When Rudy Giuliani’s partners in crime, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested in October on their way out of the country, they were carrying one-way tickets to Vienna. Giuliani was supposedly booked on another flight to Vienna that same evening. And no matter how many times Devin Nunes may give conflicting answers on Fox News about his own dealings with Parnas, one thing is absolutely clear: When Nunes went to look for “proof” concerning Donald Trump’s Ukraine-centric conspiracy theories, he did not fly to Kyiv. He went to Vienna, on a $14,000 first-class ticket.
Kyiv has a perfectly good international airport. So why do so many of those interested in protecting Donald Trump keep going to Vienna, which is over 1,000 miles off-target? There are a number of possibilities. Because while Vienna may not be in Ukraine, Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash is in Vienna. And, mysteriously enough, so is an organization called TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, a group that’s been funding Giuliani’s international jaunts for over a decade. It’s also home to the European Privatization Investment Corporation (EPIC), an equally little-known group that plotted with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to rig a $2 billion privatization of Ukrainian media.
All of which makes it seem that, while Vienna is not Ukraine, it’s the go-to gathering point where East meets West in efforts to rip Ukraine apart. It also suggests that all these separate organizations and individuals may not really be so separate after all.
A ProPublic investigation from 2018 shows how TriGlobal was shipping Giuliani around the world, including to locations that baffled local observers, well before Trump took office. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project network detailed Manafort’s involvement in efforts to cheat Ukraine out of its own broadcast and telephone systems in 2010. And the recent charges against Parnas and Fruman show that they were funneling millions from overseas sources into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates—including a big deposit made for Donald Trump. In all of these separate events, a handful of names keep repeating.
In the 2016 campaign, the Russian military, at the direction of Vladimir Putin, engaged in a multi-million-dollar campaign of theft, collusion, and disinformation by every possible means. Republicans, including Nunes, keep making claims that other countries were also interfering. None of those claims has proven truthful. But there does seem to be something in common between the Russia investigation and the Ukraine investigation: Republicans have had plenty of outside help in trying to derail those investigations. And that help might really be from a conspiracy that’s more than a theory.
Could all of it—Giuliani’s TriGlobal funders, Manafort’s EPIC ventures, Parnas’ mystery donors, Nunes’ source for Trump-saving information, and the secret mission launched by Trump and Giuliani—be aspects of the same thing? It seems as ludicrous at first glance as something that Nunes cobbled up between shouting Chalupa! and asking people if they knew Nellie Ohr. But if the Vienna-centered groups aren’t really one and the same, they certainly do seem to have a few names in common.
One of those is certainly Firtash. But just because Firtash is a Ukrainian-born oligarch, that doesn’t mean that his presence in this whole thing suggests that there really was some kind of Ukrainian force involved in 2016. Firtash is stuck in Vienna and is the subject of a—now strangely lax—effort at U.S. extradition because he’s in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and thought to be a major player in Russia’s international crime ring.
William Taylor may have only just become familiar to most Americans for his testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, but in a 2010 cable, Firtash made it clear to then-Ambassador to Ukraine Taylor that anyone wanting to do business in Ukraine needed permission from a Russian crime boss working with Firtash to unify Russian and Ukrainian state-owned companies. Firtash’s extortion efforts in Ukraine were made visible, ironically enough, because stolen U.S. diplomatic exchanges were published at the time by WikiLeaks.
Firtash also happens to be the actual owner of Cambridge Analytica. Remember them?
In their own January 2019 investigation, Mother Jones described TriGlobal as “a New York-based firm that has advised Russian oligarchs and others with Kremlin ties.” But ProPublica found that TriGlobal’s New York office was a closet-sized space in a work-sharing building that hadn’t seen a human presence in months. Which still puts that office ahead of several of TriGlobal’s supposed international offices, because those are completely nonexistent. However, the Vienna office does seem to exist—at least to the extent that someone answers the phone.
Despite the lack of a real New York office, the listed head of TriGlobal is New York businessman Vitaly Pruss. NBC identifies Pruss as Giuliani’s “longtime go-between for Ukrainian deals,” but it wasn’t Ukraine where Pruss and Giuliani made their first connection. It was Russia. Pruss is also the man to whom Giuliani turned when he was “desperate for more information about Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.” Whatever other role he played, Pruss seems to have often served as Giuliani’s travel broker and switchboard, arranging trips that included visits to pro-Russian officials in Ukraine and pro-Russian officials in … Russia. Pruss also seems to have arranged trips in which Giuliani was paired with Parnas, and may have made the initial contact between Giuliani and yet another Russian Ukrainian oligarch who hired Giuliani for his “security” expertise in defending a city on the border of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. That oligarch claims he actually hired Giuliani to lobby in the United States, which Giuliani has denied.
Finally, that EPIC investment from Paul Manafort appears to be a venture gone badly wrong. It ended up folding after a series of fumbles in which it seemed that Manafort misrepresented his funding and the value of the company. But after it collapsed, the whole Ukrainian telecommunications infrastructure ended up going for a song to Firtash. Who also managed to accumulate most of the the broadcasting and internet service in Ukraine. Firtash, who claimed to be angry at Manafort for “stealing” $17 million from him, now has nothing but good things to say about him.
Maybe it is all coincidence. Maybe the string of one-degree-of-separation connections that link EPIC to Firtash, to Parnas, to TriGlobal, and to Russian crime overlords isn’t some vast conspiracy. Maybe all those tickets to Vienna are just because everyone wants a chance for a night at the opera. Maybe, in a world where a few hundred people control almost all the wealth and power, it shouldn’t be surprising that the same names come up again and again when you look at any set of political events and business deals.
But Giuliani and Parnas seem to be everywhere in this story. And it’s definitely time that someone genuinely interested in finding out what happened goes to Vienna.