Obscure businessman navigating between Wall Street, Florida and Ukraine, Republican donor, sometimes tartuff, sometimes matchmaker, Lev Parnas, has become one of the main players in the impeachment process against Donald Trump. While the two indictments concerning the President of the United States were transmitted to the Senate by the House of Representatives on Wednesday, January 15, new elements have come to support the accusations of the Democrats according to which the President has used his office for personal use.
The source of these elements? Lev Parnas, arrested on October 9, 2019 at one of Washington's airports with his friend, Igor Fruman, an American born like him in the former USSR. The two men are being prosecuted for violating the rules of campaign finance. On Wednesday evening, the "facilitator" spoke on MSNBC. He overwhelmed the president, saying that he knew everything about his activities in Ukraine in the service of his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Released on Tuesday, the documents, letters, handwritten notes and SMS entrusted to the Chamber after the green light from a federal judge, on January 3, report on his exchanges between Mr. Parnas with Rudy Giuliani, as well as with the former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko and the circle of relatives of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president elected in April 2019.
The dozen pages reveal the existence of another exchange of good practices between the different parties. Triggered by the content of a phone call between Donald Trump and the Ukrainian head of state on July 25, the House investigation had uncovered a first deal. It showed that the president conditioned an invitation to Washington and crucial, inexplicably frozen US military aid, to the launch of an investigation against the Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden. The latter is targeted through his son Hunter, who served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
New twist
It now seems that the recall of the former US ambassador to Kiev, Marie Yovanovitch, was part of another strategy. The diplomat was hated by the then-serving Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko.
In March 2019, during a WhatsApp exchange with Lev Parnas, the prosecutor seems to promise elements on Mr. Biden or Burisma, in exchange for the departure of the hated diplomat. "If you don't make a decision about Madam, you will question my allegations. Including about B., he writes. You can't even get rid of an idiot. " "She's not just an idiot, believe me (…). But she won't go ”, answers Lev Parnas. The latter activates, uses an American journalist, John Solomon, of the site The hill, to overwhelm the diplomat and then obtains that the son of President Donald Trump Jr. gives his articles visibility through his Twitter account.
