Two men who aided efforts by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden were arrested at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. Prosecutors said they were arrested on campaign finance charges.
CBS News reported that “the men, Ukrainian-born Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, originally from Belarus, have been charged with conspiring to circumvent federal laws against foreign interference by allegedly engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for state and federal offices.”
According to CNN, “Attorney General William Barr, who visited the Manhattan US Attorney’s office Thursday in what officials said was a routine stop, was briefed on the investigation into Parnas and Fruman in February after he took office, and he supported the prosecution, according to a US Justice Department official.”
Parnas and Fruman are not the only ones who were arrested. The others indicted alongside Parnas and Fruman are David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin. CNN reported that “overall, four men were indicted Thursday on two counts of conspiracy, one count of false statements to the Federal Election Commission and one count of falsification of records. The four are alleged in the indictment unsealed by New York federal prosecutors to have conducted a scheme beginning in March 2018 to evade campaign finance laws.”
Guiliani has acknowledged that Parnas and Fruman are both his clients. Dailymail stated that “in an indictment unsealed Thursday in the Southern District of New York, the men are accused of funneling hundreds of thousands from a mystery Russian businessman into a pro-Trump super PAC in violation of U.S. campaign laws banning foreign donations and efforts to conceal campaign funds.”
“Shortly after the announcement [of the indictment], the Democratic House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Trump announced they have subpoenaed Parnas and Furman.”
In a really detailed article on this development, The OCCRP stated that “amid their donation spree, Parnas and Fruman took part in an impressive series of meetings with senior Republicans. On or about May 1, 2018, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in the U.S. capital, both men had dinner with the president in a meeting documented by Parnas in a now-deleted Facebook post.”
Read the indictment here.
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