ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA — A federal magistrate judge in Virginia reluctantly approved a bond package Thursday for Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the associates of Rudy Giuliani who were arrested Wednesday under campaign finance charges.
Parnas and Fruman will not be released to home detention, until the terms of the bail are met, the judge said.
Under the terms of the package, Parnas and Fruman each will have to put up $1 million in bail and would then be released to home detention to their residences in Florida, where they’d be monitored by GPS devices. Their travel will be restricted to the Southern District of Florida and the Southern District of New York, where the campaign finance charges were brought.
The detention hearing happened less than two hours after the two men made their first appearance in court in front of Magistrate Judge Michael Nachmanoff.
The Soviet-born, Florida based men —who were still wearing the clothes they were arrested in Wednesday — said very little in their brief appearances in front of a magistrate judge, and mostly nodded as they were read their rights.
Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles Airport on Wednesday after purchasing one-way international plane tickets, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York said Thursday. The attorneys representing them Thursday’s said that they did not know where they are traveling to when asked by TPM but there are reports that they were traveling to either Frankfurt or Vienna.
At Thursday’s appearance, Parnas and Fruman were being represent by Kevin Downing and Thomas Zehnle, who also represented former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The attorneys said they were only representing the men temporarily, as the defendants worked out finding lawyers who could represent them permanently in New York.
Ya think?! LOL!
And here’s some more hot fudge chocolate topping to pour over that schadenfreude sundae:
Can the House Intelligence Committee counsel depose them while they are jailed? I don’t see why not. We’re all Feds here, right?
Considering they were picked up at Dulles with tickets out of the country, considering them flight risks isn’t a stretch.
I really wanna see Trump pull his “privilege” shit on these two assholes.
At this point, I think we need to start considering as “flight risks” Rudy, Bill, both Mikes, and Donald.
(Not to mention Ivanka, Jared, and the Paste-Eating Twins.)