MIAMI — On a warm evening in mid-May, Lev Parnas arrived at a recording studio in Miami, settled into a chair behind a microphone and, over the next roughly three hours, proceeded to lambast his former hero.
“People don’t want to realize to what extent Donald Trump micromanages and is aware of all the corruption and criminality that’s going on,” Parnas said.
“Don’t forget that Donald Trump loves Vladimir Putin,” he said.
“It’s a contract marriage,” he said of Trump’s relationship with Melania. “Most oligarchs, they have the same thing.”
It wasn’t an especially groundbreaking line of attack against the former president, but Parnas was still feeling his way in his new role as a Trump world scourge. Back in 2019, Parnas was a pro-Trump hatchet man whose tale of digging up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine would put his face on cable news and his name on the front page. And had also netted him a campaign finance conviction, for which he went to prison and finished his term on home confinement in September 2023. When I met him in May, it had been only a few months since Parnas had rebranded himself as an anti-Trump podcaster. His show, “Lev Remembers,” was pulling in an audience of maybe a couple thousand live listeners. But the podcast is just one of the vehicles that Parnas is using to try to reclaim the attention and influence that came so easily five years ago.
In February, Parnas published Shadow Diplomacy: Lev Parnas and His Wild Ride from Brooklyn to Trump’s Inner Circle. In March, he testified before Congress, seeking to discredit the GOP-led impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Rachel Maddow unveiled an MSNBC Films documentary she produced about Parnas’ life — “From Russia With Lev” — to sold-out audiences in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco. An average of 2.2 million viewers watched its MSNBC premier on Sept. 20. Last Wednesday, Parnas appeared at a campaign event for Paula Collins, a Democrat looking to unseat one of Trump’s top allies in the House, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Meanwhile, a group of anti-Trump activists is organizing a “Tour America With Lev” event, which is expected to bring Parnas to audiences from North Carolina to Wisconsin in the run-up to the election. The event’s mission, the organizers write, is “to Save Democracy One Story at a Time.”
Parnas, by his own admission, is an improbable choice for a savior of democracy. With a chipped front tooth, a silver chain around his neck and sock-less black loafers, he looks like someone who should be out collecting gambling debts or, say, checking I.D.s at a discotheque. Indeed, he freely admits he used to run cash for the mob in New York City.
And let’s not forget the role he played in torpedoing democracy. As Parnas has told it, often and openly, roughly five-and-a-half years ago, he was assigned by then-President Trump to go to Ukraine and uncover enough mud to sink the candidacy of Trump’s chief political rival, Biden. Over the course of 10 months, and working closely with Rudy Giuliani, Parnas scoured the Eastern European nation — meeting with current and former prosecutors, powerful oligarchs and even the former president of Ukraine — in search of the evidence that would definitively show how Biden abused his power to protect his son Hunter. Though he ultimately failed to obtain the smoking gun he was looking for — because, Parnas now says, there was no wrongdoing to uncover in the first place — he nonetheless managed to help unleash an unfounded political smear that backfired, becoming central to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, and has recently resurfaced in the sputtering Republican-led impeachment inquiry of Biden.
What prompted this conversion from Trump fanboy to Trump critic is a matter of debate, but there’s little question it occurred shortly after Parnas’ arrest on campaign finance charges (almost entirely unrelated to his Ukrainian subterfuge) in October 2019. When his MAGA allies didn’t come to his rescue, and when Trump himself denied knowing him, a wounded Parnas turned against the then-president, insisting that the commander-in-chief “knew exactly what was going on” with his Ukrainian muckraking operation. Parnas also provided to Congress hundreds of pages of text messages, photographs and other documents that substantiated much of his account of his activities in Ukraine. Today, Parnas is once again telling his story as widely as possible, he told me, in order to repair his reputation, keep Trump from winning a second term, and even more improbably clear Hunter Biden’s name of the attacks Parnas helped propagate.
“I’m looking for atonement,” Parnas told me. “I want to make up for what I did.”
With this dramatic turnaround, Parnas is following the now familiar path that was pioneered most notably by Michael Cohen: A Trump die-hard breaks with him once his misdeeds are exposed, confesses publicly and reinvents himself as a resistance hero.
