Rudy Giuliani, the godfather to Lev Parnas’ son, threw his indicted associate under the bus on Thursday, telling CNN that the alleged point man in Donald Trump’s Ukraine extortion plot is not to be trusted because he’s an “an unreliable source” who has been “caught in so many lies.” (Parnas has pleaded not guilty.)

“I feel sorry for him,” Giuliani said of the Ukrainian-born businessman. “I feel what he’s doing is terribly wrong.”

What Parnas is doing, of course, is spilling everything he knows about Trump and Giuliani’s effort to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into Joe Biden and a debunked 2016 conspiracy theory related to the DNC server. In interviews, Parnas has alleged that the president was aware of the plot, despite Trump’s vehement denials. Perhaps most troubling for the White House, Parnas has also turned over reams of documentary evidence to House impeachment investigators ahead of Trump’s Senate trial. Giuliani sidestepped questions about the substance of Parnas’s claims in his CNN interview, engaging instead in a little concern trolling of his former friend. “Maybe he’s getting really bad legal advice,” Giuliani said. “The same thing Michael Cohen did,” he added, referring to the longtime Trump lawyer who was rewarded for loyalty by getting called a “rat.” “When you have a witness like that,” Giuliani said of Parnas, “you don’t try out to be a government witness on television.”

He made similar comments on Monday night, telling Fox’s Laura Ingraham, in an apparent attempt to get some distance from Parnas, that “Lev is someone I’m—I was close to. Obviously, I was misled by him. I feel very bad. I was godfather to his child...I still feel sorry for him.” He added, nobly, that “I will not be sucked into a point-by-point response—which I am ready to give in great detail in front of Congress or a court, in which it will turn out that he lied multiple times.”

Giuliani, who has made plenty of his own TV missteps, frequently attacked Cohen’s credibility when he turned on the president. “This guy is a proven liar,” Giuliani said in 2018. Indeed, Trump and his allies repeatedly described Cohen as “discredited,” suggesting his general scumbaggery made his allegations against the president inherently untrustworthy. Trump recently brushed off his many photos with Parnas by describing him as a “groupie” and a “con man.” For Trump, it seems one advantage to working with unsavory characters is being able to question their credibility as soon as they’re no longer useful.

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