President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani dismissed claims made by his indicted former business partner Lev Parnas, claiming they are fictional.
Giuliani, 75, responded to Parnas’s claims about their work to uncover evidence of corruption by 2020 Democratic front-runner former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine during a Monday night interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. He was asked questions about specific accusations thrown out by Parnas during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week.
“Obviously, I was misled by him,” Giuliani said, after Ingraham played a portion of Parnas’s interview with Maddow. “I still feel sorry for him.”
While he refused to “respond to him for each and every one of the misrepresentations” Parnas has made, the former New York City mayor added that he “wouldn’t mind being called as a witness” to testify in front of Congress.
After being pressed by Ingraham to point to examples of lies that Parnas made, Giuliani referenced a supposed meeting at the White House Hanukkah party in 2018.
“He said that he was part of a meeting that he was called into during a Hanukkah party at the White House. And the president, during that meeting, deputized him and told him that he was going to be like his representative,” Guiliani explained. “There were four people in that meeting. The four people in that meeting, myself, his former partner, Igor Fruman, and two others, say that it’s absolutely untrue. The meeting never took place. The records demonstrate the meeting never took place.”
Giuliani also pointed to a Parnas claim that GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California met with Viktor Shokin in Vienna in 2018 to show that “Parnas once again lied.” He additionally denied Parnas’s allegation that he spoke with Attorney General William Barr about his work in Ukraine.
“A stupid lie is when your partner, Igor Fruman, can contradict you. A stupid lie is when there’s a tape recording that can contradict you. A stupid lie is when there is a passport that can contradict you,” Giuliani said. “And the lies are not just lies. They’re stupid lies, which means he is extremely, poorly represented. I don’t let my client to go in and tell a story that four people can contradict without checking it out.”
