Original subtitles

I was a nursing student and going to Cal State of LA and, you know, hanging out and

doing what most 20, 21-year-olds do, and I was dragged to this club,

and there was left-partness.

Gold chain, and his cardiac glasses, and his Christian out-to-jare,

gold-foiled hoodie.

He said he was in LA to produce a movie.

The evening went by.

We were talking.

We were relating.

Me and Love are both immigrants from Ukraine.

Similar background.

Similar upbringing.

The foundation.

It's still the Soviet Union.

The next day, he shows up in a stretch limo in front of my house to pick me up for lunch.

It's just a certain way that they produce people out of

Russian and Ukraine that's different than anywhere else.

He proposed four days later, and we were married within six months.

All of our friends and family thought we were completely off our rockers.

It was like, nobody matters.

Nothing you say can stop us.

Like, that's it.

It's like Beyonce and Jay-Z, Bonnie and Clyde.

Like, let's do this.

We're going to conquer the world.

I don't think you could have convinced me with

anything that this is where we would be in 2024.

Love-parnissed.

Love-parnissed.

Love-parnissed.

Love-parnissed.

Love -parnissed.

Parnissed.

The shady and indicted Ukrainian businessman, Love-parnissed.

That he would be involved in one of the biggest scandals.

President Trump pressured the head of Ukraine to pursue an investigation into Joe Biden.

My call was perfect.

Having to do with our birth country, Ukraine.

Having to deal with presidents of Ukraine and of the United States.

Parniss is a recently indicted goon who worked with Giuliani to help Trump

blackmail Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden.

The impeachment of President Donald Trump is here.

Love-parnissed.

He is now talking and he has documents to back up his words.

Parniss implicated several top Trump administration

officials, including the president himself.

Were you relying on Love-parniss to get rid of your ambassador?

I mean, who does that?

What happened?

What happened?

Love happened.

Democrats are really scraping the bottom of the barrel

if they think that Love -parniss is their star witness.

Love-parnissed.

He is a creepy, sleazy, self-serving, super-snitch.

He will do and say anything he can.

I think I'm crazy, but I really thought I'm going to get the Medal of Honor.

Boy, was I wrong.

That was born in Odessa Ukraine, February 6, 1972.

My father used to own underground factories.

During communism, you weren't allowed to have your own business.

People that were caught running these type of factories would get the death sentence.

We immigrated to the United States in 1976 when I was four years old.

We had friends and family that were all immigrating to a little town.

Right by Coney Island, it was Brighton Beach, and we called it Little Odessa.

It was kind of like one big family.

We all came from the same persecution, and we all wanted the same thing,

which was the American dream.

Certain individuals started leading and taking control of the neighborhood.

People, like my father, that were businessmen in the Soviet Union,

what you now call Russian organized crime.

When my father passed away and I was 11 years

old, I had to get more involved into that world.

While other kids were going to school, I was on the streets hustling.

And the girl I was dating, her uncle, happened to

be one of the leaders in that organized crime group.

And I ended up working for him as a runner, collecting money.

So one day, I'm in South New Jersey, and I'm collecting.

I've had somewhere around two and a half, three million dollars in cash and checks,

sitting in the back of my Lincoln Town car.

And an 18-wheeler hits me and drives over the back of my car.

So I remember calling my uncle and telling him, I'm stuck and the cops are on their way.

What do I do with their leg?

Whatever you do, don't open the trunk.

We're on our way.

At the end of the night, there was a bunch of fun and laughs that Atlantic City could

see, discussing how I almost got arrested with two and a half million in cash.

Then around 1989, there was a big boom in the Russian community.

The Cold War might be over, and there might be a lot of opportunity.

So now fast forward.

I've made some really good money over the next several years in Russia, import, export.

I probably had every most powerful Russian, Ukrainian, ex-Soviet Union,

businessman, mobster there to do business.

At some point, it became too crazy.

People were dying left and right, and I saw it was my time to exit.

One day, I decided to give my cousin Oleg a call.

Come on by, let's grab some sushi.

I wanted to impress him.

So here Oleg is pulling up in this red Ferrari, gets out in a pinstripe suit,

looking like a million bucks, and I look at him, I say, who did you kill?

He goes, nah, it's called Wall Street.

If anybody's seen the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, that didn't do it justice.

My first day in the office, I see guys doing lines on the table.

You got guys smoking weed in the corner.

There's just a bunch of young guys running around

with headphones and screaming crazy numbers.

That was my initiation into Wall Street.

These were largely boiler rooms.

They were low-level brokerage houses, not very well-known, and love was on the hustle.

Three of the brokerage houses that he worked

for had been expelled for violations of fraud.

All of a sudden, everybody started getting arrested, and

the news started coming up with the mob on Wall Street.

You know, it's time to exit.

My cousin, Oleg, was opening another office in Boca Raton, Florida,

and he was looking for people to work there.

Boca Raton, Florida, here we come.

The palm trees, the oceans, the warm sunny weather, it was a paradise.

But it was also an opportunity for every fraudster

in the world, because you had a lot of retirees.

I ended up working for the same mobbed up, penny stock

mobsters, doing the same shit we were doing in New York.

In Boca Raton, he had multiple cases, non-payment of dots, and being evicted

from various places where he lived, he had been the target of at least nine court cases.

2008, the Great Recession hits, and my life goes upside down.

I lose my wife, I lose my cars, I lose my business.

And I kind of started looking for a new path in life.

I got approached by one of my friends and said, would you

be willing to open up some poker rooms in Beverly Hills?

Next thing you know, here I am, running illegal poker games on top of Road Day of Drive.

Our clientele was the who's who, if you ever seen Molly's game?

Movie stars, directors, and business titans.

They were going all in, all the time.

Thank you, Molly.

This is for you.

And that's it, and that was us.

At the same time, I was introduced to this Hollywood producer, Rudy Duran.

He discovered Brook Shield, saying it was Jack Nicholson's

good friend, and he had the script that he was dying to do.

The main characters were supposed to be Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg.

Now, here I am, running at night poker games, and during the day, running around

would sell the most powerful people in Hollywood, trying

to put together a movie called Memory of Assassin.

I had no idea about the movie business, but I was a salesman,

and I ended up going out there and finding investors.

He's always been someone that is doing a lot at the same time.

Serial entrepreneur?

Yeah.

For sure.

Serial father, too.

Love is a super likable guy.

You know, I mean him, he makes a joke, and I'm like, oh, I love you.

You're so crazy.

Love is kind of a lovable character.

He is charismatic.

He's full of energy, full of pissing vinegar.

You can't forget love.

I've never met anyone that has not recalled meeting love.

While living the life of Adam, I met a very special person.

A little guy know that this person would end up being the love of my life.

Excuse me.

Oh, that's it.

Four days later, I dropped to one knee at four o'clock in the morning, and I

proposed her with the jar of pickles, and she said, yes.

I was going to be wife number three, but baby mama number four.

And it was like, okay, enough, you have kids.

All of the kids are in Florida.

So for me, it was immediately I have to move.

I became an instant mom.

I was a young woman.

But then once you have three kids instantly, you get really old really quickly.

The movie deal fell apart back then in 2010.

It would eventually be made later on without me with Liam Neeson called memory.

We all have to die.

That's important.

That's what you do before you go.

I got retained December of 2017.

You go after a character named left Parnas about a judgment.

