Donald Trump on Lev Parnas last week:
“I don’t know him at all, don’t know what he’s about, don’t know where he comes from, know nothing about him. I can only tell you this thing is a big hoax. He’s probably trying to make a deal for himself. Perhaps he’s a fine man. Perhaps he’s not … I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to him. I don’t need the help of a man that I never met before other than perhaps taking a picture at a fundraiser.”
He said this about him earlier this week:
I don’t know him, other than he’s sort of like a groupie. He shows up at fundraisers. I don’t know anything about him. …Parnas, I don’t know, other than he probably contributed to the campaign along with tens of thousands of other people. This weekend I was taking pictures with hundreds of people. Every once in a while I’ll look at somebody and I’ll say, ‘Gee, I wonder when that picture is going to be in The New York Times, or The Washington Post or on Fox.
As you probably guessed he protested too much:
A recording reviewed by ABC News appears to capture President Donald Trump telling associates he wanted the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired while speaking at a small gathering that included Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — two former business associates of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who have since been indicted in New York.
The recording appears to contradict statements by President Trump and support the narrative that has been offered by Parnas during broadcast interviews in recent days. Sources familiar with the recording said the recording was made during an intimate April 30, 2018, dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
“Get rid of her!” is what the voice that appears to be President Trump’s is heard saying. “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it.”
Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)
This tracks with Parnas’s interviews in which he talks about this dinner and says that it was he who blackened Yovanovitch’s reputation in an attempt to get Trump to fire her. Parnas apologized for doing that explaining that he was doing what he thought would advance the cause.
Now we don’t really know what Parnas’s motives were. It’s very hard to sort out whether he was just a “groupie” who got caught up in Giuliani’s web or whether there were other reasons and inducements. We certainly don’t fully understand where all the money came from.
But as this pertains to Trump, if this tape is validated, it proves that he was lying about Parnas. Not that we didn’t know this, but a tape is a valuable piece of evidence. I wonder if the House will obtain it and find reason to play it during the question period next week.
I wonder if Lev has any other tapes? I’ll bet Trump and Rudy are wondering that too.
Update: