Lev Parnas, one of the two indicted associates to Rudy Giuliani, says Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) met with an ousted Ukrainian official in an effort to dig up dirt on 2020 candidate Joe Biden, according to Parnas’ lawyer.
“Mr. Parnas learned from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that Nunes had met with Shokin in Vienna last December,” Joseph Bondy, Parnas’ lawyer, told CNN on Friday.
The attorney also told CNN that Parnas helped Nunes contact Ukrainians in the congressman’s efforts to find damaging information on Biden.
Bondy said that his client is open to testifying to congressional investigators on Nunes’ alleged communications in Ukraine.
President Donald Trump and Giuliani have repeatedly peddled the false claim that Biden had Shokin ousted because the prosecutor was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company with ties to Biden’s son Hunter.
In reality, Biden was one of many Western leaders calling for Shokin’s ouster due to the prosecutor’s poor handling of corruption. Additionally, Burisma was not under investigation at the time.
Recent reports have show that Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a hardline Trump defender in the committee’s impeachment probe, has been on the periphery of President Donald Trump and several of his allies’ efforts to peddle debunked conspiracies theories about Ukraine and the Democrats.
Another one of Parnas’ attorneys, Ed McMahon, told the Daily Beast on Wednesday that Parnas had set up calls and meetings for Nunes in 2018 to help with the congressman’s unspecified “investigations” in Europe.
It doesn’t stop there: Former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, another Ukrainian official who’s been fueling Trump’s conspiracy theory, told the Daily Beast earlier in November that he had met Nunes in May at a housewarming party.
“We had an interesting conversation,” Telizhenko told the Daily Beast. “He’s well aware on Ukraine politics and from what I understood, he’s a true patriot in the United States.”
