Modern-day John Dean: How Lev Parnas went from Giuliani crony to Democratic impeachment hero

Now poised to become a hero to Democrats who yearn for a modern-day Dean, Parnas will appear on liberal favorite Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC Wednesday night.

Parnas was born in Cold War-era Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union, but his family moved to the United States when he was three years old, and he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Parnas attended college in New York and became a real estate agent before moving to Florida. There, he founded a number of debt-ridden brokerage outfits. In recent years, Parnas used large political donations to ingratiate himself with numerous Republicans. Parnas and Fruman hired Giuliani for one of their joint ventures in 2018, and Giuliani then used the duo to help with his foray into Ukraine.

Parnas bounced from job to job in southern Florida in the 1990s and 2000s, including working at two firms that were shut down for fraud before he bought his own. One company purchased by Parnas, a technology firm called Edgetech, reached a valuation worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper before swiftly crashing. He then went on to found Fraud Guarantee, which prosecutors said he named in an attempt to improve his personal online search results after being accused of fraud in 2011. Court records show Parnas has a history of unpaid debts, some totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The new Parnas documents were made public shortly before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to give the Ukraine-related articles of impeachment alleging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress to the Republican-led Senate.

Pelosi defended her decision to delay handing over the articles for weeks during a Wednesday speech and pointed to the new allegations stemming from the Parnas records.

“Time has been our friend in all of this because it has yielded incriminating evidence, more truth, into the public domain,” Pelosi said, adding that the evidence was obtained by Democrats as a result of a congressional subpoena. “Lev Parnas — you know who that is, an associate of Rudy Giuliani — that further proves the president was an essential player in the scheme to pressure Ukraine for his own benefit in the 2020 election.”

Pelosi reportedly got the idea to delay handing over the articles from a December television appearance by John Dean on CNN, where he is a regular commentator. Considered by some to be the “hero of Watergate” and by others to be a shameless opportunist, the man known by the FBI as “the master manipulator of the cover-up” has spent the subsequent decades deeming scandals in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump including the “worse than Watergate” — including the Ukraine saga.

Dean, 81, was embroiled in the Watergate scandal during the early 1970s. He turned on his co-conspirators in exchange for a plea deal and a short prison stint, becoming the star witness in the impeachment proceedings that forced Nixon to resign.

Parnas, through his attorney Joseph Bondy, pushed for weeks to get permission from the courts to hand over records. Bondy mounted a social media campaign to allow his client to take the spotlight and share information in the upcoming Senate impeachment trial.

Dean tweeted about Parnas in December, pointing to his contributions to Republicans and hinting at a sinister Russian conspiracy.

“Lev Parnas is a contributor to Kevin McCarthy — looks like the Minority Leader is in the Ukraine loop,” Dean wrote. “When will Rudy show up in his phone records? It is as if Putin has taken control of the GOP. What in hell are they doing? Will a reporter please ask him?”

Parnas’s lawyer has used his rapidly growing social media platform to proclaim his client’s desire to share what he knows, employing the hashtags #LetLevSpeak and #LevRemembers, as he says Parnas “remains committed to testifying as to all the actions he took in Ukraine on behalf of President Trump.” Bondy has released viral videos trolling Trump, his family, and other Republicans with guilt by association.

Neal Katyal, the acting solicitor general during the Obama administration, wrote in the Washington Post on Wednesday that “these new documents demolish at least three key defenses to which Trump and his allies have been clinging: that he was really fighting corruption when he pressured Ukraine on matters related to the Biden family; that Hunter Biden should be called as a witness at the Senate impeachment trial; and that there’s no need for a real, honest-to-goodness trial in the Senate.”

Prosecutors say that in 2018, Parnas and Fruman falsely claimed that hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions came from General Energy Partners, purportedly a natural gas energy company. In reality, the money was funneled through the company to conceal foreign donors. The duo gave $325,000 to America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC.

Prosecutors claimed that “these contributions were made for the purpose of gaining influence with politicians so as to advance their own personal financial interests and the political interests of Ukrainian government officials.” The charges relate to a conspiracy to obstruct the Federal Election Commission, a conspiracy to defraud the U.S., making false statements to investigators, and the creation of a false entity to obstruct an investigation.

A newly released photograph of alleged meeting notes taken by Parnas on stationary from the Ritz Carlton in Vienna, Austria, detail Giuliani’s plan to “get [Zelensky] to announce that the Biden case will be investigated.” Prosecutors revealed Parnas received a $1 million loan from Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is mentioned in the new document. Firtash has fought the Justice Department’s efforts to extradite him to the U.S. from Vienna for years. Parnas was arrested in October at Dulles Airport with a ticket to the Austrian capital.