Congressional Republicans can’t stop talking about a debunked allegation against President Biden, but one man is sharing the true original source of the story. (video embedded below)
Lev Parnas was once close to Donald Trump and his then-attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Now, he’s escaped what he refers to as the “cult” and wants to tell the real background story of the Hunter Biden story and how Trump and his allies worked to fabricate it.
He says he was approached by Giuliani in 2018 to head for Ukraine and look for corroboration for a story about the corruption involved in the firing of Viktor Shokin, who was then the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
He was supposed to meet with Shokin and establish evidence that Biden had pressed for his firing for corrupt reasons — but what he realized instead was that it was Shokin’s corruption Biden was trying to stop and that Shokin’s entire goal in meeting with him and coordinating with U.S. officials (which at the time meant Trump and Giuliani) was to regain power.
Parnas relayed a message to Shokin, he says, saying that Trump and Giulini would help with his aspiration to power if he’d help smear Joe and Hunter Biden.
After a lot of finagling, the Trump allies were able to obtain a video of Shokin claiming that Biden had him fired in order to protect his son Hunter, but even then, Parnas says, he was unable to attribute any criminality to either Biden.
Parnas describes next contacting Yuriy Lutsenko, another high-ranking Ukrainian official, on Trump’s behalf and relaying the message that in order to get what he wanted — a meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr — Lutsenko would have to offer evidence of Biden’s criminality.
He was no more able to produce it than Shokin had been.
That didn’t matter to Team Trump. Parnas says:
“Rudy Giuliani pushed. He didn’t care if there was facts involved, he didn’t care if there was evidence. He cared that the information that the prosecutors gave him fed his narrative.”
He describes Giuliani using right-wing media figures and Congressional Republicans (“John Solomon, Fox News reporter Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Senator Ron Johnson, [Representative] Devin Nunez”) to push the lies, even when Shokin and Lutsenko retracted statements or refused to smear the Bidens.
“Rudy knew there was no facts,” Parnas says, “But it was all about getting Trump back in office. He didn’t care if there was truth behind it. All he cared about that he could bring up enough ‘what if’ and bring enough confusion so the American public would get confused enough to be able to get Trump back in office.”
In fact, according to Parnas, Trump, and Giuliani were carrying out a constant effort to contact individuals they had reason to believe were corrupt (in some cases due to already being sanctioned or identified by the U.S. as Russian agents, for instance) and seeking assistance from them in muddying the Biden name ahead of the 2020 election.
There are still Congressional Republicans doing the job for him to this day — Representative James Comer, for instance, has been caught coordinating with an alleged unregistered foreign agent to smear Biden, and he and his cronies keep pushing a long-debunked allegation that Trump’s own DOJ couldn’t support with evidence.
Parnas says this is just one in a series of videos in which he’ll spill what he knows from the inside.
You can see the full video below:
Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.