Tonya Andre.

Tonya Andre is a Miami lawyer.

Great guy, but he was the root of all my problems.

And he was retained by a gentleman called Michael Puse.

He was an investor in the movie deal that I was doing with Rudy Durant.

Mr. Puse lent money from the trust that took care of his elderly mother.

Seven years later, he still out his 350 grand.

Which is now $500,000 if you can't post judgment interest.

He was like a real pit bull.

Once he got subpoena power through the judgment, my life turned into a living hell.

On paper, left look like terrible collection.

All the earmarks of a bum case.

I think the column at typical Miami hustler would do the game with this service.

Now to the race for the White House and after decades of very publicly slirting

with the idea, billionaire Donald Trump says he

really is running for president this time around.

Watching him come out going down those golden escalators.

They're bringing drugs.

They're bringing crime.

They're rapists.

I mean, I never voted.

I had nothing to do with politics.

I was never registered.

But he wasn't a politician.

He was a New York hustler.

And we could relate.

I'm working with a big real estate company.

We were out in a restaurant.

Robert Pereira, I met for the first time that evening.

He was a very, very wealthy businessman and also a powerful person in the

Republican party.

And they had ties close to Trump.

At first, I was extremely excited to meet this guy because of my real estate project.

So that night we come up with this crazy idea is

we're going to hold a huge fundraiser Robert's house.

This is the La Palas.

I mean, it's a $140 million house with golden chandeliers, golden doors.

So while Robert is basically figuring out how we're going to raise this money for

Donald Trump, I'm more excited about how I'm going to have 20 Robert Pereira's in

the same room where I could pitch my real estate deal to.

Until all of a sudden, it's breaking news.

Trump taped bombshell.

Donald Trump caught on a hot mic months after marrying Melania, making vulgar

comments about groping women, saying when you're a star, they let you do it.

It's a shit show.

People are canceling left to right.

We were able to salvage it.

And that was my very first donation, $50,000 to the Donald Trump campaign.

But something happened that night.

We were like two seats away from Trump and Lev piped in and said something.

And instantly, it was like no one else was in the room.

And the two of them were just talking.

The moment that really got me is when I asked him, I said, why are you doing this?

And he looked out onto the ocean and then stared back at us and said, you know what?

I don't need to be doing this.

I'm doing this for the regular folk, for the common people.

I'm trying to stop them from destroying our country.

And at that moment, it was something that hit me at that moment.

I was mesmerized, colonized, hypnotized.

I was Trump-enized.

For the month leading up to the 2016 election, we were Trump family.

It was a world where we were flying around all over the place following Donald Trump.

It was a small group.

A tough time for any Republican right now to be

standing up alongside their party's standard bearer.

Nobody believed he could win.

Even we didn't believe he could win.

There was rallies and dinners and then finally the debate in Vegas.

Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.

Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president in the United States.

No puppet.

No puppet.

It's pretty clear.

You're the puppet.

After that, Trump said I want you guys with me

on election night at the Hilton in New York.

It was such a roller coaster of a night, all like sitting there nervous,

trying to pray our way to having Trump win.

For Hillary Clinton, one of the most stunning defeats in American political history.

Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.

I was like, our guy made it.

Finally, we're gonna get back on track.

Back to that, you know, make America great again.

At the crazy party, I didn't vote, but we still won.

I love this country.

Shortly after that, we found out that we were invited to the inauguration.

It didn't take long for work to spread.

That was just like the Trump guy.

During this wild ride, I started documenting taking

pictures of everything and posting them on social media.

All of a sudden, I started getting phone calls from everybody.

I knew I didn't know in the Russian -Ukrainian community wanting to be my friend.

Everybody wanted to go to the inauguration.

You're gonna do a great job to the people in this country.

It was hilarious to see all these characters from my previous life.

mafia, kingpins, oligarchs, hugging, sitting, VIP, and

interacting with all these Republican congressmen and senators.

It was very interesting for me always not only watching the way Lev was interacting,

but the way everyone kind of accepts Lev.

You wouldn't really come up to Trump and say, hey, my brother, how you doing?

Lev did.

In the year and a half, I went from not knowing anything about what politics is,

to now being in the inner circle of the president.

Lev was just in state of shock that he was at this level.

This is a guy who's an immigrant and who is living large, larger than he ever dreamed.

Donald John Trump do solemnly swear.

There are also plenty of congratulations being extended to the president-elect,

including those of Vladimir Putin.

Putin said today he's ready to open a new chapter with the U.S.

I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin and with Russia.

Washington Post is reporting that President Trump revealed highly classified

information to the Russian foreign minister and

ambassador during a meeting in the Oval Office last week.

The White House blindsided tonight as the Department of Justice reveals that they

will appoint a special counsel to now oversee the FBI

investigation into Russian meddling in any possible collusion.

And then they launched the Robert Mueller investigation.

The man now leading the investigation, former FBI director Robert Mueller.

They're weaponizing the DOJ to go after Donald

Trump because they can't stand that he won.

U.S.

officials believe Russia not only tried to influence the election,

but also worked to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

Over a month before the election, U.S.

intelligence agencies accused the Russian government of hacking emails from the

Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign.

My people, they said, they think it's Russia.

President Putin, he just said it's not Russia.

I don't see any reason why it would be.

President Trump and those working with him had scores of contacts with Russians and

WikiLeaks, including attempts at setting up bad channels with the Kremlin.

I have nothing to do with Russia, folks, okay?

The Russia cloud over the Trump White House seems to be darkening.

Paul Manafort and a deputy campaign official, Rick

Gates, will turn themselves into face charges.

Well, towns, conspiracy against the United

States, unregistered agent of a foreign principle.

Paul Manafort was working for free as Trump's campaign manager, but in reality,

he used to get paid by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.

Paul Manafort, he was doing work in Ukraine that was very definitely pro -Russian.

The entire thing has been a witch hunt.

This investigation is nothing more than a witch hunt.

Five defendants have pleaded guilty.

It's only a witch hunt if you don't find any witches.

There's a great effort and a part of the Trump administration to turn the tide.

On collusion, they have nothing.

They have nothing.

It's somebody's version of the truth, not the truth.

Truth isn't truth.

Giuliani takes this narrative and turns it into Ukraine.

It wasn't Trump and the Russians, they meddled in the 2016 election.

It was actually Hillary and the Ukrainians.

It's Ukrainian collusion, which was large, significant, and proven.

With Hillary Clinton, with the Democratic National Committee.

The real collusion scandal, as we've said several times

before, has everything to do with the Clinton campaign.

So that's where I think the Mueller team should be investigating,

which is the real crime, which is the Clinton collusion.

All of a sudden, my old friend, somebody that I haven't seen for a while,

Igor Fruman, comes back into my life.

Igor Fruman was a Ukrainian-American citizen that had

lots of businesses overseas, primarily in Ukraine.

He had restaurants, he had nightclubs.

One of them was called the mafia rave club.

In Ukraine, Igor knew everybody, from the low-level street

hustlers to the high -level mobsters and politicians.

They all came to his clubs.

He made their dreams come true.

I didn't think he was the right person for Lev to be as close as they became.

But, you know, they were.

They were friends.

Igor was a little bit more mysterious than Lev, known

particularly for connections in organized crime.

And he came to America with a significant amount of money.

