Two South Florida businessmen who also happen to be Republican donors say they have explosive information about "widespread corruption involving Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, American diplomats and Ukrainian officials." The pair, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are Ukrainian, and their claims have been championed by President Trump and some of his most loyal defenders. But according to some disgruntled former business partners, they're nothing more than conmen.
“Mr. Parnas is a con man, he is a crook,” Dianne Pues told the Miami Herald. “He conned us from day one.”
Parnas reportedly owes Pues and her husband over $500,000 in relation to a movie deal that went bad, a deal that she says "financially ruined" her. The Pueses aren’t the only ones who claim they’ve been conned by the Ukrainian-American businessman.
Parnas has been sued over everything from a small-claims debt owed to a furniture maker in Delray Beach to unpaid legal bills to a $100,000 loan issued to a natural gas firm he runs with Fruman. The plaintiff in the latter case also alleged that Parnas and Fruman “boasted” about their close relationships with major figures in the GOP.
...major figures that include Rudy Giuliani.
As the Daily Beast reported late last month, Giuliani tasked Parnas and Fruman with uncovering alleged evidence of Biden-related corruption, and the pair served as intermediaries between top Ukrainian officials and Giuliani. But their claims began to fall apart when a former Ukrainian prosecutor who met with Giuliani -- thanks to Parnas and Fruman -- said that claims of criminality by Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, were not supported by any evidence.
As the Miami Herald points out, the usage of a private emissary to negotiate with foreign governments isn't unprecedented in American politics, but it is unusual.
“I think what’s worrying is that [Giuliani] wasn’t tasked with carrying out secret negotiations to advance the interests of the country, but he was effectively acting as an arm of Trump’s reelection campaign,” international studies and Russia expert Jeff Markoff told the Miami Herald. “A closer analogy to all this might be CREEP — the Committee for the Re-election of the President — under Nixon, which has involved in all the shenanigans.”
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