But is Parnas really a changed man? Or is this fast-talking wheeler-dealer just working his latest hustle?
It’s a question about which there’s considerable disagreement. With the election rapidly approaching, the new Parnas has been embraced by many in the anti-Trump movement. “Sometimes it takes someone like this to be able to reveal some truths that we absolutely need,” says Scott Dworkin, the executive director of the Democratic Coalition, a progressive grassroots group.
The prosecutors who put him in prison, however, say the Parnas they encountered was looking out only for himself. “[N]othing about Parnas’s crimes or the conduct since his arrest shows that he has truly changed,” federal prosecutors wrote in a June 2022 filing related to his sentencing. “His crimes of conviction have a unifying theme: Parnas lied and swindled in order to buy influence and power. His conduct since his arrest is of a similar vein. Parnas sought fame and notoriety as a result of his arrest.” Prosecutors added that Parnas has “cashed in on his notoriety” through the $120,000 payment from one of the production companies that made the documentary about him.
For his part, Parnas says that from now until Election Day, his singular goal in speaking out is to prevent Trump from retaking the White House. But he’s also hoping that, once the election is over, he’ll be able to use the attention he garners from this new wave of notoriety — plus the attention from his past — to launch a whole new career. The details are still hazy, he says, but he listed a few possibilities for me: There might be paid speaking gigs, an offer to work as a political commentator on TV, a new book deal or perhaps a deal with a Hollywood producer for a TV series based on his life.
Parnas bristles at any suggestion that his new crusade might just be another money-making angle. But it’s hard not to wonder about this given the life story he tells with such relish. Parnas arrived in Trump world planning to leverage his new connections to make money. Now that he’s out, he says he’s hoping that his anti-Trump efforts can lead to personal benefits as well.
“I have a lot of knowledge of world events, current events, political events,” he says, “where I think I could also be able to monetize it into a career financially for going forward.”
“You never know,” Parnas says. “Maybe one day I’ll decide to run for office.”
Parnas’ passage into and out of Trump world happened in a relatively quick amount of time — about four years between when he first shook hands with Trump and when he found himself locked up and abandoned by him. But in some ways it was the result of a lifetime of working the angles.
Growing up in Brighton Beach, a slice of New York City with a bustling population of Soviet-Jewish immigrants, Parnas told me he used to steal baseball cards from memorabilia conventions and resell them in the neighborhood. But when his father died in 1983, he resolved to do more to support his mother and sister. “I basically made a decision that I’m going to work,” Parnas recalls, “and make that American dream happen for my family.”
At age 15, he said he dropped out of high school, purchased a fake I.D. and secured a job selling real estate. One day, Parnas showed an apartment to a tall, older gentleman in a suit. As he pointed out the features of the unit, the man turned to him.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
It was Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father and, as it happened, the owner of the apartments that Parnas was selling. For a young immigrant on the make, the Trump name signified success. “The wealthy of the wealthy,” Parnas says, “something that I always dreamed [of] and aspired to be.”
Parnas’ bosses let him go when they discovered he was underage. Through a connection in his then-girlfriend’s family, he began work as a runner for the Russian mob, collecting cash that was skimmed from area gas stations and delivering it to the gangsters’ headquarters. “I [would] typically have like anywhere from five to $10 million in cash [in] my trunk every day,” Parnas recalls.
Over the following years, Parnas worked as a securities broker for three different companies that, according to The Wall Street Journal, would eventually be expelled from the industry. In 2011, a New York family trust sued Parnas for allegedly failing to repay a $350,000 bridge loan that was supposed to bankroll a movie. Though a judge eventually ruled in their favor, the Pues family trust has reportedly struggled to obtain the more than $500,000 that the court said Parnas owes. “Mr. Parnas is a con man,” Dianne Pues, who declined to comment to POLITICO, told The Miami Herald. “He financially ruined us,” she added. Parnas says his conflict with the Pues family was simply a business deal gone bad.
In 2013, Parnas launched a new company offering to insure investors against the losses they would incur if they were victimized by swindlers. According to the Journal, Parnas selected the name of the company — Fraud Guarantee — partly in order to bury the controversies in his past. Now, when someone plugged “Lev Parnas” and “Fraud” into an online search engine, they were less likely, for example, to pull up a reference to his allegedly unpaid $350,000 loan, the Journal reported. Parnas denies choosing the company’s name for that reason.
Years later, however, Parnas would plead guilty to wire fraud in connection to Fraud Guarantee. According to federal prosecutors, Parnas and an accomplice swindled more than $2.3 million from the company’s investors between 2012 and 2019, and Parnas used some of the funds to lease luxury cars, give money to his wife and son and cover other personal expenses. One of the victims, a pro-Trump lawyer named Charles Gucciardo, had been trying to save up money to allow his daughter, who has special needs, to live without additional financial assistance after he and his ex-wife pass away. In a letter to the judge, Gucciardo, who was defrauded of $500,000, called Parnas a “pompous conniving self-centered con artist who does not care one iota about the consequences of his actions so long as he believes that he might stand to benefit from his schemes.”
By 2015, Parnas was living in Boca Raton, Florida with his third wife and four children, when a name from his past resurfaced. In the years before Trump launched his White House bid, Parnas says he occasionally bumped into the real estate developer on the South Florida social circuit. Around 2014, Parnas says he was invited to a reception for Ivanka Trump’s jewelry line, where he got his picture taken with Donald Trump. Then, in June 2015, Parnas received a call from his teenage son, Aaron. “I think your friend is running for president,” Aaron said.
Parnas had never even bothered to vote. But in order to impress his son, Parnas scored a couple of VIP passes to a 2015 Trump rally in Doral. While there, the two had a few minutes to chat and take photos with Trump. Parnas told Trump about selling Trump-owned apartments in New York all those years ago. Trump said Aaron could work for him at the White House after the election.
Parnas says he felt an odd kinship with the New York wheeler-dealer. “His life,” Parnas says, “is very similar [to] my life — just, you know, he grew up with hundreds of millions of dollars and I grew up with nothing.” The proximity to power was intoxicating, he says. “Because where I came from, the streets of Brooklyn, people like us don’t get to those levels.”
In the fall of 2016, a wealthy Trump backer asked Parnas if he would like to help host a small fundraiser. The minimum cost? A $50,000 contribution. For Parnas, the check was support for Trump, but also a business strategy to gain access to a network of rich donors who might invest in a real estate deal he was putting together. “It was a huge bet,” he says. “I didn’t pay rent that month, I’ll put it to you that way.”
The wager paid off. At the fundraiser, Parnas got Trump to sign the photograph he’d taken at the Florida rally a year earlier. “It was me and him having a one-on-one conversation with everybody sitting watching and being in awe.” Parnas, now a superfan, attended Trump’s election night celebration in New York and marquee parties for the inauguration. He got photos of himself with the likes of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Amid this swirl of MAGA boosterism, he got to know one Trump world figure particularly well.
As Parnas tells it, Giuliani — the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York whose office won high-profile convictions against the mob — looked up to Parnas because of his gangland roots. “I mean, you gotta understand, Giuliani dealt with guys like me by trying to put guys like me away all his life, while admiring guys like me,” Parnas says. In 2018, when Parnas says he helped arrange a $500,000 payment to Giuliani to be the face of the company, Fraud Guarantee, their friendship was solidified. They hung out at Trump events, had lunch at the Trump Hotel in Washington and sat together at a private box at Yankee Stadium. When Parnas’ wife had a new baby, Giuliani agreed to be the godfather.
In November 2018, Parnas says, he and his business partner, Igor Fruman, got together with Giuliani at the Grand Havana Room, a New York City cigar club. At one point, Giuliani ducked away from the table to take a phone call. When he returned, Giuliani explained he was hearing rumors about potential Ukrainian influence against Trump in the 2016 election.
