Who Is Lev Parnas? What the Public Record Shows

Several readers have asked me to provide background on Lev Parnas, the man who sent an email today calling me a liar and a scammer. Here is what the public record shows.

Parnas is Soviet-born and built his career as a Ukrainian networker. He became Rudy Giuliani's self-described "assistant and investigator," a role he obtained specifically because of his foreign contacts.

He and his business partner Igor Fruman were indicted by federal prosecutors in New York for funneling donations to American politicians on behalf of at least one Ukrainian government official — what prosecutors described as a scheme to buy access and influence in the United States government.

A month before his arrest, Parnas received a $1 million payment from a Russian bank account. Prosecutors said he concealed this payment when describing his assets to the government. His foreign travel during the same period, prosecutors noted, was paid for by a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition.

He was convicted.

Parnas has since reinvented himself as an anti-Trump media figure. The Substack writers he recommended in his email about me — Zev Shalev, Dean Blundell, Waj Ali, and others — are the same people he regularly appears with on his own shows. He was not offering readers neutral guidance. He was steering them toward his own allied media network.

The through-line of Lev Parnas's career is this: a Soviet-born operator with documented foreign money connections, convicted of federal campaign finance crimes, who moves quickly to discredit a journalist reporting on Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico ranch and the powerful people connected to it.

I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions about why such a person would take a personal interest in my work.

— Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

THE PUGILIST