Former Dallas Congressman Pete Sessions’ attempt at a political comeback in a new congressional district was already embattled. When Sessions announced his campaign for the 17th Congressional District in Waco in early October, some local Republicans said he was a carpetbagger trying to bigfoot his way back into power after losing his Dallas congressional seat in 2018.
Then, late last week, Sessions’ path back to Washington, D.C., started to look far more like a difficult climb. The former congressman was formally brought into the whirling scandal around the White House and Ukraine that had also caught up President Donald Trump, as well as his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. A federal indictment against two of Giuliani’s associates for allegedly funneling Russian money into U.S. elections referenced a “Congressman-1” who, it quickly became clear, was Pete Sessions.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born American citizens, had acted as straw donors to funnel foreign cash into U.S. elections and used a front company to conceal the source of their contributions. It was all an effort to “buy political influence” with elected officials, including “Congressman-1,” according to the indictment. The Observer first reported on Sessions’ connections to Parnas and Fruman on October 4.
