Federal prosecutors continue to be tight-lipped about just what is going on with now-indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas. Parnas has used his campaign finance-related indictment to launch an ever-more-bizarre publicity campaign of sorts, releasing through his defense lawyer a seemingly unending stream of photographs of Parnas meeting with countless top Republican Party lawmakers, administration officials, and bigwigs. The move is self-evidently an attempt by Parnas to signal that he has information to share about very important people doing very important things, if law enforcement or Congress is willing to grant him leniency in his legal travails.
But what, exactly, is Parnas trying to immunize himself against? And what's going on with a federal investigation that seems to be swirling in all directions around Rudy Giuliani, while conspicuously neither questioning him directly nor clearing him? What are Southern District of New York prosecutors up to—and what limits has Trump’s new, most powerful fixer, Attorney General William Barr, placed on them?
A new CNN story suggests that SDNY prosecutors are still mulling new charges against Lev Parnas related to Fraud Guarantee, a Parnas startup company that paid Giuliani $500,000 in fees (during a time when Giuliani was apparently hard up for cash) for still-unclear services. In premise the company was to sell corporate insurance defending companies against fraud; in execution, prosecutors are still attempting to suss out whether Parnas and others were running a scam or confidence game on would-be investors, with Trump's own "personal lawyer" providing either witting or unwitting assistance.
CNN portrays those potential new charges as "bringing the investigation closer" to Giuliani, but that's a bit of a narrative stretch. We've had good indications that the Fraud Guarantee investigation has been humming along for some time, and the enormous half-million-dollar payment to Giuliani for services he himself has, ahem, not been eager to publicly explain has been a focal point of news coverage—we can assume one of the largest individual expenses in the would-be company's would-be books is also a focal point in the SDNY investigation as well, especially considering the prosecutorial suggestion that Parnas and Igor Fruman were acting as money launderers for foreign cash being used to influence Republican political fortunes.
Paying a half million to the man who has been acting as the current U.S. president's international bag man, while assisting that bag man in connecting to corruption-tied foreign oligarchs willing to trade dubious info on the president's election challengers for whatever legal assistance that president might be able to bend his own government toward? Yeah, that's going to get scrutiny.
It’s going to get even more scrutiny when it coincides directly with a smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador that at this point looks like it had little to do with Trump's interests, and everything to do with Parnas and Fruman wanting to crookify their way into the Ukrainian energy business—but needing to circumvent an anti-corruption U.S. official who was not willing to buy their claims of "corruption" by their Ukrainian business targets and/or rivals. And that cash-building effort seems to have roped in, through Giuliani and Trump and as-of-yet-unknown channels, the State Department, the Secretary of Energy, and God only knows how much else of the Trump administration's top subordinates.
A big question, then, is whether the struggling-to-invisible Fraud Guarantee, by the time Giuliani entered the picture, was still even intended as a serious venture—or was just a pass-through for handing Giuliani cash that couldn't be handed to him as easily if it came in a bag marked "money for helping us get business favors out of the Trump administration."
This is all still a half-mystery. A Republican donor paid Parnas $500,000 to invest in Fraud Guarantee with the understanding that Giuliani would be involved. Parnas paid Giuliani that same $500,000. Giuliani then did very little to nothing for that company, it seems, but coincidentally played a very, very aggressive and instrumental role in removing a U.S. ambassador that Parnas wanted removed for business reasons, using known-false smears, while sweetening the pot for Trump’s own buy-in by tying in claims about an election opponent that were similarly bizarre and false but, again, would just happen to muddle the Ukrainian energy markets in a way useful to a group of well-connected, mysteriously financed saboteurs. Coincidentally.
Despite signaling early on in the case that more indictments would very likely be coming, however, SDNY has still not publicly announced just which parts of that aforementioned mess Parnas will face additional indictments for. There is absolute silence about Giuliani's role, though it seems implausible in the extreme that Giuliani could have been so thoroughly enmeshed in the ambassador scheme, the Biden "dirt," the connections to indicted foreign oligarchs and the stink of Russian cash and Russian motives throughout and not noticed that there was something untoward going on.
We can assume, at the least, that Trump Attorney General Barr has involved himself with this case. We know he has plucked out the cases "important" to Trump (those threatening his allies, in other words) for his personal attention. We know, in the Stone case, that he was willing to put his thumb on the scale so egregiously that the line prosecutors resigned rather than sign their own names to it. We can assume, then, that there is enormous pressure on federal prosecutors to not find any crimes related directly to Giuliani or the efforts Giuliani was getting paid for, because Donald J. Trump would have an absolute, full-fledged meltdown if yet another of his closest allies and "fixers" ended up in handcuffs.
The obvious question, then: Is this all going to just go away? Poof, like that? Parnas, at least, seems to firmly believe that he is about to be hung out to dry, or even worse, while far more important figures in his scandal get away clean, and has been broadcasting to Congress as loudly as he can that he has something to trade them, if they're willing to listen. He could very well be bluffing, or lying outright. But as his collection of photographs shows, he was able to slither up to the very top ranks of Republican power near-effortlessly. It almost seems harder to believe he wouldn't be privy to "dirt" we haven't even contemplated yet.