Where’d the million dollars go?
This week Edward MacMahon, one of the two attorneys representing Lev Parnas, filed a request in court to withdraw from the case. MacMahon cited Parnas’ dwindling ability to pay his legal bills as the reason. Parnas’ remaining attorney, Joseph Bondy, tweeted that the split was amicable and that it was best for all sides. Even if we presume that this is all true, where’d the million dollars go?
Federal prosecutors recently alleged in court that in September, Lev Parnas received a million dollar deposit in his bank account from Kremlin oligarch Dmitry Firtash. Parnas pushed back by asserting that the deposit was a loan to his wife, not a payoff. Either way, the Parnas household just got its hands on a million bucks four months ago, and now Parnas is saying he can’t afford to pay one of his lawyers?
Suffice it to say that this raises some questions. The obvious question is why a Kremlin oligarch gave a million dollars to Lev Parnas just as the Feds were moving in on him (he was arrested two weeks later). The next question is why Lev isn’t willing to, or can’t, use it for his legal fees. Is he afraid to use Kremlin money to fund his defense, now that it’s been exposed as Kremlin money? Is the money already gone, and if so, where did it go?
This leads us back to Rudy Giuliani’s public admission back in October that he was paid half a million dollars from Lev Parnas’ comically named company, Fraud Guarantee. Did this payout to Rudy come from the same money that Lev had received from the oligarch just weeks earlier? If so, it would help explain why Lev no longer appears to have the money. Or is this all just one big coincidence? Prosecutors are surely trying to get to the bottom of this as we speak.
