By Allan Lengel
In a criminal case that was a carryover from the Trump Justice Department, Lev Parnas, a Florida businessman and former associate of Rudy Giuliani, was convicted Friday in New York of using funds from a foreign investor to influence political candidates with campaign donations, the Washington Post reports.
It took a federal jury less than a day to convict Parnas, a naturalized U.S. citizen, of fraud. He was charged with giving campaign money to several state and federal candidates to get access to them. He was also found guilty on counts related to a $325,000 donation in 2018 to a joint fundraising committee that supported then-President Donald Trump, the Post reports.
Prosecutors also alleged that Parnas lied to the Federal Elections Commission about the source of the 2018 donation.
Giuliani was not charged in the case, but remains under federal investigation. It is unclear if prosecutors will get Parnas to flip on Giuliani in exchange for leniency.
Shayna Jacobs of the The Post writes:
While Parnas’s trial did not directly relate to Giuliani or Trump, the guilty verdict still provides a legal coda to a precarious moment in Trump’s presidency: his first impeachment trial. Parnas, a Ukrainian native, was recruited to help Giuliani seek damaging information on Joe Biden and his son Hunter prior to the 2020 election. Trump was accused of threatening to withhold badly needed aid to Ukraine if officials there did not announce a criminal investigation into the Bidens.
