Lev Parnas

“A close associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is claiming Trump was directly involved in the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden… Parnas made several potentially explosive claims in an extended interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, segments of which were aired Wednesday and Thursday.” (AP News)

“Parnas is alleging that Giuliani directly told him to convey the message to Ukraine that the military aid was contingent on announcing the investigations Trump wanted — after talking to Trump about it… The demand from Ukraine is almost certainly solicitation of a bribe. Federal statute makes ‘bribery’ a crime if a public official ‘demands’ or ‘seeks’ anything ‘of value personally,’ in exchange for performing ‘an official act,’ provided this has been done ‘corruptly.’ It defines ‘of value personally’ broadly… In this case, though, Parnas is also suggesting that Giuliani and Trump discussed this, and that after that happened, Giuliani instructed him to carry out an element of it. That strongly suggests a criminal conspiracy to solicit a bribe.” (Greg Sargent, Washington Post)

The right questions Parnas’s credibility.

“‘Do you believe that part of the motivation to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch,’ Maddow asks Parnas, ‘was she was in the way of this effort to get the government of Ukraine to announce investigations of Joe Biden?’ ‘That was the only motivation,’ Parnas replies. ‘There was no other motivation.’ That doesn’t quite add up… For one thing, the pending indictment against Parnas put his efforts against Yovanovitch at least a year earlier, and on behalf of a Ukrainian official…

“The Department of Justice never alleges that [these efforts] had anything to do with an investigation of any other US person, but only intended for the removal of Yovanovitch (unnamed) for the unknown purposes of one or more officials in the Ukrainian government — at the time, the government of Petro Poroshenko. Both the timing and the specifics of Parnas’ straw-man actions tend to corroborate that point far more than they do Parnas’ later claim that this had to do with Trump’s 2019 interest in getting Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue a Biden probe.”
(Ed Morrissey, Hot Air)