Igor Fruman's lawyer may have just gotten himself fired

But he evidently won't mind.

You remember Igor - one of Giuliani's two buddies who were trying to get out of the country when they were busted at the airport for illegal campaign contributions.

LOL.

A lawyer for Igor Fruman, one of the men who had been working with Rudy Guiliani in his Ukraine campaign, tried to argue Friday that his client was not a flight risk and didn’t need to be under house arrest, despite the fact that he had been arrested just before boarding a flight overseas on a one-way ticket last month.

“I’m not exactly sure what your ask is here,” Judge Paul Oetken said to Todd Blanche, the lawyer for Fruman.

Blanche sighed and looked down.

[...]

"There is zero evidence,” Blanche told the court.

“It’s false that he had a one-way ticket?” Oetken aksed.

“No, that is absolutely true,” Blanche responded. It was just cheaper for Fruman and his business partner, Lev Parnas, to get one-way tickets, Blanche said. The one-way ticket to Vienna was $8,000, while the round-trip was $20,000, he said, adding that he had texts from the date of purchase showing that a one-way was cheaper.

  Buzzfeed News

That's certainly not been the case on domestic flights I've been on.

Fruman and Parnas have been indicted on four counts of campaign finance violations, including using “straw” accounts and businesses to use the money of an unnamed Russian businessperson to influence US politicians. They also played a key role in a campaign to oust the former US ambassador to Ukraine and dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden for President Donald Trump.

In early October, Congress asked Fruman and Parnas to testify for the ongoing impeachment inquiry into Trump over his statements to the president of Ukraine. Two days later, the two men were arrested as they were about to board a plane at Dulles. They both had one-way tickets to Vienna, Austria.

[...]

“He just was not fleeing the country,” Blanche repeated.

Fruman wanted his bail agreement to be amended because he was finding it difficult to lead his life under house arrest, stuck in his home alone in Miami with his three children as he was going through a divorce, Blanche said.

Stuck home with his kids. That's a long fall from where he was, for sure.

“He needs to be able to take them to school, and to just be a dad,” the lawyer said. “He also has a mother with severe health problems who lives nearby,” and he wants to be able to visit her.

When the lawyer for the government, Nicolas Roos, got a chance to respond, he immediately brought up the timeline of Fruman and Parnas’s arrest.

“What is clear is he was subpoenaed by Congress on October 7th, on the 8th he booked a one-way flight to Vienna, and on the 9th he was arrested on the jetway,” Roos said. “What was his reason to leave on such short notice? … Why such a rush to leave the country?”

Roos went on to detail Fruman’s many financial and political connections to Europe, attempting to demonstrate that Fruman could live a very pleasant life abroad if he were able to flee.

[...]

The judge denied the petition. Fruman will stay on house arrest.

UPDATE: 9/11/21

Igor Fruman found guilty in Trump campaign charge