The Daily Beast reports:

George Soros, an American billionaire who has invested heavily in progressive political causes and philanthropies around the world, has long been a bête noire of conservatives and regularly vilified in Russian propaganda—the same kind that Trumpworld is accused of subscribing to in its Ukraine dealings. Giuliani, diGenova, and Toensing were particularly opposed to Soros’ work, Parnas said.

“Soros became Enemy Number One, and it was understood that Soros infiltrated the U.S. government and State Department over a certain period of time,” Parnas said.

“He employed different prosecutors in different states, different congressmen, and the biggest thing was they thought Victoria Nuland was his person in the State Department and then let him control Eastern Europe by naming ambassadors and stuff, and then opened up this anti-corruption-type of system to cover up, actually, his corruption. That’s what we were running with.”

Parnas said he didn’t have any particular interest in Soros, but got pulled into the conservative lawyers’ allegations. Many of Trump’s thorniest problems, in their view, started with Soros.

“The consensus was that the reason Trump had the Russiagate and everything that was happening was because Soros and the Democrats controlled certain U.S. embassies in Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukrainian one, and were able to help with the Manafort stuff and all other kinds of stuff that basically caused problems in the Trump World,” he said.

So the effort to influence Zelensky’s administration included machinations against Soros, he said—in particular, to push Zelensky to distance himself from people perceived to be close to billionaire. That push and the push for political favors for Trump were one and the same, he said. In retrospect, Parnas said, the Soros focus grew out of an atmosphere he described as cult-like. When asked if he believed his former allies’ claims about the billionaire, he said he got sucked in at the time.

“When you’ve got the president saying it, you’ve got his attorneys saying it, you’ve got all these congressmen saying it, you’ve got all these senators saying it—again, when I say Trumpworld, that small inner-whatever, everybody would talk about it: ‘This Soros guy.’ That’s why I look at it as a cult.”

Soros, a survivor of the Holocaust, has regularly been portrayed as a super-villian in Kremlin propaganda, and some of Trump’s allies have echoed that description as the president’s impeachment troubles have grown. DiGenova sparked outrage just last month after claiming Soros “controls” the State Department. [Continue reading…]