Lev Parnas

Lev Parnas (born February 6, 1972) is a Soviet-born American businessman and associate of Rudy Giuliani.

Parnas, Giuliani, Igor Fruman, John Solomon, Yuriy Lutsenko, Dmytro Firtash and his allies, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova were involved in the Trump–Ukraine scandal.

As president, Donald Trump said he did not know Parnas or what he was involved in; Parnas insisted Trump "knew exactly what was going on."

In October 2021, Parnas was found guilty in U.S. Federal Court on six counts related to illegal donations to the 2020 campaign of Donald Trump.

He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, three years of supervised release and $2,322,500 in restitution on June 29, 2022.

Parnas was born in Odesa, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1972 to a Jewish family.

His family brought him at the age of three to the U.S. via the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, first to Detroit, and later to Brooklyn.

He was a student at Brooklyn College and Baruch College.

He also worked at Kings Highway Realty, where he sold Trump Organization co-ops.

Parnas moved to Florida in 1995 and became a broker, working for firms including Euro-Atlantic Securities, Mammoth Bullion and Monolith Bullion.

He later founded Parnas Holdings.

After a failed film project, he partnered with Igor Fruman in an energy related venture.

The Miami Herald maintains he "left a long trail of debts in Florida and beyond."

In 2013, Parnas founded a firm he named Fraud Guarantee.

Parnas had chosen the name after he personally experienced cleaning up his Google search results after accusations of fraud in previous ventures.

Florida authorities apparently dissolved Fraud Guarantee in September 2014 for failing to file an annual report, which would have limited the company to activities related to closing itself down.

It was reported the two also pressed for support for allegations that former Ukrainian officials schemed to manipulate the 2016 election to support Hillary Clinton, by revealing adverse information about Paul Manafort, chairman of Trump's campaign, which became a central element in Mueller's special counsel investigation.

Parnas and Fruman visited Israel in the summer of 2018 as a part of a delegation, led by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and joined by Anthony Scaramucci, of "right-wing Jewish and evangelical supporters of Trump."

The group met with U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair Netanyahu, as well as billionaire Simon Falic, one of Netanyahu's most generous donors.

As early as April 2018, Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman began assisting Trump's re-election efforts and they identified Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as being an obstacle.

The recording appears to be from a small gathering with Trump, apparently during a dinner held April 30, 2018 at Trump Hotel Washington.

A voice identified as Parnas's is heard to say to Trump: "The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the Ambassador."

Late in 2018, Giuliani dispatched the two to Ukraine to search for damaging information on Trump's U.S. political rivals.

According to The New York Times, "Their mission was to find people and information that could be used to undermine the Special Counsel's investigation, and also to damage former Vice President Joseph R. Biden."

Both were at the center of the pro-Trump forces' push to remove Ambassador Yovanovitch, because her loyalty to Trump was deemed insufficient.

Over the course of a year beginning in 2018, Parnas and Fruman assisted Giuliani and his associates to contact Ukrainians who were working on finding alleged corruption surrounding Hunter Biden and Burisma.

These included Yuriy Lutsenko, then the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, who was crucial to Giuliani's efforts to produce damaging information.

Viktor Shokin, a former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, was part of this group.

In 2019, Parnas served as a translator for a legal case involving Dmytro Firtash, one of Ukraine's wealthiest oligarchs with self-admitted mob connections, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. to face bribery charges.

Firtash has lived in Vienna for five years.

"Mr. Parnas was retained by DiGenova & Toensing, LLP as an interpreter in order to communicate with their client Mr. Firtash."

A Swiss lawyer for Firtash loaned $1 million to Parnas's wife in September 2019, according to Federal prosecutors.

Parnas has also been involved in Jewish charities and causes in the US, Ukraine and Israel.

Parnas is on the board of the Ukrainian-Jewish charity Friends of Anatevka, founded by Ukrainian rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, to provide a refuge for Jews affected by the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Huckabee joined the two again in March 2019 when they were awarded the Chovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) awards at a gala for the National Council of Young Israel, an event focused on supporting President Trump and Israeli West Bank settlements.

Rudy Giuliani and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy were also in attendance.

While in Israel Parnas and Fruman also met with oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, a wealthy Ukrainian under investigation by the Department of Justice for money laundering.

In late September 2019 the whistleblower report was released, which characterized Parnas and Fruman as "two associates of Mr. Giuliani."

On September 30, 2019, the House Intelligence Committee requested documents from Parnas.

On January 24, 2020, during the Trump impeachment trial, ABC News published a recording that Parnas's attorney claimed was made by Fruman and shared with Parnas.