Two clients of Rudy Giuliani just got indicted on serious federal charges. The two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were born in the former Soviet Union, are tied up with Ukrainian state-owned oil companies and marijuana ventures in Las Vegas, and a federal court found them to have stiffed business partners in the past. Federal authorities on Wednesday nabbed the two at the airport while trying to leave the United States with one-way tickets.
While everyone ought to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, these guys hardly look like model citizens.
Yet Rudy Giuliani, while serving as President Trump’s personal lawyer, has become intimately involved with Parnas and Fruman. No attorney is responsible for the character of his clients, but these two are not merely Giuliani’s legal clients. They are full-fledged partners with the New York mayor, it appears. Giuliani has used the men as special envoys of a sort in his hunt through Europe for dirt on Joe Biden or the Democratic National Committee.
Now, federal prosecutors have charged Parnas and Fruman with illegally funneling Russian money into U.S. campaigns, including a pro-Trump super PAC run by Donald Trump Jr. President Trump denies knowing the men, but photos show that he has dined with them.
If these men are as unethical as the charging documents make them out to be, Trump can thank Giuliani for bringing them into his orbit.
Giuliani’s fingerprints — and those of these two clients — are also all over the phone call that prodded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to publicly back impeachment. In that phone call, Trump focused on investigations into the 2016 election and into Joe Biden’s son’s sketchy Ukrainian business dealings. Trump also made clear that Giuliani was his point man on those issues. Finally, Trump brought up the U.S. ambassador he wanted fired, whose firing happened to be a priority of Parnas and Fruman.
Giuliani says that he did his Ukraine work, including the Biden investigation, on his own. If Trump is meeting with Parnas and Fruman to talk Biden, that suggests Giuliani got them together.
We don’t know all the details about Parnas and Fruman, but it’s pretty clear that whoever put them in the same room with Trump wasn’t doing Trump a favor.
Giuliani has also made it known that he is working for Trump on a pro bono basis. To be blunt, that means he isn’t actually working for Trump.
As we said about Trump’s relationship with Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s campaign for free while in the pay of foreign interests: If you’re not paying for the service, you aren’t the customer; you’re the product.
Giuliani is using president Trump, but the victim isn’t only Trump. It’s also the whole country.