Igor didn't fit into Trump World until he started paying for their bills.

Igor became everybody's best friend with that American Express Black card.

So when Igor comes back in my life, at first I didn't understand, but then I

realized that Igor has been looking through my social media like everybody else.

And that's when he made his proposal.

There was a company in Ukraine, an energy company that was up for sale,

but they wanted to be bought out by an American company.

All of the people that really controlled oil and gas industry were Republican mega donors.

So we started a company called Global Energy Producers.

They had not spent a lot of time in that energy sector, so I don't think they knew

a lot about it, but look, they were salesmen.

Between the connections he had in Ukraine and the

Republican Party, it's silly not to put these two together.

Instead of going, getting fancy offices and investing money into advertising,

we were going to become mega donors to be able to have VIP

access to everything that goes on in the Republican Party.

He was donating money left and right.

And I'm like, what are you doing?

We were donating to everybody who would take our money.

We donated $100,000 to Kevin McCartry and Vice

President Mike Pence for Protect the House.

We donated thousands of dollars to Pete Sessions.

We donated to Rick Scott's Senator campaign.

We donated $50,000 to the Ron DeSantis campaign for Florida Governor.

I'm the one that got him to govern a ship.

That was a matchmaker between Governor DeSantis and Trump.

I mean, it was like to learn the roof.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.

The night he won, the first person he gave a hug to was me.

And then we made our commitment for a million dollars

to the pro-Trump Super PAC, America First Action PAC.

And we wired $325,000 for our first installment.

It was Igor's money.

And the money's going to various shell companies that they formed, LLCs.

It's going to other business partners, and then it's coming back to them again.

This was a real exercise in following the money.

So we're invited to our first intimate dinner

with Donald Trump to the America First Super PAC.

And it was being held at the Trump International

tell I was sitting face-to -face with Donald Trump.

When Trump saw us, he greeted us like he always

greeted us by saying, my guys to me and Igor.

Igor secretly recorded the whole thing.

And all of a sudden, topic changes to Ukraine.

Me being me, I got into the conversation.

How did Ukraine do?

Don't ask me.

They love you, though.

I realize that Trump has no idea about Ukraine.

How long did Ukraine last in a fight with Russia?

Not very long.

Without us, not very long.

He has no idea they have oil.

You can't have oil?

No.

No, but one in Euro.

Yeah, we could...

Yes.

So prior to us coming to the event, I heard all these stories about what was

going on with the Ukrainian ambassador and that how she was, you know, a Soros plant

and how she was part of the Clinton regime.

The first thing that came out of my mouth is I said...

The biggest problem there, I think, is we got to get rid of the ambassador.

She's still left over from the Clinton administration.

Where the ambassador?

Where Ukraine?

I'm repeating gossip.

I have no idea.

I have no facts, no vetting.

She's basically walking around telling everybody, wait, he's going to get impeached.

He got angry all of a sudden, turned around to one of his aides and said...

Get rid of her.

Okay?

Get around.

Take her out.

Okay?

It was silence.

The table looked at each other.

Nobody knew what to do.

Do it.

So we all start clapping.

Yeah.

Left shared a piece of silly gossip, probably from somebody that was corrupt.

And because of that, she should be immediately fired.

She's like, why?

It was putative.

It was terrible.

It was Trump.

I get some voicemail, you know, from a reporter saying, left Parnas

through this entity named Global Energy Producers, there was this, you know,

LLC that was started in April.

And in May, they gave 325,000 to America's first action.

And I was like, that doesn't make any sense.

This guy doesn't have two nickels rubbed together.

You know, he's in the room with Trump.

Tony Andre comes in as a civil lawyer, but through the subpoena power,

is able to get a lot of the transfers and how the money bounced around.

To the various banks, which gets loud in big trouble later.

It was like a freight train going off the tracks.

And I could see that it's going off the tracks.

And I was trying to explain to him he's going off the tracks.

But he was like, if I go off the tracks, then I go off the tracks.

Whatever, you know, effort.

My world changed.

I started associating myself and hanging out with hardcore right-wing mega -republicans.

Trump International Hotel, it was like home away from home.

Everybody knew my name.

Everybody knew my association with the Trump family.

And it was kind of like feeling like I was at my own hotel.

The managers, the hotel employees, everybody knew to report back to Donald Trump.

He knew who the highest rollers were.

If you wanted any favor from Donald Trump, you better stay at his hotel.

At least $7.8 million he received from 20 foreign governments.

It's about Trump Tower and Trump hotels.

Almost entirely.

That's where this money went.

Waking up at the Trump hotel would be like waking up in the war zone with the

congressmen, senators, conspiracy theories, Fox TV all over the place.

You're basically hotboxing, right-wing, Fox News, Russian propaganda.

All day long.

Everybody believed in the same bullshit.

Everybody wanted to please Donald Trump.

But what nobody could understand at the time was how

close Rudy Giuliani really was with Donald Trump.

And their relationship goes way back.

You know, you're really beautiful.

Oh, you dirty boy!

Oh, oh, Donald, I thought you were a gentleman.

You can't say I didn't try.

When I met Giuliani, he was going through a divorce.

He was having financial difficulties.

I can certainly tell you, the person that you see now is not the man that I married.

Giuliani's last hurrah was when he ran for president during that debate when Joe

Biden basically embarrassed Rudy in front of the world by

saying There's only three things he mentioned in a sentence.

And now in the verb in 9-11, I mean, there's nothing now.

Rudy could never forget that.

Yes, he was still Rudy Giuliani, America's mayor.

But he wasn't in the limelight.

And that's what he really missed.

Rudy was hustling, being the unofficial lobbyist, the unofficial ambassador.

People started giving him jets and private airplanes and paying for dinners.

People started finding out that he was the key to Trump's ear.

Rudy was basically working with anybody that was willing to give him a dollar.

That's where I came in.

But we sat down to discuss Rudy being my partner and my company called Fraud Guarantee.

He believed for him to do for us, but he did to life-lock.

Identity is that you steal from everyone.

You have to protect yourself.

I protect myself with life-lock.

Who needs fraud guarantee?

I take fraud credit.

It was me.

Who better to start a company like that than a lot of partners?

Looking back, you could see where the irony is that now, you know, especially I

get convicted of fraud for fraud guarantees, so yeah.

Fraud guarantee becomes a guaranteed fraud.

Rudy was supposed to use his contacts to promote the company.

Instead, he took half a million dollars and accomplished nothing.

But in the beginning, I really looked up to him and I really cared for Rudy Giuliani.

I'm here with my friends, Lev and Igor.

It was like a romance made in heaven.

At some point, almost overnight, Rudy became Lev's, I don't know,

a work wife or something because they spent so much time

together and they had such an intimate relationship.

They were almost like father and son.

Four to five days out of the week, four or five,

six times a day with phone calls and text messages.

And he was the godfather to my son Nathan.

There's a picture of him wiping his mouth.

I don't think Lev has ever offered me that service.

Maybe not even all of her kids.

After that, I was like, yep, we're not getting him back, people.

Like...

This is an ABC News special report.

The death of President George Herbert Walker Bush.

There was the hottest ticket in Washington.

Dignitaries, billionaires from all over the world were trying to get a ticket.

Rudy says that you guys want to go with me.

I was like, hell yeah, we're going to go.

But Rudy wasn't just taking me and Igor, but Rudy was also taking a date.

