From Russia with Lev (Rakontur, Surprise Inside, Universal Alternative Television Studios, MS-NBC Films, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 20) I watched a new documentary on MS-NBC called From Russia with Lev, a pun on the title of Ian Fleming’s 1957 James Bond novel From Russia, with Love (note the comma in the title; the film version, made in 1963 and the second Bond movie with Sean Connery, omitted it). This was heavily promoted by MS-NBC in general and Rachel Maddow, who co-produced it through her company Surprise Inside, in particular. Maddow made a rare appearance hosting the 5 p.m. MS-NBC hour to push the movie (normally she just does Mondays at 6 p.m.), which was billed as a real-life James Bond story. Actually, if there’s a fictional secret agent Lev Parnas resembled, it was more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. Lev Parnas was born February 6, 1972 in Odesa, which was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now part of Russian-occupied Crimea in what is nominally the territory of the independent Republic of Ukraine. His parents moved the Parnas family to the U.S. in 1975 and briefly lived in Detroit before settling in Brooklyn. As Parnas himself tells it, while other Ukrainian émigrés he knew got educations and aimed for above-board careers, Parnas became a “hustler,” though in 1995 he was supposedly involved in finance as a broker. Parnas’s first contact with Donald Trump – or at least his businesses – came in the early 1990’s when he sold co-op apartments for the Trump Organization as a salesperson for Kings Highway Realty.

Over the next 20 years Parnas was involved in a number of shady business enterprises – Parnas Holdings, Global Energy Producers, and the charmingly if oxymoronically named Fraud Guarantee – until he and Igor Fruman, his partner in Global Energy Producers, hooked up with Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. When Trump won he invited Parnas and Fruman to the Inaugural events and put them in touch with Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Trump gave Giuliani the assignment to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, Trump’s most likely – and most feared – opponent in his 2020 re-election bid. Giuliani in turn gave the job to Parnas and Fruman, covering their expenses as they traveled through vacation hot-spots in places like Vienna and Paris. At the time Ukraine had a pro-Russian President, Petr Poroshenko, and a state prosecutor (their equivalent of an attorney general) named Viktor Shokin who was widely rumored to be involved in Ukraine’s chronic government corruption. Parnas and Fruman lobbied Shokin to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who had just been appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite having no prior experience in the energy business. Then Poroshenko lost his re-election bid in a landslide to Volodomyr Zelensky, a comedian who had previously played Ukraine’s President in a TV sitcom and pledged to launch an anti-corruption drive. Even before he lost his re-election campaign, Poroshenko had fired Shokin after pressure from other countries – including the U.S., represented by Biden, then the sitting vice-president – demanded his ouster as a sign Ukraine was dealing with its corruption problem seriously.

Trump arranged for his own vice-president, Mike Pence, to go to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration, but withdrew the Pence appearance after Zelensky turned down his demand that he do Trump the “favor” of investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump also used Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovich, fired because she’d refused to be part of the administration’s campaign to get the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of the Bidens. Parnas soon learned the consequences of his failure to do Trump’s bidding when he was arrested in October 2019 for allegedly planning to direct funds from foreign governments in an attempt to influence U.S. relations with Ukraine. Along the way Parnas dumped his Trump-supporting attorney, John Dowd, and hired his own counsel, Joseph Bondy (who was extensively interviewed in the film), who sent word to the U.S. House of Representatives that Parnas would be willing to testify against Trump in impeachment hearings relating to the so-called “perfect phone call” Trump had made to Zelensky, seeking his announcement that he was investigating the Bidens in exchange for weapons the U.S. Congress had already promised Ukraine. (Other former members of Trump’s inner circle, including personal attorney Michael Cohen and staff member Cassidy Hutchinson, also turned state’s evidence against Trump after they fired their Trump-hired counsel and hired their own attorneys.) According to Parnas, that prompted the U.S. Justice Department, under the control of Trump appointee William Barr, to switch out the charges against Parnas and instead try him on campaign finance law violations. The idea was that if Parnas would go before Congress as a convicted felon on charges unrelated to Ukraine, his credibility as a witness against Trump would be reduced.

In May 2021, Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy wrote a letter to Judge J. Paul Oetken relating to the case. It read, “The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, [Trump attorney] Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump.” While Oetken refused Bondy’s motion to dismiss the case, calling Bondy’s letter a “conspiracy theory,” evidence exists of a network between the FBI, Fox News on-air personality Sean Hannity, Right-wing journalist John Solomon and others to obtain privileged information about the case. In the final scene of From Russia with Lev, Parnas and Hunter Biden meet for the first time and Hunter Biden is startled when Parnas calmly informs him they had his personal bank records, leaked to them by a source in the FBI. Parnas himself says now that being arrested was the best thing that could have happened to him because it finally broke him free from the Trump cult.

MS-NBC hyped From Russia with Lev as a revelatory case study in how Donald Trump operates, but it’s really an all too familiar story of how Trump exploits people for what they can do for him and then coldly dumps them once he’s sucked them dry. Trump publicly denied that he’d ever known Parnas, and when he was confronted with photos of the two of them together, said, “I get my picture taken with everybody.” (He pulled the same trick with E. Jean Carroll, the woman he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting in the mid-1990’s in an elevator at New York’s high-end Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion store.) In the end, all From Russia with Lev proves is that Donald Trump is a narcissistic egomaniac who will do anything to anybody in order to safeguard and increase his own power – and at least half of the country knows that about him already. The other half believes he’s a Messiah who can literally do no wrong, and that’s why the 2024 Presidential election is so maddeningly close in the polls, and if the pattern from 2016 and 2020 that Trump consistently does five percent better in the actual election than he does in the polls holds this year, he will be President again.