MANHATTAN (CN) — Jury selection began Tuesday in a campaign-finance trial that the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic stopped from contributing bad press to former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election.
Lev Parnas, born in Ukraine and raised among Russian-speaking immigrants in Brooklyn, was arrested alongside Andrey Kukushkin, a Ukrainian-born California businessman, and two other co-conspirators in October 2019 on charges that they used the shell company Global Energy Producers to funnel $325,000 in foreign cash into America First Action, a super-PAC that championing Trump's ultimately unsuccessful reelection.
After Trump's first election, Parnas was, for a few short years, a mover and shaker among the elite donors, lawyers and lobbyists surrounding the erstwhile reality star. With his then-friend, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, he was a key player in efforts to gin up political dirt in Ukraine, which led to Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives.
Initially Parnas, Kukushkin and their co-defendants, Igor Fruman and David Corriea, pleaded not guilty to charges that they illegally used donations to U.S. politicians from a wealthy Russian businessman to obtain legal, recreational marijuana distribution licenses in several states including Nevada and New York.
Correia and Fruman both separately pleaded guilty in the last year, however, leaving just Parnas, 49, and Kukushikin, 48, headed to trial this week.
The former president’s footprint on the New York City jury pool was apparent; the third prospective juror on Tuesday morning responded to the jury questionnaire that has a brother who has worked for the Trump Organization for eight years as a real estate attorney.
“Politics comes up but politics is not relevant to what the jury is deciding,” U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken advised prospective jurors on Tuesday morning.
Indeed, the jury questionnaire advised prospective jurors that the trial would potentially include testimony from or mentions of Giuliani and Trump, as well as Jared Kushner, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida Senator Rick Scott, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, among others.
Giuliani himself was not charged in connection to Parnas’ case, but federal investigators executed a search warrant of his Manhattan apartment and office in late April, seizing electronic devices in a predawn raid that coincided with the search warrant executed in the Washington area against Victoria Toensing, another Giuliani ally and onetime Trump attorney.
And while the 77-year-old Giuliani has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime, his claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election have landed him as a co-defendant in multiple defamation cases at the federal level and in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Parnas and Kukushkin attended jury selection in-person on Tuesday, each at one point briefly pulling off their face masks to show their full faces to would-be jurors. By the end of this afternoon, the parties settled on a group of 12 jurors and three alternates.
The Obama-appointed Judge Oetken said he expects Parnas and Kukushkin's in-person trial to take two weeks. Opening arguments are expected to begin at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. Prosecutors said last week that they anticipate resting their case during the second week of the trial.
Parnas and Kukushkin face a six-count superseding criminal indictment that was filed over the summer in the Southern District of New York, charging the pair with one count each of conspiracy to make contributions by a foreign national; solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national; making a contribution by a foreign national; conspiracy to make contributions in the name of another; false statements to the federal election commission; and falsification of records.
One week before their Oct. 9 arrest at Washington’s Dulles Airport — Parnas and Fruman had been carrying one-way tickets to Vienna, Austria — the president, through his attorney Jay Sekulow, gave another of Trump's attorneys, John Down, the green light to represent Parnas and Fruman.
Fruman had another Trump-connected attorney when changed his plea to guilty last month: Todd Blanche, who previously won the dismissal of criminal charges against former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort.
The men's final co-defendant, Fraud Guarantee business partner David Correia, pleaded guilty last year to counts of wire fraud conspiracy and making false statements in a federal affidavit for his involvement in a $2 million investor fraud scheme and lying to the government. He was sentenced to year and a day in prison.
During the final pretrial conference last week for Parnas and Kukushkin, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos said plea discussions with lawyers for Parnas mostly occurred in the last nine months.
“While those conversations were ongoing for a period, they’ve ended,” Roos said. He described the discussions as tentative and said there were talks at one point about a plea that would not involve every count in the indictment, but prosecutors decided that any plea close to trial would be to all counts.
Parnas' attorney Joseph Bondy said his defense team was open “to attempting to resolve this matter” and even engaged in a 10-hour “proffer” session in which Parnas discussed evidence with prosecutors. But he said the door that was open a few months ago “where we might have been able to reap the benefits of a plea” was shut when prosecutors more recently insisted “we should eat every count of the indictment.”
Parnas had been a recurring fixture in Trump’s first impeachment investigation, supplying House investigators with thousands of files on the scheme he advanced to pressure Ukraine’s president to open investigations into Democrat Joe Biden, who went on to beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Despite this, Parnas was never invited to testify. Recordings and documents that Parnas shared with the House Intelligence Committee lay bare a plan, with the knowledge of the president, to smear, possibly surveil and allegedly threaten ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whose reputation for anti-corruption advocacy won her acclaim inside the State Department and powerful enemies where she was posted.
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