But not only the date, but her mother also.

At the time, Rudy was drinking nonstop.

Right after he'd be going right on TV and

representing the President of the United States.

If I did one tenth of what Hillary Clinton did, I'd be in jail.

She paid people to create violence at his rallies.

She sold 20% of our uranium to Russia.

Poor little Hillary, we got to be nice there.

There's something awful about Rudy Giuliani.

How many of the former President's terrible ideas came from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani?

But the funniest part is having to hear the conversations through the speakerphone

of Trump ripping Rudy after going on TV drunk.

Rudy always wanted to be Secretary of State, but Trump didn't give him the

opportunity because he thought he was low energy, because

he fell asleep in a meeting and then on a plane ride.

So at a certain point in time, you had the official Secretary of State

who was Secretary Pompeo, and then you had the

shadowed Secretary of State who was Rudy Giuliani.

This wasn't a normal presidency.

It was turning American foreign policy, basically into an episode of The Apprentice.

Yes, I am.

The Mueller investigation, it's winding down.

Giuliani is no longer looking back at the 2016 campaign.

Joe Biden, former Vice President for eight years, now emerging as the number one

potential candidate now, to run against Trump.

You are the Democrat's top choice to run against President Trump in 2020.

President Trump says that you're his dream

candidate would be his dream to run against you.

He was the point man for the Obama administration in Ukraine.

His son, Hunter, takes a job with Burisma, a large energy company in Ukraine.

Trump's biggest nightmare was Joe Biden, and

he did not want him to run and be his opponent.

Let's go after Joe.

Let's go after Hunter, and let's find that way through Ukraine.

Rudy was amazed to see how Igor and I were aware about these intricacies that were

going on in Ukraine between all of these corrupt

politicians and all the guards and criminals.

So Rudy says he has an idea.

You guys are going to go Ukraine.

And when we said yes, he called Trump up, the plan was hatched.

We were to go on our first reconnaissance mission

on behalf of Donald Trump from Rudy Giuliani.

It was almost like Levenigor landed in Trump's lab.

They were Ukrainian, they were citizens, they were businessmen, and they were

willing to do it on Trump's and Giuliani's terms, 120%.

Rudy says that this has to be all secretive.

This is very confidential.

To look that Igor said you have a $20 bill, Rudy

took it and said, I'm officially your lawyer now.

Rudy's tool of choice was the lawyer -client privilege.

That would enable him, Trump, and ourselves to communicate.

They get people that can work in the shadows.

Not a Henry Kissinger, not a Phil Habib.

Not any of those folks.

Love and Igor.

No guardrails.

No oversight.

Nothing.

And that is how I was recruited to start the secret

mission to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

And this is where really the back-channel campaign begins, and could that get them

in trouble with various laws in place that weren't against that, of course.

But they didn't worry about that.

They had protection, they had the president, they had Rudy Giuliani.

For the life of me, I can't understand why they got

recruited to do anything sensitive with Rudy Giuliani.

It makes no sense to me unless maybe you're looking for a fall guy.

I don't think Hillary Clinton or any other sane person would be entrusting Lev and

Igor with top secret government kind of information.

And then having them run around Ukraine, he's not qualified.

I mean, it's just... it's ridiculous.

With Trump, it was never about competency.

It was never about the Constitution.

It was always about loyalty.

It was always about protecting him.

It was always about doing things for him.

Like fear and loathing in Washington, D.C.

As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top.

There's this president talking to this crazy cat, his lawyer, who's got these two

people that should not even be in the room, that

are now participating in a really high level.

But comedic as it was, it was also gravely serious.

Wait!

We can't stop here!

This is bad country.

This was the beginning of the BLT team.

We would meet at the BLT Steakhouse restaurant at the Trump International Hotel.

They had a private room there that I was told by that junior.

It was swept once a week to make sure that there was no listening devices there.

The BLT team was compiled of Rudy Giuliani, who's the head, and it was me and Igor.

And then you had John Solomon, who was the Hill reporter at the time.

Then you had Joe, DeGeneva, and Victoria Tunzing, who

was two right-wing lawyers that used to work for Trump.

They were key part in getting Bill Barr to become Attorney General.

Victoria told them, don't worry about it.

Bill Barr is going to wipe away the Mueller report, and that was it.

Bill Barr, one of the most respected jurists in the country,

highly respected lawyer, a terrific man, a terrific person.

He will be nominated for the United States Attorney General.

So the BLT team had this big round table with windows.

People couldn't see him the way you were sitting down.

And Rudy was like Tom Corleone.

Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S.

Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

New York City is affected by organized crime, more

so probably than any other city in the United States.

I'd be right by his side as his soldier.

He's part of a criminal family.

He's, you know, he's the Tom Hagen.

I have a special practice.

I handle one client.

He is fascinated by the mob and constantly talk about the Godfather.

Sounds like a poor imitation of the Godfather.

Almost like, you know, the Godfather.

This is business.

You could see his love for that mob lifestyle.

Everybody knew that I was so close to the president

and Rudy Giuliani, that I was a gatekeeper.

To be able to walk into a room and have all of these powerful people, congressmen,

senators, bow down to you, run up to you, kiss your ass.

It was amazing.

The power, the rush.

December, 2018, we were invited to the White House Hanukkah Party.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Trump comes straight up to me, shakes my hand, looks

me in the eye and says, Rudy tells me great things.

Thank you for what you do.

And then his keep up to good work.

The president of the United States is sending me

on the mission to be able to save our democracy.

But a week later, we were in Ukraine.

I knew he was out of his league right from the beginning.

I told him, listen.

You entered a good old boys club.

You don't belong there.

You do not have membership to this club.

At all.

You think you might.

But all you have is access.

And access is going to get denied.

The second there are done with you.

When he started traveling to Ukraine and being on this

mission, I knew almost everything he was doing was a bad idea.

I'd get home and tell her, you can't believe what just happened.

And you can't believe who I was with.

She'd be like, what are you doing?

Every chance I had to tell him that he thought of his mind, and instead of a

medal, he's going to get handcuffs because he's going to be the fall guy.

This was a mission impossible.

A mission stupid.

I don't know which one, but maybe both.

See you in Ukraine soon.

We're in Ukraine.

There was a convoy of cars with a bunch of people in there with guns.

We were driven first to one house where we switched

cars I mean, this is right out of a spy thriller.

It was in the middle of nowhere, like a log cabin.

There was a Victor Shokin.

He was a elderly gentleman.

But this guy is not your typical grandfather.

This guy is hardcore.

Victor Shokin was a very disreputable former prosecutor.

There are various allegations of corruption for this

country to get the kind of help and aid that it needed.

Various funding agencies wanted them out.

Then Vice President Biden went over there to get rid of this guy.

As I'm leaving it six hours.

If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.

That happened.

Shokin was let go.

Oh, son of a bitch.

You got fired.

Ukraine's embattled prosecutor general Victor Shokin is no longer in office.

Victor Shokin's departure comes after the country's president, Poroshenko,

publicly urged the general prosecutor to resign.

By the time Lev Parnas gets the shokin, he has a vendetta.

Shokin told us Joe Biden was involved in the firing to protect his son,

Hunter Biden, who was a board member of a Burisma corrupt, the Ukrainian energy company.

It's a huge bombshell.

It would cause Biden the nomination.

