Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, was up bright and early on Thursday morning to try to spin the remarkable interview that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did on Wednesday night with Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s bagmen in the effort to extort the government of Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Parnas claimed that Donald Trump “knew exactly what was going on,” and he also implicated Vice-President Mike Pence. “This is a man who is under indictment and who’s actually out on bail,” Grisham said on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump’s favorite morning show. “This is a man who owns a company called Fraud Inc. . . . We’re not too concerned about it. We know that everything in the Senate is going to be fair.”
The first part of what Grisham said was correct. After being arrested in October as he prepared to board a flight to Vienna, Parnas, a forty-seven-year-old Soviet émigré who grew up in Brooklyn, was charged with four counts of violating campaign-finance laws by trying to hide the source of political donations that originated in Russia. Campaign-finance records show that he listed his employer as Fraud Guarantee, a Florida company that, according to its Web site, helps people “reduce the risk of fraud as well as mitigate the damage caused by fraudulent acts.”
This was just one of many business ventures with which Parnas, who has lived in Florida for many years, has been associated. Others involved stockbroking, bullion dealing, and film production. After Parnas was arrested, the Miami Herald described him as a “former stock broker who has left a long trail of debts in Florida and beyond.” The wife of one of his debtors, who is pursuing a legal judgement of five hundred thousand dollars against him, told the Herald, “He financially ruined us.” Continue reading.