Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

We still have time to mess this up!

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

… gradually, and then suddenly.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

White supremacy is terrorism.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The words do not have to be perfect.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / BREAKING: “Lev Parnas Pushes to Share His Info With House Intel”

BREAKING: “Lev Parnas Pushes to Share His Info With House Intel”

by | 101 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Happy New Year’s Eve, political journalists!

Lev Parnas, a former Rudy Giuliani associate charged with financial crimes, is looking to share more material with congressional investigators, according to a letter his lawyer has sent to a federal judge. The letter, filed in court on Monday evening, indicates that the committee first tasked with helming the impeachment inquiry is gathering additional evidence about Trump World.

In the letter, Parnas’ lawyer Joseph Bondy said the Justice Department will share materials with his client on Tuesday that it seized from his home and at his arrest. The materials include documents and the contents of an iPhone. Bondy then asked Judge Paul Oetken of the Southern District of New York to allow him to share those materials with the House Intelligence Committee; a court order currently bars him from sharing them with anyone. The Justice Department has said it does not object to him giving the material to Congress…

Trump’s relationship with Ukraine—in particular through his intermediary and personal lawyer Giuliani—is at the center of the impeachment process. Parnas had a front-row seat to much of Giuliani’s Ukraine-related activity.

Federal authorities arrested Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman at Dulles Airport in October and charged them with conspiring to illegally funnel money from a foreign national into an American election. For many months before their arrest, the two worked with Giuliani to investigate allegations about former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who served for a time on the board of a scandal-dogged Ukrainian energy company…

Parnas and Fruman, both Soviet-born U.S. citizens, made hefty political contributions through an entity they started called Global Energy Partners. And they built connections on Capitol Hill; after then-Rep. Pete Sessions sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch’s removal, a PAC the pair supported shelled out a huge sum to boost his re-election bid. Sessions’ name was also batted around within the Trump administration as a potential replacement for Yovanovitch, though any efforts to install him there didn’t get traction.

Parnas and Fruman have both pleaded not guilty. And Parnas indicated he would cooperate with the congressional impeachment inquiry. Because of his close proximity to Giuliani, he may have significant visibility into Giuliani’s actions that other witnesses lack. For instance, a senior Zelensky aide confirmed to The Daily Beast that Parnas was present for a meeting he had with Giuliani where they discussed the U.S.-Ukraine relationship…

Guess we’ll know from the Oval Office Occupant’s tweet-stream — or Giuliani’s — how successful efforts to hide this news from him have been. As if the festivities at Mar-A-Largo weren’t fraught enough already.

Credit for Individual-1’s obsession with appearances, though; Parnas looks exactly like the bumbling minion in a spy caper who inadvertently betrays Mr. Big, doesn’t he?

Reader Interactions

101Comments

  2. 2.

    opiejeanne

    a court order currently bars him from sharing them with anyone.

    It doesn’t say, but who is responsible for this court order?

  3. 3.

    Gvg

    I don’t remember why this guy changed from ardent Trump supporter, to trying to bring him down? I am not sure I believe him. He was arrested, I recall, but that doesn’t explain a change of sides. Also I had the impression this guy was linked with Russian mobs and …betraying those is not usually safe. What is going on with him?

  4. 4.

    Biff Longbotham

    Lev, baby, yooze a day late an a dollah short wit de inside scoop stuff. Wut dey gonna do, open up dem impeechment hearins agin?

  5. 5.

    Kay

    Can he tell us more about this?

    Erik Prince, a major Republican donor and founder of controversial security firm Blackwater, has been referred to the U.S. Treasury Department for possible sanctions violations tied to his recent trip to Venezuela for a meeting with a top aide of President Nicolas Maduro, two senior U.S. officials said.

    They had a whole other crime ring running In Venezuela at the same time.

    * It’s Trump’s (corrupt) Treasury Department so the fix is in, but there’s probably more involved than Prince and Guiliani, don’t you think?

  6. 6.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Credit for Individual-1’s obsession with appearances, though; Parnas looks exactly like the bumbling minion in a spy caper who inadvertently betrays Mr. Big, doesn’t he?

    I rewatched Midnight Run last week to recover from a family party: “Is this idiot number one? Put idiot number two on the phone.”

    I’ve been traveling all day– did we cover the judge dismissing Bolton’s cats-paw lawsuit? I’m wondering what happens now

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Gvg: Yeah, I’m not counting any chickens.

    I saw a twitter thread today suggesting that Pelosi may be holding up the referral of the articles to the Senate so that the apparatchiks can’t dismiss it before the SOTU and give The Beast a chance to gloat for the MAGAts. I think stuff like this gives her talking points for further delays.

  8. 8.

    Kay

    It may matter, but won’t they just say what they said with Cohen? “Everyone we hire is a liar so therefore no one can believe anything any of us say, whether it’s exculpatory or incriminating”?

    That was the Cohen defense. I don’t know what to do with that- does anyone?  It’s certainly true they all lie constantly. I admit I didn’t anticipate it as a defense, but it seems to work.

  10. 10.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    “Parnas looks exactly like the bumbling minion in a spy caper who inadvertently betrays Mr. Big, doesn’t he?”

     

    As Dump would say, he’s straight out of Central Casting.

  11. 11.

    patrick II

    @Gvg:

    He changed over when Trump said he didn’t know him. Parnas thought they were friends.  When that happened Parnas probably decided he was on the wrong side of the pardon/non-pardon wall.

  13. 13.

    Kay

    This is how Trump’s low quality hires spend whole workdays:

    On the evening of July 10, 2017 staffers at the U.S. embassy in Brussels—the official office for the ambassador to the European Union—received an unusual call from the seventh floor of the State Department back in Washington. The office of then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was irate. Someone in Brussels with access to the mission’s Twitter account had liked the wrong tweet. It had set off alarm bells in Foggy Bottom.
    The tweet wasn’t just any tweet. It was one written by Chelsea Clinton and directed at President Donald Trump in a public spat that took the Internet by storm.

    They interviewed ten people – spent God knows how much time and money hunting down the Tweeter who wasn’t loyal enough to Dear Leader.

  15. 15.

    Biff Longbotham

    Hmm…seems my patois got me moderation hell.  So…It seem to me that Lev is a day late and a dollar short with this upswell of desperately offered info.  What are they going to do, have Round Two of House impeachment hearings?  This wont see the light of day in the Senate.  I just don’t see what his angle is.

    BTW, BJer since 2002, mostly lurker, last commented about 10 years ago.

  17. 17.

    frosty

    @Biff Longbotham: Welcome back! See you in ten years, if we’re all still around!*

    *No, seriously, comment away. It’s not like you’ll be Idiot 1 on this blog, there’s already serious competition.**

    ** Present company included.

  18. 18.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Gvg: He turned because the President said he never met him. Despite all the photographic evidence on Parnas’s Twitter and Instagram feeds. This pissed Parnas off and he got himself attorneys that are willing to cut a bitch.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: Xi and Putin. Maduro is being protected by Wagner mercenaries. Wagner is owned by “Putin’s Chef”, who also runs the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is the one step removed from the GRU Russian disinformation, misinformation, agitprop, and troll farm. Xi owns Prince. So that’s who else is involved.

  25. 25.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Adam L Silverman: Lev is clearly uninterested in spending time in prison. He may look like he’s out of Central Casting, but seems a lot smarter now than a lot of these other assholes.

  27. 27.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Patricia Kayden: It’s a combination of several things. The first is that for some reason I’m not aware of/haven’t seen anyone explain, the Black Hebrew Israelites have gone operational again in the greater NY metro area. The second is that the decades long inter-communal hostilities between the Ultra Orthodox and Chasidic communities and the African American communities in the outer boroughs are becoming very salient and contributing to the violence. The third is the stochastic terrorism element in this. By pulling the white supremacists, neo-NAZIs, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, homophobes, and xenophobes into the spotlight and providing them some form of cover through his rhetoric and that of his surrogates, the President has become a primary ideational vector for stochastic terrorism.