We fly down to New York.

We meet up with Rudy in Park Avenue.

He was very excited because Victor Shokin's willing to play ball.

So Victor Shokin now needs to get a visa.

He then goes to the US embassy.

Then he gets rejected.

Rudy looks at me and says, don't worry about that.

I'll take care of that.

He calls me on later that evening, says he just met with Pompeo.

Everything is good.

Shokin goes back.

Then they take away his passport.

Shokin is obviously irate screaming to the media and everything that the US

ambassador, Marie Vonnovich, blocked his visa.

I said, Rudy, it's Marie Vonnovich again.

She's back at it.

Rudy loses it.

She's going to get involved in my investigation.

I'll show her.

If he texts me, I'm calling number one.

That was Donald Trump.

Calls me back and tells me in two days, everything's going to be alright.

If Shokin gets called into the embassy where he gets a

strict letter saying that he is put on a do not fly list now.

So the more pressure we were putting on together, the

visa, the more they were destroying Shokin over there.

He was flipping, losing it.

The President of the United States can't even get a visa for somebody.

It was like the Baton Rouge Bears of politics.

One thing about Marie Vonnovich, she's not

going to do the back room, you know, diplomacy.

She was a very disciplined and respected civil servant.

They needed to get her out.

And we can't get a visa for a Shokin.

So we arranged a Skype call.

It was Rudy, myself, and Igor.

We were joined by XFPI agent that Rudy had there to take notes.

And on the other side was Victor Shokin.

How long had he been conducting that investigation that involved Biden's son?

Rudy said, was there anything illegal that Hunter Biden or Joe Biden did?

Do they get a kickback?

Do they get a bribe?

And there's a two second pause and then you hear...

No, but if I would be able to investigate it, I'm

convinced that we would have found something there.

Shokin did it previously investigated Briezma.

There was no credible evidence at that time to charge Briezma or Hunter Biden.

So for Shokin to then bring it up again, it seemed ludicrous.

Tonight, we have more evidence of Ukraine gas company Briezma leveraging Hunter

Biden for political access and more lies from Joe Biden as he tries to cover up this story.

The bullshit pipeline worked like this.

Between five and seven in the evenings, Rudy would text

what we have anything for the president or John Solomon.

And get some information from Ukraine.

I'd send it over to John Solomon and literally

within an hour or two it'd be all over Fox News.

Joe, remember you heard it here first, credible evidence about your son peddling

your influence as vice president in exchange for

millions in one case and billions in another case.

If some Ukrainian caught me up with some crazy deer, like the sky is yellow,

Solomon would turn around and say, yep, my source

has confirmed the sky is yellow and the anonymity.

I can confirm to you tonight that the U.S.

government had open source intelligence and was aware as early as February of 2019

that the Ukrainian government was planning to reopen the Briezma investigation.

Part of my job was to make sure that the information

we were getting was coming from credible sources.

People that were in power in office and had authority.

But there was lots of other characters like oligarchs, street

guys, businessmen that were all trying to get into the mix.

Most of those were actually GRU and Russian agents.

They were just babbling all this Russian disinformation.

Nobody would listen to it until Rudy Giuliani.

I mean, Rudy did not care as long as it fit his

narrative and the narrative was Joe Biden is bad.

Having his son, who had just been tossed out of the military for drug problems,

put on the board of the most corrupt company in Ukraine.

They needed to help feed the beast, get it out

there on the hill, get it out there in Fox News.

Well, Joe Biden has spent weeks deflecting the flood of questions

about his son's shady business deals in Ukraine and China.

And then all of a sudden, Hunter Biden resigns from the board, Lev and Igor,

they got a victory.

They're riding high.

It was good, but we needed more.

We didn't have the smoking gun.

Two days later, here comes a call, and it's current general prosecutor Yuri Lutzenko.

Come on down.

You're the next contestant.

Yuri Lutzenko didn't have a great reputation.

Like a lot of prosecutors, these are largely political hacks.

They feed a certain faction that's in power.

He came in with a pile of paperwork that had to do

with Marisma, but he's not showing any hardcore facts.

He never left any records, nor was very specific

as to, okay, where did the money come in?

How was it delivered?

How did Vice President Biden benefit?

Giuliani said we needed to announce an investigation into the Bidens.

Lutzenko was willing to get this investigation

announced, but he needed something in return.

Yvonne Vich had to go, and that wasn't a problem because Rudy wanted Yvonne Vich gone.

The problem is Trump already fired her.

Remember, when we had our dinner, he said, get rid of her, and she's still there.

But he couldn't understand it.

He would just scream, she's fired, and expect that's it.

He's gone.

Trump told Pompeo to fire her, but Pompeo refused.

He even screamed so loud at his secretary of Madeleine to fire, and she told him,

Mr. President, I don't have the authority to do it.

A man that's known for firing people on TV, and here he can't fire his own ambassador.

I mean, it was hilarious.

I don't know if I'm more offended as a Ukrainian or as an American to see the

extents and lengths that President Trump was willing to go.

It didn't make sense to me, and I think the only person that made sense to was Trump.

It was just astonishing to see such high levels of governments acting like children.

One of the things that I was fascinated to find was that when global energy producers

did get bank accounts, I see charges of Leves in Ukraine.

You know, he's living it up in Kiev.

While Leves is being chased by creditors all through South Florida, he is now

orchestrating a stream of money with Igor that goes through a foreign bank to the U .S.

The money is flowing, and he is spending it with Igor with reckless abandon.

They flew for his class.

They stayed in top-level hotels.

They ate $1,000 dinners.

We're talking $600 at Tutsis, a strip club in Kiev.

They were not only moving around Ukraine.

They were jet-setting around the globe.

Paris, Warsaw, London.

They were globe-trotting diplomats, if you will.

And I use that for him loosely.

Here I am, a kid at Brooklyn going to meet the president of Ukraine, a country that

was born in, relaying a message from the most powerful man in the world.

It's time, game time.

I was scared every time he went to Ukraine that he wouldn't come back.

Petro Poroshenko battling to hold on to his presidency against Zelensky.

Elections were going on in Ukraine.

They tell Poroshenko.

If he would giveuzenko the go-ahead to open an investigation into the Biden,

and if Poroshenko himself would come out and

discuss the involvement in the meddling of U.S.

Ambassador Maria Varnovich into Ukrainian politics, in return, down Trump would then

not only have Poroshenko visit him at the White House, but he would also come visit

him in Ukraine and support him in his elections.

I made the very, very first quid pro quo to the president of Poroshenko,

Ukraine from President down Trump.

After I'm done talking, Poroshenko sits back, starts laughing and said,

hold on a second.

He goes, we're not going to do this again.

Thank you very much.

It's a great honor to be with President Poroshenko.

He got screwed by Trump on some shady cold deal,

and now he can't even get a phone call back.

So, at this point, he didn't trust that Trump would hold up his end of the deal.

John Solomon, Rudy, everybody starts going crazy, and it

becomes an all-out war between Yuri Lutenko and Rudy Giuliani.

Finally, after Rudy getting on the phone and literally screaming at Lutenko and

cursing, Lutenko, he's going to do the interview, and he's

going to give us a bombshell that we're not even ready for.

This isn't a normal political exercise.

This is subterfuge on an entirely another level.

You just don't see that.

Nowhere in American history.

You guys understand that.

