or depositions.
The two contacted former White House Counsel John Dowd to defend them. But then Wednesday night the two did something stupid.
They tried to skip the country.
The Feds were waiting for them at the airport...with campaign finance charges for illegally donating foreign money to Trump.
Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, two foreign-born donors who gave money to a political action committee supporting President Donald Trump, were arrested Wednesday night and face charges tied to campaign-finance violations, two law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News.
The pair are expected to appear in federal court Thursday.
Fruman and Parnas worked with Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, Giuliani has previously said, as part of his dealings in Ukraine that involved efforts to encourage the nation to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Parnas is Ukrainian, while Fruman is Belarusian, according to the indictment unsealed Thursday.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the arrests.
According to the indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, the two men, along with fellow defendants David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin, "conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with candidates, campaigns, and the candidates' governments."
The indictment describes an elaborate scheme to conceal the real source of the political donations through the use of secret agreements, limited liability corporations and straw donors.
The defendants deceived "the candidates, campaigns, federal regulators, and the public by entering into secret agreements, laundering foreign money through bank accounts in the name of limited liability corporations, and through the use of straw donors ... who purported to make legal campaign contributions in their own names, rather than in the name of the true source of the fund," according to the document.
Two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News that Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. Wednesday. The two were slated to depart on an flight that would have taken them outside the U.S., the sources said. Their exact destination was not immediately known. Kukushkin was arrested in San Francisco Wednesday. The status of the fourth person charges in the scheme, Correia, is not immediately known.
The Trump campaign declined to comment to NBC News while John Dowd, an attorney for the two men, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News. Reached by NBC News, Giuliani said he could not yet comment.
Now, this raises a whole lot of questions here. Parnas and Fruman were obviously on the FEC and DOJ's radar for a long time to have these charges ready to go, but trying to flee the country to avoid the House impeachment depositions subpoena meant that the SDNY had to act.
Now with these two in pocket, a LOT can happen, things that have to be making Trumpworld very, very nervous. The indictment says that these two (on top of being Rudy's two intel gophers on Biden) are in fact connected to "Foreign-National-1", a Russian, pouring money into the Trump campaign. We've kinda come full circle, really, as Marcy Wheeler discusses.
What the indictment is less clear about is who the Russian bankrolling all this is. A key part of Parnas and Fruman’s crime is that they were laundering funds for “a foreign national Russian citizen and businessman.”
From in or about June 2018 through April 2019, LEV PARNAS, IGOR FRUMAN, DAVID CORREIA, and ANDREY KUKUSHKIN, the defendants, and others known and unknown, conspired to make political donations — funded by Foreign National-1 [the Russian] — to politicians and candidates for federal and State office to gain influence with candidates as to policies that would benefit a future business venture.
Putting together the Dowd letter and the indictment, it becomes clear that the John Solomon propaganda that Trump was pushing (and which Rudy sent to Mike Pompeo’s State Department as part of the effort to get rid of Yovanovitch and which Lindsey Graham just invited Rudy to come present to the Senate Judiciary Committee) was funded by an as yet unnamed Russian.
There are US congressmen mentioned in the indictment too as getting money from this scam, one of them is apparently former Rep. Pete Sessions, the other is current House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy. Tada!
Oh, and House Republicans have issued subpoenas for these two due October 16.
It's all connected to Trump and Russia. It always is.
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