Lev Parnas' Attorney Responds To Trump Troll Twitter Disinfo

[jberryhill]

I'll start with the tweet from Joseph Bondy, Lev Parnas' attorney, and then drill down:

Link to tweet

One of the classic disinfo techniques used by internet trolls is to use a select piece of fake information, when there is a body of perfectly good information, in order to use the one fake to discredit the truth.

A typical deployment of this technique was the Texas Air National Guard Memo. Did W shirk his duties in the TANG? You bet he did. But by spiking the information-sphere with the fake memo, the story could be discredited by reference to "the fake memo".

Ivana Trump's book "Raising Trump" contained this picture, which Ivana Trump has stated is Eric Trump's sixth birthday party at the Plaza Hotel in New York:



The photo was also run in a cropped version in this ABC News piece a while back, with the caption:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/ivana-trump-opens-surprising-facts-life-donald-trump/story?id=50330454

"Ivana Trump shares a family photo from Eric Trump's sixth birthday party at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1990."

One thing to note is that even Ivana's memory that it was a "sixth" birthday party might be off. The picture quality is not the best, but it looks like there might be seven candles on that cake.

However, the Trumps divorced in 1991, but Eric's birthday is in January. To be precise, Eric's birthday is January 6, 1984.

Now, Lev Parnas, in a recent New Yorker piece, talked about getting a job at Kings Highway Realty in Brooklyn when he was 16. The characterization of that job is a little odd, since it is highly unlikely that a 16 year old was dealing in real estate, since NY does not issue licenses to 16 year olds to do so, and contracting with minors is generally a difficult affair. Be that as it may, in the SAME New Yorker piece, Parnas states that Trump didn't get to know who he was until 2016.

In any event, Parnas' age matters because he was born in February 1972. So, if that picture was taken in 1990, the person who was initially fingered by a curious Twitter account, sure looks a lot older than 17 (and doesn't have Parnas' cleft chin).

One of the things that is interesting with "I just found out on Twitter" is to track down the original source of a piece of information. The original Twitter account that posed this as Lev Parnas has been suspended, and seemed to come out of nowhere.

But, despite that happening, the picture took on a life of its own. The party was said to be for one of Lev's kids, to obscure the date problem, or was said to be for Ivanka Trump, despite the football theme which would have been an odd choice for the Trumps to make for a girl's birthday party. The interesting thing is that, starting from a "patient zero" red-marker notation, the identical image took on more aspects than Vishnu - in terms of the factual details - in a matter of well under a few hours.

In order for that to happen, people along the way have to make stuff up. Given that tweets can be easily re-tweeted, it makes no sense for different persons to re-package the facts as "25 years ago", or "Ivanka's party" or "Lev's kid's party" absent an intent to simply confuse what is the photo and when it was taken.

Eventually Snopes picked it up, of course:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lev-parnas-eric-trump-birthday/


The claim that the man in this photograph is Lev Parnas is not based on any credible information. This claim is based solely on the notion that the man in the photograph bears a passing resemblance to Parnas. However, Parnas’ name was not attached to this picture until close to three decades after it was taken. And from what we can tell, Parnas is too young to be the man pictured here.

...

Some social media users have pointed to a report in the New Yorker to bolster the claim that Parnas is indeed the man in this photograph. While the The New Yorker reported that Parnas started selling Trump Organization co-ops for Kings Highway Realty when he was 16, there’s no indication that Parnas had a familiar relationship with the Trump family at that time. In fact, Parnas said that while he bumped into Trump occasionally at events in New York over the years, he didn’t get to know the president until the 2016 presidential campaign

The amazing thing about the will to believe is that people were willing to believe that the clearly older man in that photograph was somehow a 17 year old Lev Parnas (or 18 year old, depending on whether that is Eric's sixth or seventh birthday).

There is an active effort to get people to bite on these kinds of things. When you see something on Twitter that might be interesting, it may be a good idea to indicate whether you have bothered to look into it, and consider that what you are re-posting, re-distributing and giving a wider audience may or may not be true.

Also, just because someone is not sure that it is true, does not make that person a troll. The truth can usually stand up to questioning. In fact, that's a typical method for getting at the truth.

Plus, everyone missed the real surprise in the picture anyway.

That kid on the far left? Had a cameo in Airplane:

[malaise]

1. Mr Cynicism wins this round

[Mike 03]

2. There was something floating around this morning too.

IIRC, it was a photo of an allegedly old Miami Herald (?) article that referred to Parnas and Fruman as Trump's "best friends" claiming they threw him a birthday party or some variation on this.

Seemingly credible twitter accounts were passing this around, but it was unsourced, and it wasn't a retweet, so it couldn't be traced. I'm still very curious about where it came from.

[jberryhill]

4. Well, if you believe Parnas

He says that Trump wouldn't have known him prior to 2016.

Parnas might not be telling the truth about everything, since he may have legal exposure that makes it worth admitting to some things but not others.

For example, he has gone with the "not serious about stalking Yovanovitch" story.

[Mike 03]

5. This photo of the article that was circulating was almost certainly a fabrication.

The typography was all wrong, and it contained errors, abuse of punctuation. People here reviewed it and nobody seemed to accept it as believable. But its purpose was to trip us up.

I wish I could remember the exact date. It was early 2000s.

[dewsgirl]

6. I shared it and deleted it.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. the male at the head of the table is wearing glasses ...

Ergo, he is Moscow Mitch.

Ipso pepto, your argument fails!

(Hillary's time machine was not involved in this explanation. I'm not licensed to operate it).

[jberryhill]

7. Careful... you seem like a smart guy....

If you know too much, well, first we lock you up.

Then, we spell your name wrong so's nobody can find you....



Yes, that's the super-competent main federal lockup in NYC at work again... Where mistakes are never made.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

8. who dat?

It looks like he's being disappeared, one letter at a time. If I log in and discover I'm "Hermit-The-Pog", I'm gonna run.

"Release Date: UNKNOWN" -- that's also a bit ominous.

[Maine-i-acs]

9. I like the way Don the Con is grabbing Eric's head

to twist it toward the camera.

[jberryhill]

10. There are a few weird things going on in there

[TheBlackAdder]

11. It's not his hand, it's a brain sucker. What's it doing? Starving to death! 😂

[jberryhill]

12. Lol