I mean, I was at the studios.

I was at the control room.

Overseeing this interview, old Soviet style, you know, propaganda, state TV type of shit.

Today we'll launch the criminal investigation about this fact,

and we'll give legal assessment of all this information.

Lutenko tells the Hill we're doing an investigation,

and boom, that was another victory for the team.

How real was the investigation?

No more real than a lot of the investigations that happened there.

So let's be perfectly clear.

Trump already never cared if there was an actual investigation.

Trump even himself said it several times to announce it and leave the rest to me.

How do you gauge the relationship between Ukraine and specifically our U.S.

ambassador, Ms. Ivanovich?

That's when Lutenko heads us with the bomb.

Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S.

ambassador here, Ms. Ambassador gave me a list of people who should not prosecute.

And all hell broke loose.

There was no proof of that.

And the State Department flatly denied that and said it was a fabrication.

But you know, the end of the day the damage was done.

We were on cloud nine high fives and having dinner and drinks and thinking we did it.

We got it.

Mission accomplished.

Breaking news in the Russia investigation, a summary

of the Mueller report has been delivered to Congress.

Attorney General William Barr reported that the special counsel found no evidence

that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or

coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

This was all bullshit.

Worries among Mueller's investigators that Barr may have

shaped the entire narrative about the Russia investigation.

But it was party time at the Trump International.

Music was going, congressmen, senators were all over the place.

Finally, this Russian collusion is going to bad.

We knew that Bill Barr was going to take care of it.

After Mueller, you would think at that point the

administration would be breathing a collective sigh of relief.

No.

There wasn't any effort to kind of, okay, let's play this straight.

Let's do it right.

No.

They're right back in the hunt.

Now let's target an ambassador.

It's been a dramatic day.

President Trump fired US ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

That morning I wake up from a phone call to, from Lutenko and he's like,

congratulations.

Finally, you guys did something right.

Yovanovitch said she was never told why she was removed.

By text Victoria Tunzing and she said the wicked witch is gone.

I'm like, you know, from the Wizard of Oz.

The wicked old Richard loves his name.

She is the anti-corruption fighter and we were celebrating that we got her out.

What they were doing was this dangerous form of diplomacy.

They had the wherewithal and the means to get recalled an American ambassador.

They did that and there was no turning back.

And so as the Ukrainian presidential elections start heating up in April,

all of a sudden, here comes Vladimir Zelensky out of nowhere.

Here was a guy that was a comedian that had no chance whatsoever.

Every day he got bigger and bigger until eventually

he just took over and won in the landslide.

Having played the role of President in a TV show, the Lord

and me, Zelensky is now on course to make that role a reality.

Zelensky and his team can celebrate this election victory, but defeating corruption

and ending the war with Russia is going to prove far harder.

All of a sudden, it's a holy cast of characters and our mission changes.

We need to open up a backdoor channel between Zelensky and Giuliani on behalf of Trump.

The integration date of President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky is being discussed.

The inauguration is going to be big, and it's going

to be this huge event to show a strain for Russia.

It was very important for Trump to be there.

And Trump said, I don't think I can make it, but

I will send the next best thing, I'll send Pence.

So they were all set, Rudy realized that the

inauguration was going to be their pressure point.

Then he would use it to our advantage.

We have runaway diplomats operating in another country under nobody's watch.

Nobody's age is nothing.

If we lose sight of that, we have problems.

And if we lose sight of what happened, we're in serious trouble as a country.

Lev started to slip away, reminds me of the Titanic scene.

Jack, there's a boat.

Jack, that's pretty much where we were during the four years of the presidency of Trump.

I'd never know when he was coming or going.

He could buy a ticket in the morning and then cancel it

by night and then be somewhere else by the next morning.

When he was home, he was unbearable.

It was Trump, Trump, Trump, MAGA, MAGA, Ukraine, scandal, Joe Biden.

There was nothing else to talk to Lev about.

It was hardcore control over my family.

Are you kidding me?

You're going to watch MSNBC.

You don't know that that's full of lies and they hate Trump.

That was part of the MAGA cult movement.

Once they got you in and they told you what you could

watch, who you could speak to and what you could believe.

Now I have to eat and pretend like it's not a big deal.

That Trump is making fun of disabled people.

I don't know what I said.

I don't remember.

Being derogatory towards women.

She's shocked that I picked her.

I'm not thinking, Mr. That's okay.

I know you're not thinking.

You never do.

I'm sorry.

My husband is now turning in to the same orange

person on TV that he didn't go spray tanning.

Eventually, that might have gotten there, you know?

I mean, eventually him and Rudy would have been going together to get spray tanning.

They were in this sort of, like, Republican political-industrial complex.

They were in it.

He seemed like he thought he was untouchable.

My client had gotten a phone call.

Hey, you know, our guy Lev has connections straight to the top.

Why are you busting our chops about this 500 grand?

It was a thinly veiled threat.

My client is a real tough-minded guy.

He wasn't gonna be deterred by any threat thinly veiled or otherwise.

That inspired me to be just as tenacious.

The mission was now to schedule a meeting between Rudy Giuliani and President-Black

Vladimir Zelensky.

Trump wanted the new president to announce an

investigation into Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

The announcement would legitimize the story that we've been pushing in the media.

He wanted Rudy to close the deal.

We're in Ukraine.

We're pounding the pavement.

We're meeting with every kind of character.

From your foreign ministers, your oligarchs, your criminal.

Anybody in there from rabbis to pope.

My dear brother, we are here in Ukraine.

We're here with the Rabbi Moist.

God bless you, Mr. Giuliani.

There wasn't a rock that we didn't overturn.

I mean, from bartenders to waitresses, we went everywhere.

It was like a groundhog day.

We would get promises.

Everybody would tell us, yes.

Great.

Absolutely.

We'll set it up.

And then two hours later, they disappear.

I was starting getting really creepy because some

forces out there are stopping this from happening.

We didn't know at the time the U.S.

Embassy was following everything we were doing.

After every meeting, somebody from the embassy would

come right in afterwards and tell them, Domi would rooty.

This is illegitimate.

There's proper channels.

This needs to stop.

It was us first in deep state.

And the embassy, and we represent Donald Trump, kiss her ass.

So after several people ghosting us, they finally set up a meeting with Minister Vakhov.

He said, well, I need an official letter.

I said, no problem.

I gave Rudy a call.

Within a couple of minutes, there was an official letter e-mailed over to me.

Vakhov's eyes changed.

He had to say that this was real now.

We had an agreement on May 10th, Rudy was supposed to fly in.

And there was supposed to be a meeting between Zelensky and Rudy.

So at five o'clock in the morning, I hear my phone gone crazy.

It's Rudy.

I thought maybe he was drunk or something.

Pick up the phone and he's screaming.

They're all against us.

This was all a setup.

The Ukrainians were going to come out after Giuliani and I mean Zelensky.

And claimed that Giuliani was trash-shaked them down.

And Giuliani said, that's it.

Get out of there.

We're not going back to Ukraine.

Fuck them.

They're all liars.

You know, we're done.

About an hour later, my phone starts blowing up again.

Now it's the Ukrainians.

All the Ukrainian officials and oligarchs call me up saying what the fuck is going on.

Rudy went on Fox and basically went on a rampage.

I'm not going to go because I think I'm walking into

a group of people that are enemies of the president.

