Two foreign-born Florida businessmen who have been helping President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer investigate political rival Joe Biden have been arrested on charges of funnelling foreign money to US political candidates and a pro-Trump election committee, authorities said on Thursday.
The arrests were the latest dramatic development in a political saga that threatens Trump’s presidency. They come as the Democratic-led US House of Representatives conducts an impeachment inquiry into Trump centred on the Republican President’s request in a July telephone call for Ukraine’s President to investigate Biden.
The businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested in connection with a New York federal case involving campaign finance laws, the US attorney’s office in Manhattan said. The two men were donors to a pro-Trump fundraising committee and the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has said they helped him as he sought to investigate former Vice-President Biden, a leading Democratic contender in the 2020 presidential election.
Parnas is a Ukrainian businessman. Fruman is a real estate investor who was born in Belarus. Both, according to various media accounts, helped introduce Giuliani into top Ukrainian political circles.
The two men had been planning to fly to Vienna on Wednesday night, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Parnas and Fruman conspired to “funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office”, according to a federal court filing in New York. The two men made illegal contributions using straw donors, according to the indictment.
John Dowd, the lawyer for Parnas and Fruman, declined to comment on the charges. Giuliani did not immediately return a request for comment.
Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for the President, said that “neither the President nor the campaign was aware of their scheme”, referring to the defendants.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and has described the impeachment probe as a partisan smear.
In May 2018, the indictment said, Parnas and Fruman contributed $325,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee called America First Action. The $325,000 donation was falsely reported as coming from a purported natural gas company, the indictment said.
The two men falsely claimed that the company, GEP, was “a real business enterprise” and that “its major purpose is energy trading, not political activity”, the indictment said. In fact, it said, the company had no real business.
According to the indictment, Parnas sought the help of a US congressman — identified by a person familiar with the matter as Republican Pete Sessions — to get the US government to remove the then-ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Trump called Yovanovitch “bad news” in his July 25 call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Yovanovitch was removed from the post by Trump.
The indictment said the efforts were conducted at least in part at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official. Giuliani said last week he provided information to both Trump and the state department about Yovanovitch, who he suggested was biased against Trump. She is scheduled to give testimony to House lawmakers this week.
Sessions, a Republican from Dallas, lost his seat in the 2018 congressional elections to Democrat Colin Allred.
Parnas and Fruman were supposed to appear in front of US magistrate judge Michael Nachmanoff at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, according to a spokesman for the prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Two other people were charged in the indictment: David Correia, a US businessman, and Andrey Kukushkin, a Ukrainian-born US businessman.
In an interview last month, Parnas said the FBI was investigating him but said he did not know why, and that he did nothing wrong. “I don’t know what the FBI wants. I’m not going to comment, what they are doing. What they did.”