In response, Parnas, who kept close tabs on political developments in his homeland, says he began telling Giuliani about Joe Biden’s prior involvement in Ukrainian affairs. Parnas provided this information, he says, in order to try to demonstrate his value to Giuliani. While serving as vice president, Parnas explained, Biden had used the threat of withholding foreign aid to force Ukraine’s top prosecutor from office. What’s more, Parnas went on, at the time of his ouster, the prosecutor was overseeing an investigation into a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, whose board members included Biden’s own son, Hunter.
When Giuliani expressed surprise at this, Parnas says, Fruman grabbed his cell phone and pulled up a video of a 2018 speaking event in which Biden boasted about what he’d done.
“I looked at [Ukraine’s president and prime minister] and said: I’m leaving in six hours,” Biden said during the speaking event. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
(A spokesperson for Giuliani, Ted Goodman, did not provide comment on a detailed list of Parnas’ claims. Fruman’s attorney, Todd Blanche, declined to comment for this story.)
The removal of the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not a controversial act. American and European officials had long been pushing for his dismissal due to widespread frustration over his refusal to fight corruption. But Giuliani was positively giddy at the prospect of exposing Biden as corrupt, Parnas says. After watching the video, Parnas recalls, Giuliani said something like “We’ve got you!”
A few weeks later, Parnas, Fruman and Giuliani arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the White House Hanukkah party. Giuliani told Parnas that the president wanted him and Fruman to go to Ukraine, locate the ousted prosecutor and find out what he knew about this whole Biden-Burisma affair, Parnas says. Later, in the Red Room, Trump gave Parnas his regards. “Rudy’s told me good things,” Trump said, according to Parnas. “Keep up the good work and thank you for what you’re doing.” (A Trump spokesman, Steven Cheung, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Parnas walked out of the White House exhilarated. Just a few years earlier, he’d been a Donald Trump fanboy with a dodgy past. Now, the president was sending him on an international mission to gather evidence against a treacherous adversary. “I remember coming home telling my wife, and she thought I was crazy,” Parnas says. “I couldn’t believe it myself.”
In describing his efforts in Ukraine over the coming months, Parnas makes a crude but emphatic distinction between himself and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney who is often described as a “fixer.” “Michael was there to fix the shit, clean up the shit. After the dog takes a dump, you go clean up,” Parnas says. “I was the guy that was sent out [there] to take that dump.”
Here’s a compressed version of what that looked like: Parnas met with Shokin, got him to agree to tell publicly his story about Joe Biden. He pressured Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation into the Bidens. He met with oligarchs in dance clubs and bath houses. Along the way, he encountered Russian disinformation agents, who were also working to spread conspiracy theories to American audiences. He never did find the smoking gun to prove Shokin’s ouster was the result of a corrupt plot by then-Vice President Biden to protect Hunter, who would later say he used “poor judgment” by agreeing to sit on the Burisma board.
But this didn’t diminish Parnas’ view of himself as a real-life James Bond. “Here I am on a secret mission sent by the president of the United States,” he says. “I thought I was being a hero.”
Soon, he began to envision what his life would be like when this was all over. When the Bidens’ corruption had been exposed to the world, and when Trump was free to tell the country about how our democracy had been saved by a middle-aged street hustler from Brooklyn. “I thought I was gonna get the medal of honor,” he says.
But it wasn’t just accolades that Parnas was after. According to The New York Times, Parnas was pursuing energy deals in Ukraine at the same time he was hunting for dirt on the Bidens. Though Parnas denies chasing such business deals during that time, he was confident that once his anti-Biden escapades had concluded, he could turn his connections in Washington and Ukraine into a thriving oil-and-gas empire. “I could have made billions of dollars,” he says.
On Oct. 9, 2019, Parnas and Fruman arrived at Virginia’s Dulles International Airport for a flight to Vienna, where they would continue their anti-Biden subterfuge. Before they could reach the plane, though, FBI agents approached them and asked for their passports.
“You’re under arrest,” one of the agents said.