Calling out names.

A gentleman by the name of Leshanko.

If you had told the whole world that Ukraine is corrupt, then fuck you.

So no trip on Sunday, no trips to Ukraine.

No trips.

My ass in the light.

Any one of these guys out there that I was dealing with could have just said,

he's not leaving and I'm not leaving.

It was a terrible morning.

All of U.S.

and Ukrainian relations are now on the line.

So I set up a meeting with Lukasenko and I started going strong and saying,

this could all be resolved.

President Zelensky needs to announce a fucking investigation.

This will stop Lukasenko saying, give me an hour.

And within an hour I got called from Shafer.

Sergei Shafer was the intern chief of staff to President Zelensky.

He was his partner in his entertainment business.

So I called Rudy.

I'll never forget that conversation.

He was very loud, so I had to hold the phone off over here.

And he was very, I mean, he was like, you make

sure you tell them like we're not messing around.

Make him understand that if Zelensky does not pronounce an investigation into the Bidens.

By Monday, there will be no relationship.

There will be no military aid.

There will be no medical aid.

And vice president Pence will not show up at your inauguration.

I was like, holy shit.

Pence canceling?

It was a message to Vladimir Putin.

That we are no longer supporting Ukraine.

Like, how am I going to say this?

So I start practicing with Igor.

I see Igor starting pale white.

He's like, you're not going to say this.

You do understand this is the president of Ukraine.

We have to think about our safety.

We have to get out of here.

We get downstairs.

There's a whole entourage of bodyguards and cars.

Igor kept trying to explain to me, yellow, they're protecting us.

But if tomorrow they decide not to protect us, we're off to see Sergei Shafer.

The meeting was at a restaurant called Prague.

The whole restaurant was closed.

Probably 40, 50 bodyguards between mine and Sergei Shafer's.

And then there was a three of us.

And the little table outside.

This is literally like a scene I have a spy movie.

I mean, James Bond has nothing on us.

Bond.

James Bond.

Igor sitting next to me, taking shots because he was nervous as hell.

I had Shafer's heart.

I understand this meeting might not be pleasant, but it's very serious.

This is what needs to happen.

We've been trying to get a meeting with President Leggsolenski.

For some reason, we're having difficulties.

We need your help to be able to arrange this meeting.

Looking back at it, it was just incredible how I was explaining to him that we were

trying to root our corruption while at that

moment, corrupting him to the fullest extreme.

It was a simple meeting.

There was not that much to discuss.

And that was it.

That night, they ghosted me.

I remember Rudy saying, well, now they're going to see the wrath of Trump.

Next morning, the Ukrainians got a phone call from the United States telling him

that Mike Pence is not going to be coming to the inauguration.

Boy, was that a problem.

Like, this is the way he's going to go out, running around for Trump.

Is this really worth his life?

Ukrainian officials wanted Vice President Pence to attend

the inauguration for the new president, Zelenski, in Kiev.

What are you learning about that trip?

It was canceled, right?

Pence canceling was almost like a death sentence for us.

We were trying to advance the election.

Oligar Igor Kolomoysky owned television broadcast network where Zelenski made his bones.

Zelenski and Kolomoysky were essentially friends and supporters of one another.

This guy is as bad as they come.

I mean, this guy has an army of 10,000 people of his own.

So this is not an irregular Oligar.

The first statement he makes on television as he gets back is...

Basically threatening our lives.

I'm pretty sure I probably broke down after that, and I was just like,

what if he doesn't come back?

Giuliani started tweeting, hitting all media, basically telling Vladimir Zelenski

that if he does not arrest Igor Kolomoysky immediately, and if something happens to

either me or Igor while we're in Ukraine, that he will be the blame for it.

Now we're getting a call from the interior minister saying, you're out of here now.

Within moments, we were fitted with bulletproof vests

thrown on into a convoy of cars and wished off into a plane.

No immigration, no passport control.

Next thing you know, we were gone.

We were out of Ukraine and off to Paris.

And that was the last time I ever was in Ukraine.

That's when Trump has to enter the fray.

A troubling private conversation between President Trump and a foreign leader has

rung such an alarm bell that the intelligence

community's internal watchdog calls it an urgent concern.

This was a July 25th call between the president and Ukrainian President Zelenski.

And what's jumping off the page to me is that the

president of Ukraine says, where are the javelins?

Where is the defense support you're giving us?

And the very next sentence by the president is, I would like you to do us a favor.

During the call, Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian president eight times to

investigate former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

It was a very easy connect to dots to what Levitz started to

do and what President Trump had eventually tried to do himself.

The president was saying, I need this favor.

And by the way, I've got your money.

This conversation was about a trade.

It clearly was a quid pro quo.

There was no quid pro quo.

No quid pro quo.

There was no quid pro quo.

This is a very dangerous situation for our country right now.

And it is amazing that we continue to let this man be in charge of nuclear weapons.

Question, sir, was what did you want President Zelenski

to do about Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter?

Are you talking to me?

The irony is that it comes shortly after he had just been investigated from using a

foreign power to meddle in a presidential election.

And it's happening all over again.

That call was perfect.

It couldn't have been night, sir.

Even if you don't believe the whole Russia, Russia, Russia, that Trump

colluded with the Russians, I want to make it very clear that

he colluded with the Ukrainians to meddle in the 2020 election.

And I know it because I was there.

That's really where things started to accelerate downward quickly.

Mr. Trump did order a hold on military aid to Ukraine.

President Trump ordered his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to delay that

military aid to Ukraine just days before a call with the Ukrainian president.

We found out that Trump actually withheld military aid.

That was a very, very serious moment in my life.

The message I gave them, Trump actually acted on it.

I was horrified.

It was like holy cow.

Now we're in it.

We're talking about not releasing aid to Ukraine.

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget, we laid Mr. Trump's order to

withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid.

One career diplomat sounding the alarm very directly by noting in writing in this

text, I think it's crazy to withhold security

assistance for help with a political campaign.

Never in a million years I think we were get to that point.

I never thought that we would not get a meeting with Zelensky.

Zelensky really stood up to live and to Rudy and to Trump and he just wouldn't budge.

Ukrainian weren't as corrupt as he thought they were.

They weren't as corrupt as him or Rudy.

I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.

That would be a tremendous achievement.

I thought Trump's a hero saving our democracy and

Zelensky is a corrupt leader and it was all the opposite.

At the end of the day, it turned out that Trump was

the actual criminal and Zelensky was a stand-up guy.

We were all waiting for Trump to get presidential and instead he just became a monster.

And he's a bully and he really needs to focus on himself.

Like, please stop focusing on the United States.

Go sit down.

It's time.

He's serial entrepreneur type judgment debtors.

They're going to find themselves into something.

And Lev found himself into the biggest something I've ever seen a debtor ever get into.

We were able to find a account that Lev controlled

through an entity called Aaron Investments 1 LLC.

The $325,000 actually came from.

They gave 325,000 to America's first action.

The money got flagged by a bank.

They saw the hallmarks of money laundering and fraud.

That got the attention of the feds.

The campaign legal center filed a complaint with the ABC.

They're basically alleging a straw man donation by global energy producers.

And then we were off to the races.

That was the smoking gun we needed.

And then a tweet came out that listed the top five

donors for Trump and him and Igor were on that list.

