(CNN)Federal prosecutors in New York have asked a federal judge to revoke bail for indictedRudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnasand jail him while he awaits trial,alleging in a court filing Wednesdaythat he failed to disclose $ 1 million he received from a Russian bank account the month before he was charged.
According to prosecutors, Parnas also made false statements to the government about his assets and income and misled his pretrial services officer in Florida about whether he had been granted permission by the court to leave his house.
In one instance, prosecutors said, Parnas earned $ (********************************, 02 over the course of three months from a law firm and put it into an account in his wife’s name, but told the government that he received $ (*********************************, 06 annually from the firm.
The law firm diGenova & Toensing – which represents Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is living in Austria while fighting bribery charges in the US – has said it hiredParnas as a translator to communicate with Firtash, who does not speak English.
Parnas, a Soviet-born American businessman, was indicted in October along with three others for allegedly funneling foreign money into US elections. Parnas has pleaded not guilty. The federal judge who set his bail ordered home detention at Parnas’s residence in Florida.
Parnas and one his co-defendants, Igor Fruman, are linked closely with Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney. For months, they aided Giuliani’s effort to compile what he has claimed is damaging information on Trump’s political rival, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, whose son, Hunter Biden, was on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. That effort stands at the center of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry.
Prosecutors made allegations in the filing Wednesday that extend beyond Parnas himself. They accused one of Parnas’s attorneys of giving incomplete or not fully accurate information to the government about Parnas’s assets and income. And they said one of his attorneys misrepresented to Parnas’s pretrial services officer whether Parnas had been granted a modification to his bail.
Prosecutors did not identify in the filing which of Parnas’s two attorneys provided the allegedly false information, nor did they disclose any additional details about the $ 1 million payment Parnas allegedly received from the Russian account in September.
“We’ve received the government filing, we disagree with it in material respects, we will be filing our reply in writing and we look forward to addressing these claims with the court, “Joseph A Bondy, one of Parnas’s attorneys, said in a statement.
In their filing, as they have in court, prosecutors emphasized that they consider Parnas a “significant flight risk,” adding that his apparent misrepresentations to the government have intensified their concerns.
“His efforts to mislead Pretrial Services and the Government regarding his assets and income in an effort to gain his release – when coupled with his most recent effort to mislead Pretrial Services regarding the conditions of his release — only serve to compound the already-extreme flight risk that he poses, “they wrote.
CNN’s Kara Scannell contributed to this report.
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