It was Parnas and Fruman’s campaign finance activities — not their efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine — that were at the core of the indictment against them. They were charged in connection with a $325,000 donation to a pro-Trump super PAC that Parnas and Fruman claimed had come from their natural gas company, Global Energy Producers, but which was actually from a loan obtained by Fruman. Prosecutors also alleged that they’d conspired to help illegally direct funds from Andrey Muraviev — the Russian oligarch who’d partnered with them on the cannabis venture — to politicians, including a then-candidate for the Nevada governor’s office, Republican Adam Laxalt. Jeffrey Barr, an attorney for Laxalt, said that Laxalt later returned the funds and testified against Parnas at trial. “Adam Laxalt’s testimony was instrumental in bringing Parnas to justice,” Barr says.
Still, in his first few days at the Alexandria, Virginia, jail, Parnas didn’t think he had much to worry about. It was only a matter of time, he figured, before his powerful friends — maybe Giuliani, maybe Trump himself — would swoop in to rescue him. Soon, however, he began to sense that something wasn’t right. “I heard from a guard making fun of me,” he recalls, “telling me that Trump said he doesn’t even know who I am.” He spoke by phone with his wife, who said Giuliani hadn’t done anything to help.
As he wrestled with feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt, Parnas began to reconsider what he’d done over the prior year. He came to recognize that he’d never been an elite operative carrying out a dangerous mission for a grateful president. He’d been a political goon who could be used and discarded.
“The hustler,” Parnas says of himself, “was hustled.”
On Oct. 16, 2019, less than a week after his arrest, Parnas’ attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, reached out to federal prosecutors. According to court records, Bondy explained that Parnas was “really upset” that Trump had denied knowing him and was interested in cooperating with his prosecutors. But when Parnas began turning over information, prosecutors were unimpressed. “[T]he information was not fully credible and in material respects was plainly contradicted by the evidence,” prosecutors later wrote in court filings, “which caused the Government to have serious concerns about Parnas’s credibility and candor.” Parnas denies providing false information to prosecutors. Bondy adds that “at the time of the Government’s initial contact, the key allegation against Mr. Parnas was that he tried to persuade President Trump to recall the Ambassador to Ukraine at the request of corrupt Ukrainian officials. Mr. Parnas, through his counsel, properly denied this claim. When prosecutors filed a superseding indictment a year later, this allegation was quietly omitted.”
Unable to get anywhere with prosecutors, Parnas turned to the media. He provided Congress with thousands of pages of materials, including photos, text messages and other documents containing his communications with Giuliani and other figures whom he’d encountered during his muckraking operation in Ukraine. Then, on Jan. 15, 2020 — the day before the first impeachment trial was to begin — MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired an interview with Parnas in which he directly implicated the White House in the political subterfuge. “President Trump knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas said. “I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president.”
The bombshell interview attracted an average of 4.5 million viewers during the hourlong episode — the largest audience in the history of Maddow’s show — and helped turn Parnas into something of a hero to the anti-Trump resistance. “We may be looking back on this 20 years from now as a John Dean moment,” said MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, referring to the former White House official who helped expose Richard Nixon’s involvement in the 1973 Watergate scandal.
But while Parnas describes this media blitz as an effort to “get the truth out” about the pro-Trump sabotage, prosecutors said the campaign appeared designed to secure immunity from Congress. Referring to the hundreds of pages of documents Parnas provided to lawmakers, prosecutors wrote, “the record shows that Parnas undertook these actions not out of the goodness of his heart, but laser-focused on the sentencing benefit and personal benefits he could obtain.”
In response, Bondy said, “Both parties were focused on their case, as they should have been. Once in the [Southern District of New York], Mr. Parnas complied with his Congressional subpoena, provided evidence to Congress, abandoned any immunity requests, and offered to testify without any agreement, believing truthful testimony was in the public interest. It has been.”
Regardless of his motivations for going public, Parnas didn’t receive immunity. Instead, he was found guilty of campaign finance charges in October 2021, and five months later he pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy in the Fraud Guarantee case, in which investors were bilked out of more than $2 million. At a court hearing in June 2022, where he was sentenced to 20 months in prison, a tearful Parnas apologized to those he had harmed. He says he never asked Trump for a pardon.
“I have made mistakes, I lied,” he told the court. “I’m going to be a different person.”
