Recording Surfaces of Another Trump Meeting With Parnas and Fruman

The recording documented the presence of Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, at the club, Mar-a-Lago, with the president, the first of two such donor gatherings they participated in with him that month. They met with him again 10 days later, on April 30, at his Washington hotel.

Trump has sought to distance himself from the two men, who would later become integral players in Giuliani’s effort to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations that could help the president’s 2020 reelection campaign.

The release of the recording came a day after Parnas traveled to Washington to rally support for calling witnesses — including himself — at the impeachment trial.

In the recording, Trump can be heard discussing his polling numbers, the 2018 midterm elections and a range of policy issues of interest to the guests, including immigration and the war in Syria. The exchanges offered another window into the president’s interactions with his top financial supporters — and, in one case, his openness to their concerns about a high-profile element of his foreign policy.

The event was apparently recorded by Fruman on his phone. In October, federal prosecutors in New York charged Parnas and Fruman with campaign finance violations, including what officials said were efforts to mask their involvement in a $325,000 donation to a pro-Trump fundraising committee.

The event at Mar-a-Lago was organized by the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, and was attended by Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the national committee, and Pete Sessions, a former chairman of the congressional committee who was then a member of Congress from Texas.

McDaniel greeted Parnas and Fruman familiarly, in the manner of a politician who shakes the hands of thousands of people whose acquaintance she may — or may not — have previously made.

“Hey, how are you?” she said to Fruman. “Good to see you.”

A spokesman for the Republican National Committee dismissed the greeting as insignificant.

“On a given day, the chairwoman greets hundreds if not thousands of people at events across the country,” the spokesman said. “This is nothing more than that.”

It was at that event that Parnas met Sessions. The two men developed a relationship over the following weeks and months, records show. They would eventually discuss removing the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Marie Yovanovitch, which became a focus of the impeachment trial.

Parnas’ lawyer, Joseph Bondy, had released another recording Saturday of the donor dinner held 10 days later in Washington, at which the president discussed Yovanovitch with Parnas, Fruman and other donors.

Among those acknowledged at the April 20 meeting in Florida was Brian Ballard, an influential lobbyist who is a top fundraiser for Trump and the Republican Party.

Five days before the event, Ballard registered to lobby for a U.S.-based Syrian opposition group called Citizens for a Secure and Safe America, which paid his firm $350,000 in 2018 and 2019. He recommended that the group’s leaders take their case against President Bashar Assad directly to Trump by paying to attend a fundraising event, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal last year.

Rim Al-Bezem, a Pennsylvania cardiologist who is the president of the Syrian opposition group, donated a total of $18,800 to the Republican National Committee and its Senate campaign arm. In an interview, she said she raised additional money from other Syrian-American activists.

As a result, she and an associate secured invitations to the April 20, 2018, Mar-a-Lago roundtable, which came a week after Trump ordered airstrikes against Syrian research, storage and military targets to punish Assad for a suspected chemical attack that killed more than 40 people.

At Mar-a-Lago, Al-Bezem can be heard on the recording telling Trump: “I’m here to thank you very much for your courageous acts. I cannot tell you how much Syrian Americans are indebted to you.”

Trump replied, “So they like the raid?”

Al-Bezem and her associate assured the president that Syrian-Americans were thankful, but also pushed Trump to take a harder line against Assad.

“Well, give me information on that, OK?” Trump asked the women. “Because I talk about it all the time.”

Four months later, Al-Bezem raised an even more acute concern at another roundtable with Trump — this one benefiting the Mike Braun’s campaign for Senate in Indiana, to which Al-Bezem donated $1,000. Assad’s military and its Russian allies were preparing to launch an attack on Idlib province, the lone remaining major rebel stronghold in Syria, Al-Bezem told the president, urging him to intervene.

Days later, Trump tweeted a warning to Assad and his allies against “this potential human tragedy,” which his top officials echoed in a pressure campaign. Assad did not attack, and Trump credited Al-Bezem with drawing attention his attention to the issue.

“I wholeheartedly believe that President Trump’s intervention had averted that attack,” Al-Bezem said in an interview Thursday. She rejected the suggestion that her donations paved the way for Trump to hear her concerns.

“I don’t think it was a donor access thing. I think it was a human access thing,” she said. “The president listened to me because he got the chance to maybe hear for the first time what’s happening in Syria from a Syrian-American.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .