Last week the Miami Herald did a piece on two South Florida businessmen named Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The story was about how these recent big Republican party donors are closely tied to our current State Department and Donald Trump’s buddy and national nightmare Rudolf Giuliani. The Herald story is mostly about how Parnas and Fruman are con men, with long histories of scamming people is business ventures.
Daily Kos contributing editor and host of the Daily Kos Radio podcast David Waldman did a little digging. Here’s the image that accompanied the article is below.
But, as Waldman points out, that image has a ghost shoulder on the left, someone cropped out—a Third Man, maybe?
Yes. That’s right. With his wife nowhere in sight, Vice President Mike Pence, probably praying for big money and no whammies, stands smiling next to the other con men. I doubt there was anything insidious in the Herald’s omission of Pence, as the article is about Trump and Giuliani, not Pence. But, as we now know—and sort of always assumed—Mike Pence might be a lapdog but he’s fully involved in every move going on in this administration.
In more recent breaking news, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, along with Harry Sargeant III have been implicated in working to position Republicans, and possibly Trump and Giuliani, to privately gain from Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state gas company. Parnas and Fruman also seem to have been peddling promises of Ukranian corruption dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Vice President Pence is a poor man’s Harry Lime, but just as unscrupulous.