Last month, Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas was indicted on campaign finance charges.
Since his indictment, this past week it was announced in a breaking news report that Lev Parnas has agreed to cooperate with impeachment proceedings.
Then, to add icing to the cake, today news broke that the Giuliani ally had gotten $1 million from a private Russian account.
According to Bloomberg:
‘Rudy Giuliani’s associate Lev Parnas got $1 million from an account in Russia in September, a month before he was charged with conspiring to funnel foreign money into U.S. political campaigns, according to U.S. prosecutors who asked a judge to jail him for understating his income and assets.
‘“The majority of that money appears to have been used on personal expenses and to purchase a home,” prosecutors said in a court filing Wednesday. Parnas failed to disclose the payment to the government, prosecutors said.’
The discovery of this payment begs new questions of just what the nature of the work was that Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were doing, and who they were doing it for.
The report continues:
‘There was little detail or explanation about the source or purpose of the payment to Parnas in the court filing. Prosecutors said the money was sent to an account in the name of Parnas’s wife, Svetlana Parnas. It appeared “to be an attempt to ensure that any assets were held in Svetlana’s, rather than Lev’s, name,” prosecutors claimed.
‘The payment came the same month that Parnas and Fruman received the first of two requests for documents from Congressional committees investigating the Trump administration’s actions in Ukraine. The pair initially refused to comply with the requests, and were arrested days later on a jet bridge at Dulles International Airport near Washington D.C., as they sought to board a plane with one-way tickets to Vienna. Parnas’s lawyer has subsequently said his client is willing to comply with the congressional investigation.’
Parnas, a Ukrainian born U.S. citizen, faces at least five years in prison on charges that have already been filed against him, but he will likely receive more as prosecutors continue their investigation.
Featured image via screenshot.
