that court case is a big deal. federal prosecutors in chicago have been fighting for his extradition for years, and so get this, when lev parnas and igor fruman end up in federal custody nabbed in a d.c. airport on an outbreound flight, we now know the prosecutors were like, wait a second, we know those guys from the ukrainian oligarch russian mob world and now they are working with rudy giuliani, the president s lawyer. what is going on here? joining me now, a reporter who broke the story that giuliani was paid $500,000 by lev parnas company and the story that parnas and fruman both worked for firtash. a lot of complicated names, but start with firtash and the case against him. he was indicted in chicago in talent f 2013 for bribery for access to
someone else, and it is worthwhile to take a second to explain who that man is. his dame is dmitry firtas and it is a big deal. controlling the flow of the natural gas is one of the ways how russia controls who has power in ukraine. he s also tied to the russian mob, and i mean really tied to the russian mob. remember bill taylor, the u.s. chief admission to ukraine, revealing trump s quid pro quo. the washington post reports back in 2010 when taylor was ambassador to ukraine his first time around he wrote in an internal diplomatic cable saying firtas had acknowledged russian ties to a mob boss in a private meeting. the guy he s referring is known as the boss of bosses. the fbi says he s involved in weapons trafficking, murder and
ukraine officials are hunter biden as part of the scream as well? well, it s a good question. did he join it i mean, the way people are seeing it now is that he, you know, sort of began more recently to join in the push to reinvestigate burisma and the hunter biden case. the famously the prosecutor, his affidavit was in support of the firtash case, right? and it s the thing that lays out some of these conspiracy theories. yep. and this wasn t something that had come up in the firtash case, which has been argued very vigorously in court and hadn t come up before. all right. thank you very much. ahead, as the president tries to take credit for fixing the catastrophe he created for the kurdish allies, what do the kurdish people have to say about it all? next. xt
prostitution on a global scale. he has also been indicted in american federal court for bribery. he s right now in vienna fighting extradition. if vienna sounds familiar, that s where rudy giuliani said his indicted associates parnas and fruman were heading before their arrest. reuters, which has done excellent reporting on this subject, reports both men had been working for firtas for several months. we learned from the washington post after consulting lev parnas, firtas hired the new legal team over the summer. the husband and wife team that are on fox news all the time and at one point going to be trump s lawyers until they weren t. these guys, parnas and fruman have overlapping gifts. they work for giuliani and stump for the president. one of their gigs. they work for two right-wing conservative media star lawyers who defend the president on tv, also being paid by a mob-linked oligarch in court.
department officials to argue against the charges. that seems like very successful representational choice by mr. firtash. it really does. i mean, and they were they were paying parnas, as they ve said themselves, they were paying parnas as a translator. he s not as far as we know a professional translator, but that became his job and his role. that s how he was receiving money in this context. so two questions here. so we know that parnas was directing money that firtash was directing money to these two men who also paid giuliani 500,000. we don t have any evidence that the half a million bucks that rudy got ultimately came from firtash, right? that chronology wouldn t make sense as we know who it. okay. i want to put that on the table. second of all, firtash has his own actions to grind with various members of the ukrainian prosecutor community. do we know if he was trying to peddle his own, like, oppo on