During my conversations with Parnas earlier this year, he was less contrite. He called the campaign finance and fraud counts “technical bullshit charges.” He said he was not responsible for defrauding Gucciardo, the Fraud Gaurantee investor, because he claims that Gucciardo paid his $500,000 investment directly to Giuliani, who was not charged in the case. “He’s a lying piece of shit,” Parnas says of Gucciardo.
By the time he reported to prison, in September 2022, Parnas’ story had long faded from the headlines. In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, and the Jan. 6 attacks, Americans had lost interest in his Ukrainian smear campaign. But despite the complications of his legal circumstances, Parnas did what he could to try to rekindle the public’s attention, and he found a pocket of interest among the most fervent wing of the anti-Trump media. Prior to his incarceration, Parnas agreed to participate in a documentary about his life, which would subsequently be acquired by MSNBC Films. An author visited him in prison, and the two began collaborating on Parnas’ memoir, which was published in February. And after he was released to home confinement, in late 2022, he reached out to a progressive journalist he knew, Grant Stern, about launching a podcast. The new media venture, Parnas says, was inspired in part by Cohen, who’d launched a podcast of his own called “Mea Culpa,” which was downloaded more than 10 million times in its first year alone. “I thought it was a good way of him getting out his voice,” Parnas told me, “and I thought I could, you know, basically mimic that same [thing].”
Meanwhile, Parnas was spending a lot of time talking about the Biden-Ukrainian scandal on Spaces, a feature on X (formerly known as Twitter) where users can engage in live audio conversations. It was here that he met Snowden Bishop, the producer and host of The Cannabis Reporter radio show and an ardent critic of Trump’s. Bishop recognized Parnas from his star turn in the news cycle; when she watched his interview with Maddow in 2020, she recalls thinking, ‘Wow. OK, he might save us.’”
With Trump planning a run for a second term, Bishop approached Parnas about headlining a speaking tour in which the former pro-Trump dirt digger would address audiences in various parts of the country, offering his experiences as a cautionary tale about what a second Trump administration might mean. “His part of the story,” Bishop says, “is just a piece of a much larger story in general about the malfeasance and chicanery and just downright rat-fuckery of what happened in the Trump administration that nobody knows about.”
Parnas is now hoping to use the MSNBC Films documentary as a springboard for the “Tour America With Lev,” which Bishop says will bring Parnas over the next several weeks to about dozen different destinations in states such as the battlegrounds of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And the film does a great deal to buff up his image. While omitting the most troubling episodes in his past — like, say, the time he allegedly pulled a gun on the owner of the condo where he had been living (a charge Parnas denies) — director Billy Corben effectively enshrines Parnas as a legend of the anti-Trump cause. The Parnas he presents is not a self-interested, serial opportunist. He’s a lovable hustler who got mixed up with the wrong crowd, admitted his mistakes and deserves our sympathy. In the film’s climax, Parnas travels to meet with Hunter Biden, the man he worked so hard to discredit. “I’m sorry,” says Parnas, on the verge of tears.
“Listen,” says Hunter Biden, after the two share an embrace, “we get a second chance.”
Parnas insists that everything he’s doing now is designed to ensure that Trump doesn’t secure a second term. “My message is that this is not an election about policies, about Democrats or Republicans,” he says, as if reading from one Biden’s speeches, “it’s an election about saving American democracy.”
But he also hopes that, once the election is over, he can use the attention that he generates over the next few weeks — as well as the attention from his past — to launch a new career. He’s not exactly sure what direction that will take him. It might be another book deal, or a job as a TV pundit. Or maybe, he’ll end up following the lead of his hero-turned-villain and decide to run for office. “The people really do need a voice, and that was one of the reasons why Trump was so popular in 2016,” he says. “Because we’re tired of politicians, we’re tired of the system.”
When it comes to his next act, though, Parnas’ true motives will matter less than the ruthless truths of Washington politics. With Joe Biden bowing out of the presidential race and Hunter Biden pleading guilty to federal tax charges, Parnas is simply less relevant to the national conversation. Once the election wraps up, Parnas’ already tenuous claim to political significance might continue to erode. And eventually, like the money investors put into Fraud Guarantee, it could vanish altogether.
