Everyone is warning us not to believe a word Lev Parnas says, so I’ll leave that alone and just talk about the documents for now. Here’s one example of the criminal behavior coming from the Trump team as they tried to get Ukrainians to smear Joe Biden on behalf of Donald Trump. Some of them had different prices:
The materials show that Parnas, a Russian-speaker who helped coordinate Giuliani’s outreach to Ukrainian sources, was directly communicating with an array of top Ukrainian officials. Among them was Yuri Lutsenko, at the time Ukraine’s top prosecutor and a close political ally of then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who was running for reelection.
Lutsenko wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador, in part because she had been critical of his office and supported a quasi-independent anti-corruption bureau he despised. The messages, written in Russian, show Lutsenko urging Parnas to force out Yovanovitch in exchange for cooperation regarding Biden. At one point, Lutsenko suggests he won’t make any helpful public statements unless “madam” is removed.
“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are calling into question all my declarations. Including about B,” Lutsenko wrote to Parnas in a March 22 message … It’s unclear if ‘B’ is a reference to Biden or Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served from 2014 to 2019.
Four days later, Lutsenko told Parnas that work on the case against the owner of the gas company is proceeding successfully and evidence of the money transfers of “B” had been obtained. “And here you can’t even remove one fool,” Lutsenko laments, using a sad-face emoticon as he again appeared to push for Yovanovitch’s ouster.
“She’s not a simple fool[,] trust me,” Parnas responded. “But she’s not getting away. Parnas, days later, told Lutsenko that “soon everything will turn around and we’ll be on the right course.” Lutsenko responded that he has copies of payments Burisma made to the investment firm co-founded by Biden’s son Hunter.
The following month, Yovanovitch was removed from her post at Giuliani’s urging.
Here’s the cherry on top of that quid pro quo sundae
Lutsenko later said publicly that he found no evidence of wrongdoing under Ukrainian law by Hunter or Joe Biden.
Look, I get that Parnas is a shady character. He’s probably going to jail, that’s how shady he is. But he was intimately involved in all this so he’s worth listening to and attempting to corroborate with the documents he provided as well as other testimony and documents that have been released through the FOIA.
Dismissing him out of hand is just as wrong as taking his word as gospel. Keep an open mind and see where this leads.