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    Sadly, Dumb & Dumber & More Dumber & Yet More Dumber & Exceedingly Dumber & Astonishingly Dumber won’t fit on a marquee.

  31. 31.

    WaterGirl

    I snuck a small bowl of my chicken and dumplings soup just now, and it was most excellent.  First time I have ever made homemade chicken soup that actually had flavor.  I separated the dumplings before refrigerating the soup.  I confess I did not have high hopes for reheated dumplings, but I think even the dumplings might be better than they were this afternoon.  I’m calling this one a win.

  33. 33.

    WaterGirl

    @Adam L Silverman: I had to sneak it because it was 9:15, after the authorized eating period. :-)

    Yes, I’m the only one home so there was no one to hide from, except my guys.

    Shorter: The food police.

  34. 34.

    Anne Laurie

    @Gin & Tonic: Lev is clearly uninterested in spending time in prison. He may look like he’s out of Central Casting, but seems a lot smarter now than a lot of these other assholes.

    Honest to Murphy, it passed through my twisted mind that Trump trusted Rudy’s new ‘friends’ Parnas & Firtash because they looked like Russian mobsters out of Central Casting.  “How can they not be the guys we need, when they look exactly like the guys I imagine us needing?”

    If they’d been more generically grey Bidnizguys, Donald (or Rudy) would’ve mistrusted them as potential FBI decoys.

  36. 36.

    japa21

    To be honest, there are times I think we are all being setup for a major let down, if not worse.  After all, no group of people could really be as dumb as this gang of crooks.  We are going to end up the victims of a major con.

  40. 40.

    Biff Longbotham

    If Lev is straight out of Central Casting, let him have a Boris Badenov-like hokey Russian accent. A man can dream, right?

  41. 41.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I though maybe Sneakered, but it would have been a lot of trouble to change my shoes, just to sneak soup past myself.

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @WaterGirl: Consider the post title:  break, broke, broken, breaking.  By analogy, it should be “I snoke a bowl of soup.”

    BTW I am not getting any of the promised 502s, 524s, or any error codes at all.

  46. 46.

    WaterGirl

    @Another Scott: I loved that until I went to Google translate.  It says I have SUCKED, not SNUCK.

    While it is true that I have sucked at various moments in my life, that still feels a bit harsh. :-)

  48. 48.

    Adam L Silverman

    @WaterGirl: If you are being held hostage by people that will only let you eat at certain times, please blink twice into a comment box and we’ll send hostage rescue.

  52. 52.

    WaterGirl

    @Adam L Silverman: Well, a girl’s gotta have standards rules, but rules are made to be broken.

    Perhaps next time I sneak a bowl of soup before bedtime I should stride into the kitchen and say “Fuck You, Food Police!” as I put the soup in the bowl.

    edit: I’ll let you know how that goes later this week.

  55. 55.

    NotMax

    Way OT.

    Okay, Steam, chalk up a victory for managing to wring a grand total of twelve bucks and change out of me for purchasing three of the games lazing on my wishlist which are significantly reduced in price during your end of year sale.

    @WaterGirl

    Follow the link I provided. Not wrong so much as, let us say, unfashionable.

    ;)

  56. 56.

    Adam L Silverman

    @WaterGirl: Are you going to return the soup when you’re done with it? If not, you’re not borrowing it. Perhaps this is a case of grand theft soup?

  58. 58.

    WaterGirl

    @Ken:

    I am not getting any of the promised 502s, 524s, or any error codes at all.

    I am going to pretend that you didn’t say that, lest we conjure that up.

  59. 59.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: The second is that the decades long inter-communal hostilities between the Ultra Orthodox and Chasidic communities and the African American communities in the outer boroughs are becoming very salient and contributing to the violence.

    The Ultra-Orthodox need cheap housing in walkable communities, and in the current housing market, that puts them in direct conflict with largely African-American/Hispanic enclaves that are a little too “risky” for upper-middle-class gentrifiers.   Way I’m seeing it, the GOP’s media enablers are only too happy to point the most desperate members of the AA ‘ghettos’ (Hebrew Israelites living in a van, the reputedly schizophrenic Monsey attacker) at extremely visible members of the most historically stigmatized religious group (those weird Chabads who don’t/won’t even speak English, and who avoid contact with ‘outsiders’).

    When bad things happen, well — time to start policing those no-go areas a little harder!   There will be no broken windows in this district… (except for the ones properly broken by the appointed authorities, of course).

  63. 63.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Anne Laurie: The tensions between the two communities are deeper than that. Some of it are longstanding grievances over what would normally seem petty.

  64. 64.

    WaterGirl

    Closing the computer and SNEAKING off to watch some TV.  If we get the dreaded error, someone who has my number, please call me.

  72. 72.

    debbie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Decades long and even longer. Back in the 1980s and 1990s when I was living there, there was serious mistrust on both sides (and you can add the Korean community into the mix). Both the Jews and Koreans were sure AAs were shoplifting their stores, and the AAs were sure the Jews and Koreans were overcharging them on everything.

  73. 73.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: The tensions between the two communities are deeper than that. Some of it are longstanding grievances over what would normally seem petty.

    Oh, I believe you.  (I also remember the Koreatown/LA standoffs back in Rodney King’s day.) But the weaponizing by the GOP is… timely.

  74. 74.

    MisterForkbeard

    @NotMax: And what were they, sir? :

     

    I picked up a few things earlier this week on steam, a couple things off the nintendo eShop, Mechwarrior 5 from Epic, and.. one cheap game for my PS4.

     

    No one bought me any games for Christmas, okay? :)

  75. 75.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: Yep. And that all got enflamed every time there was a car accident: non-lethal or otherwise. Or some other unintentional mishap. The bad blood is so thick at this point, and has been for decades, that it is hard for cooler heads to prevail because no one is willing to give anyone else the benefit of the doubt.

  79. 79.

    Another Scott

    @WaterGirl: It tells me “to have nibbled”, but touche’.

    Sorry!  :-)

    geschlichen zu haben is probably the correct version of what I was aiming for, but my German is so rusty that that never would have moved out to my typing fingers without help.

    [edit:] BTW, I still remember having to give an answer in a high school English class where I froze when “snuck” came out of my mouth as part of the response.  Ack!!

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  80. 80.

    NotMax

    New mini-series dropped today on Netflix, Bonfire of Destiny. Looks like it’s best described as a French telenovela, but since it features an actress I liked in Spiral (she played the redheaded lawyer) will give it a whirl. Although definitely not the dubbed version as in the linked trailer – shall switch it to original French, with English subtitles.

    @MisterForkbeard

    Honestly, off the top of my head don’t recall the names.

  82. 82.

    debbie

    @NotMax:

    Merriam-Webster disagrees.

    The original past tense of sneak was sneaked, following the pattern of other regular verbs. However, in the 19th century snuck started appearing, and is now the more common version for the past tense of “sneak.” Most irregular verbs become regular over time, but sneak has become irregular, and no other word like sneak (peek, creak, etc.) follows a similar pattern.

  86. 86.

    JoyceH

    @Anne Laurie: Thing is, I don’t think Lev and Igor are “Rudy’s friends” – I think they are Trump’s friends. You see pictures of Rudy with these guys over the past year or so, but pictures with Trump go back YEARS. I think Trump is the one who assembled this team of hotshots.

  88. 88.

    H.E.Wolf

    I had this posted on my fridge for years:

    Quis potest sine offula vivere?
    (“Who can live without a snack?”)

    Post Scriptum: I just googled it, and apparently offula (offla) was as outrageous a neologism, back in the day, as “snuck”. :-)

  89. 89.

