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First thing first, Lev Parnas was arrested in October of last year for trying to influence a Congressman via a straw donations in order to oust the US Ambassador to Ukraine.
Lev Parnas went on MSNBC Rachael Maddow show and claimed President Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s effort to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch was based solely on getting her out of the way so the investigations of Hunter and Joe Biden could be opened.
Chuck Ross from the Daily Caller posted this clip from the interview with Rachael Madcow of Lev Parnas claiming that Trump fired Yovanovitch solely because she was in the way of getting Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
But in a follow-up tweet, Chuck Ross notes that Lev Parnas’ feelings don’t match the facts.
Lev Parnas claims the effort to get rid of Yovanovitch was solely to get her out of the way so investigations of Biden could be opened.
Except Parnas was pushing for Yovanovitch's removal way back in May 2018, and his indictment says he did it at direction of Ukrainian official pic.twitter.com/3RHlLrwCnk
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) January 16, 2020
WaPo has reported that Lev Parnas has claimed that in April 2018, he told Trump that Marie Yovanovitch was bad-mouthing him and should be fired. Doesn't square with Parnas' new claim that he did everything at Trump/Giuliani's behest. https://t.co/QtW6Nv3S9g pic.twitter.com/nMLk8t9rqz
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) January 16, 2020
To further make this point, Ed Morrissey this morning posted a screenshot from the indictment against Parnas.
The indictment has been a public record for three months, and on this point is crystal clear.
The theory of the crime allegedly committed by Parnas and Fruman is that they took Ukrainian money and passed it off as domestic contributions to benefit a “then-sitting U.S. Congressman” in the spring of 2018.
The entire point of this operation was an effort by one or more Ukrainian officials to get this congressman to urge Trump to recall Yovanovitch, and that effort had nothing to do with the Bidens:
The other fabrication that Lev Parnas said in his interview with Maddow is that Trump threatened to withhold all aid from Ukraine if it did not publicly announce an investigation into the Biden’s.
Not a single witness in the phony House impeachment Schiff Show testified to this.
In fact they all said the opposite, that Trump didn’t make and Quid Pro Quo threat and that the Ukrainians didn’t even know the aid was being held in the first place.
