An associate of the personal lawyer of the president of the United States has again been arrested this week. This Tuesday, when he got off a flight at New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport, David Correia was arrested for his role in a scheme to violate campaign finance laws alongside Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were arrested last week. The scheme included the men — alongside a fourth, Andrey Kukushkin — working to transmit massive amounts of cash (meaning upwards of $1 million) from a Russian businessman to U.S. political candidates in the hope of procuring favor for a retail marijuana business they hoped to start but never got off the ground.
The scheme doesn’t end there, either — apparently, violating campaign finance laws was a favorite pastime of Giuliani’s associates. Their other violations include making personal donations to a then-Republican Congressman well beyond the legal limit and donating a full $325,000 whose origin they’d hid to a right-wing super PAC that supported that same Congressman’s eventually failed re-election campaign.
In exchange, and at the reported direct urging of now former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, Parnas and Fruman got that Congressman Pete Sessions to urge the Trump administration to fire then-Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, which the president eventually did — although others (like Giuliani) had been clamoring against her too. After the whole mess fell out into the open, House Democrats launched their currently ongoing impeachment inquiry.
Although what full demonstrable shape this relationship took remains to be seen, Correia claimed at one point just this year to be working directly with Giuliani, a connection he tried to use to intimidate a couple seeking to get the $500,000 that a court had ordered Parnas to pay them in restitution for a movie plan that fell through.
Dianne Pues told the Miami Herald, discussing Correia:
‘He said we no longer knew who we were dealing with and that [they] had ties all the way up to the State Department and White House and they were partners with Rudy Giuliani.’
In other words, a man at most only a couple degrees away from the president of the United States was using that connection as part of mafia-style bullying attempts targeting someone a court had ruled in favor of. Just another day in the insanity of Trump World! Correia was even photographed with the president in early 2018.
Besides this, Correia was actually listed in filings as a co-founder of the already much maligned company that Parnas founded called Fraud Guarantee, which despite the ludicrously fitting name — hindsight is 20/20! — was apparently supposed to be a company to help clients protect themselves against fraud. Giuliani was paid at least $500,000 by that company in exchange for what he claims was legal advice.
His relationship with Parnas and Fruman is now a reported subject of a federal criminal investigation. Considering the three year jail sentence that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is currently serving, that means we could see two lawyers of the current president of the United States end up with criminal charges. It should go without saying, but that’s not supposed to happen.
Featured Image via screenshot
