U.S. President Donald Trump says he doesn’t know the two Soviet-born associates of his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who were indicted on charges of campaign finance violation Thursday.
“I don’t know those gentlemen,” Trump said Thursday, referring to Ukrainian-born Lev Parnas and Belarus-born Igor Fruman. “Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them, because I have a picture with everybody.”
In fact, records paint a much closer relationship, highlighting how the two Florida-based businessmen bought their way to the top echelons of the Republican party with hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to pro-Trump Republican campaigns.
As early as March 2018, Fruman attended a donor meeting with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida,
Moreover, Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who testified Friday that Trump had pressured the State Department to force her out after losing confidence in her, blamed Giuliani and his two associates for undermining her with false assertions. She suggested that Parnas and Fruman might have felt financially threatened by her anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, The Washington Post reported.
“The fact that these two individuals were working with Giuliani and Ukrainian government officials to alter U.S. policy in that country will obviously be relevant to the impeachment investigation,” said Trevor Potter, president of the