The Igor Fruman saga just took a surreal new turn
When a still-unidentified source gave ABC News access last week to a recording that Igor Fruman had secretly made of Donald Trump in April 2018, it raised the question of who that source was. Lev Parnas confirmed through his attorney that he was not the source. He’d forgotten that Fruman had long ago given him a copy of the recording, and he only fished it out and released it after he saw the ABC story about it.
At the time, Palmer Report pointed out that there were only two possibilities. The first was that Igor Fruman gave the recording to ABC News as a de facto way of flipping on Trump. The second was that Igor had no interest in having that recording become public, and someone in Igor’s circle (not named Lev) essentially betrayed him by giving the recording to ABC. Now we have our answer.
Palmer Report explained that if Igor was flipping on Trump, he was going to need to sever his ties with his Trump-supplied legal team. Instead, Igor’s same pro-Trump legal team represented him in a court hearing today. In other words, he hasn’t flipped. Just to erase any doubt, Igor’s team specifically complained in court today that privileged information was being released.
This leaves only one logical possibility. When Igor Fruman gave a copy of his secret Trump recording to Lev Parnas, he also gave copies to one or more other people he trusted – and one of those people turned around and leaked the recording to ABC News. In other words there’s someone in the Lev-Igor circle who’s driving a separate agenda entirely. Have we heard the last of this person, or will we see more leaks of Igor’s evidence that Igor doesn’t want out there?
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report