    Jean

    I read on TPM that Joe Biden told a New Hampshire crowd that he’d consider a Republican running mate, but he couldn’t think of one “just now.” WTH?

  91. 91.

    Gravenstone

    @MisterForkbeard: I pre-ordered MW5, and was none too pleased when they went Epic exclusive. Still need to figure out how to make it play nice with my HOTAS. The default set up in game is bone stupid, and I’m hoping they’ll push something different via patch one of these days.

  94. 94.

    tomtofa

    A little OT, but a reminder today that Heather Cox Richardson is a valuable observer and commentator on current events.

    Her post today explains that Judge Leon’s rendering moot the Kupperman suit, portrayed by the MSM as a dead end, is in fact a major victory for the impeachment inquiry, since it leaves Judge Jackson’s ruling from late November intact and the final word on the subject – that ruling said T’s ‘absolute immunity’ argument is BS, and that people like Bolton must testify.

    Nothing is ever the final word, of course, but this was big.

  95. 95.

    Ruckus

    @japa21: 
    And the person pulling off the con is a very wealthy owner of a foreign country with a nuclear generating plant that blowed up and an ego the size of said country and probably the same mental disease that our shit for brains president has more than his share of.

  96. 96.

    Mikeindublin

    Probably good intel for Trump if they’re willing to share it.   Look who supporting having it released.

  98. 98.

    Chris Johnson

    @patrick II: I’m pretty sure Parnas is making the smart play, even if it doesn’t look like it from outside.

    The thing you’ve got to remember is that these guys are all tied up with the Russian mob/Putin, including the President and most of the Republicans. There’s a problem with the Russian mob being so ruthless that they terrify everyone: once you’re not valuable to them you’re a dead man, and have nothing to lose.

    If Parnas reads things as ‘the mob controlling things are not going to protect me’, it becomes a matter of whether he believes there’s another side to defect to (barely, but there kind of is: America, what’s left of it) and how pissed off as an individual he is at the Russian Mob that’s likely going to kill him.

    That’s the weakness. They’ve got this far by being terrifying, but if you know too much and you’re getting signs that you’ve crossed the line into ‘no longer useful’, if you’re really sure you’re a dead man anyhow, you have no reason to be loyal and many reasons to be vengeful.

    This is why Trump is such a basket case (he’s crazy and knows in his heart how useless he is, but he is useful as a wrecking ball and so he does his best to destroy America and divide it). And it’s also why Mitch McConnell is so brazen: that guy is a lot smarter, has no morals or loyalties, and is able to work with the Russians in this massive coup. He doesn’t personally want to be President or anything like that: what he wants aligns well enough with what the Russians want, so he is quite happy to adopt their goals, and destroy a country (technically, his own) rather than let it fall into the hands of the libs.

    So, Trump is a basket case, Parnas has nothing left to lose and is defecting to what remains of America, and McConnell is the one who’ll have a whole series of Dr. Evil game plans for what he’s going to do to serve his masters. His masters, the Russian mob, don’t actually have such plans: McConnell can have them FOR the mob, provided he doesn’t get too clever and try to seize power elsewhere.

    Huh. We should start a whispering campaign saying that this is all a plot whereby McConnell takes control of, not America, but Russia. McConnell’s long game is to kick out Putin and take over. That would be hilarious and maybe even work. The only reason he’s such a fulcrum for Putin is that he can be trusted… but when you’re the Russian mob, nobody can be trusted, least of all your fulcrums.

  99. 99.

    Chris Johnson

    @JoyceH: If they are long time Trump ‘friends’ that only makes it more likely they’re tangled up with the Russian mob and know exactly what they’re up against/what they’re doing.

    I hope the Dems get lots of goodies out of this guy, if he survives to make the hand-off of the iPhone.

  100. 100.

    WaterGirl

    @Another Scott:

    It tells me “to have nibbled”

    Okay, that is very cute!

    I wonder why my Google is spreading disinformation?  I say disinformation because it surely knew what it was doing – telling you one thing and me another.

Comments are closed.