David Correia, a Florida businessperson who was arrested at JFK Airport on Wednesday as part of an investigation into associates of Rudy Giuliani, had spoken publicly as far back as January 2017 about Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
“i assume the day your son took his position in Ukraine was also a great moment?” Correia tweeted at Biden on Jan. 22, 2017, according to a cache of his now-deleted Twitter account. “I have a feeling that chapter isn’t closed.” The tweet came days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
Correia, along with Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and Andrey Kukushkin, was named in an indictment unsealed last week that alleged the four men committed fraud and circumvented campaign finance laws to funnel foreign money to a pro-Trump super PAC. All four men have now been arrested. Parnas and Fruman are known associates of Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer working for Trump, and spent lavishly as they traveled the world hunting for information on Biden, a potential presidential rival for Trump in the 2020 election.
Parnas, Fruman, Kukushkin, and Correia “conspired to make political donations — funded by Foreign National-1 — to politicians and candidates for federal and State office to gain influence with candidates as to policies that would benefit a future business venture,” according to the indictment.
Correia has been associated with Parnas since at least 2012, the Miami Herald reported. His 2017 tweet offers a glimpse into how the Ukraine obsession that eventually consumed Giuliani was already bubbling in certain circles from the moment Trump became president.
Correia, 44, describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” on his LinkedIn and is based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He is listed as a cofounder, alongside Parnas, of Fraud Guarantee, a Boca Raton–based company that paid Giuliani $500,000.
Other cached pages from Correia’s Twitter show him retweeting John Solomon, the former Hill columnist who pushed the narrative that forms the basis for Giuliani’s baseless theory that Biden ordered the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on whose board his son Hunter had a seat. No such investigation was active, but Biden's son admitted in an interview Tuesday that it was “poor judgment” to take on the role.
Other caches show him engaging with people trolling Giuliani on Twitter. In one tweet, he calls Giuliani “the greatest mayor and US attorney ever.”
Biden's son joined the board of Burisma in 2014, and the conspiracy theories picked up steam in the dark corners of the internet before hitting the mainstream with a Trump tweet last year and Giuliani’s obsessive focus — on both Twitter and Fox — earlier this year.
Parnas and Fruman have garnered the bulk of attention for carrying out Giuliani’s campaign, following a joint exposé by BuzzFeed News and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. It is unclear if Correia or Kukushkin, who was arrested in San Francisco last week, were involved. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.