People started to dig in into trying to figure

out where his love is from, what he's doing.

At that point I started to feel more kind of unsafe.

I felt like things were destabilizing a bit.

This is an NBC News special report.

Breaking this evening, House Democrats tonight are taking the first formal step

that could potentially lead to the impeachment of President Trump.

The impeachment inquiry is centered on President

Trump's phone call with the leader of Ukraine.

Now the question, did the president pressure

him to investigate political rival Joe Biden?

They testified that President Trump froze military aid to Ukraine in order to force

a public announcement of investigation into his political rivals.

Forced out, the former American ambassador to Ukraine tells

lawmakers that President Trump pressed to have her fired.

Yvonnevich was recalled from her post in May, amidst charges from Rudy Giuliani and

in conservative media that she had spoken out against the president.

Getting rid of Ambassador Yvonnevich helped set the stage for an irregular

channel that could pursue the two investigations that mattered so much to the president.

The 2016 conspiracy theory, and most important, an investigation into the 2020

political opponent he apparently feared most, Joe Biden.

I get a letter from Congress, basically requesting all of the information that I

have gathered in Ukraine while I was doing work for President Trump and Rudy.

I called Rudy right away and told him, he said, oh, don't worry about it.

Let me call Trump and we'll take care of this.

We're going to get you a lawyer and it was John Dowd.

He represented President Trump in a matter prior to that.

For John Dowd to officially represent me, the president had to sign a letter to

waive a conflict of interest, and I have that letter.

So I fly in directly to John Dowd's house and Cape Cod.

The first thing he does is get all the president's lawyers, all the president's

men on the phone and says, you know, it's game time.

On the call was J.Suckolo, Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Tunzing, and Joe DeGeneva.

All the president's putzes.

John Dowd sent the letter of response, basically a fuck you letter.

It was a big joke about everybody couldn't believe that the way he responded to

Congress, and the Catholics, for him to not speak

to the government, not attempt to cooperate.

One could say that Lev's first lawyers were

concerned about interest other than Lev Parnas.

I mean, I'm a little confused at the time.

I thought they wanted me to testify on behalf of Trump to

tell the truth of everything I uncovered about the Bidens.

It was the opposite.

We're going to go dark.

Nobody on our side was scared of Congress.

There was no repercussions.

Trump and Rudy thought and still think that they're above the law.

The message in Trump world was, don't worry about accountability.

There won't be any.

You do what you need to do to protect Trump.

Right, as we have mentioned in our monologue, we

obtained new Ukrainian documents from Rudy Giuliani.

You interviewed Shoken.

We know why he was fired.

He was told why he was fired.

He's now set at five separate times that he was fired because

he was interviewing and investigating Biden's corrupt son.

Rudy Giuliani goes on TV with the Victor Shoken letter.

The letter basically said the first time ever that he officially got fired by Joe

Biden because he was looking into Burisma and Hunter Biden.

Now Hannity wants to do an exclusive interview with Shoken.

Rudy asked me to help Fox to set up this exclusive interview.

So the interview was arranged in Vienna.

We had the studios ready.

Shoken was there.

And we were flying out there.

In the morning, we met up with Rudy at the BLT

breakfast area and went over our game plan.

Lev and I spoke during that day just fine.

He was telling me he's just singing out the Trump hotel with Rudy waiting for his plane.

Rudy said that he got called from President Trump

and he needed to see him at the White House.

Rudy was going to meet us a couple of days later.

So I didn't think anything of it.

He told me go ahead and set everything up and I'll see you there Saturday.

And then he left for the airport.

Lev's boarding time.

A couple of men jumped out and said, can we see your passports?

Me and Igor gave them our passports.

And they turned around and said, this is them.

You are on their arrest.

They started handcuffing us.

And one of the FBI agents says, you know, I don't want to be the bearer of

bad news, but your house is being raided right now.

They busted through the back door as if, I don't

know, they're coming to Osama bin Laden's house.

One lingering thought was that I had, like, what did you do?

The arrests of two associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on campaign finance violations.

The two arrested at Dulles Airport after buying a one-way ticket out of the country.

They're associates of the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

These are the first criminal charges emerging from the Trump administration's

controversial relationship with Ukraine.

The government documents show that the men helped

Giuliani set up a meeting with high -level Ukrainians.

Who Giuliani was lobbying to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

One of the agents said to me, I could try to get your wife on the phone.

I told her I love there.

I told her not to work called Rudy.

That was the last I spoke to him for the next, like, ten days.

Your froom in and left parties were picked up at Dulles on Wednesday night.

Just hours after the Wall Street Journal reports, they had

lunch with Rudy Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel.

I think Rudy knew and was told not to be on that plane.

I didn't get from Rudy that he knew this was going to happen, but I also got from

Rudy that he wasn't very surprised that it happened.

Rudy was saying that, you know, don't worry, everything's gonna be fine.

What's the Democrats at the deep state?

It started to feel more and more and more of everybody

kind of just disappearing into the background.

I guess I met him one time and he came to an event and took a picture with me.

That was hard to go through having people just turn away.

I don't know that far yet.

In the summary.

How well do you know Parnas?

It was funny.

I didn't even realize he was you graining.

I thought he was Israeli.

When Trump came on TV... Were you relying on Lev Parnas to get rid of your ambassador?

And he was like, no.

I don't know him.

Well, I don't know him.

I don't know Parnas other than I guess I had pictures taken, which I do with

thousands of people and million people today that I didn't meet.

I don't know who he is.

I don't know what he's about.

Don't know where he comes from.

Don't know nothing about him.

He might be a fine gentleman.

Perhaps he's a fine man.

Perhaps he's not.

I know nothing about him.

I mean, that was like so low.

It was just a lie.

Of course you know him.

Trump says he doesn't know these guys, but there he is with Igor, looking like

they just won best RV dealership in Gary, Indiana.

When I told him that Trump said he doesn't know him, he didn't believe me.

He's like, no way.

What's Rudy doing?

Where's the Genova?

Where are they?

He had no idea that they weren't all running to get him out.

I was waiting for the cavalry.

The cavalry that we came.

Love was expendable.

He was a good front person.

He was someone you could ultimately disavow or maybe arrest and shut up.

The federal government took notice of our case.

Someone was absolutely looking at what we were

doing and it was aiding them in their investigation.

Obviously, our intent was not to have Mr. Parnas indicted and put in jail.

People who are in jail can't pay debt.

In the middle of the night, I see a piece of paper being slipped under my jail cell.

It's a postcard from Rudy Giuliani.

Dear Lev and Igor, the lunch was good, and I enjoyed sharing a table with you.

Trump's hotel is nice, don't you think?

I'm sorry what happened at those airports, and

I guess we won't be meeting in Vienna after all.

Don't worry, Paul's lawyers are good.

He only got eight to ten years, so maybe things will work out.

Rudy G.

I felt extremely abandoned.

He was like a father figure.

I really trust him.

This is where the first time I... it was the beginning of me getting out of the code.

I didn't want to believe that he could hurt us

after how much Lev put into that relationship.

Maybe more than our marriage at the time.

I stopped trusting everything they were telling me and

wanted to get somebody to represent me that I could trust.

When I entered the case, Lev and I decided remaining silent was not in his best interest.

That it would be far better for Lev if he appeared to be a credible person,

willing to tell important truths at great risk to himself.

I basically was going to tell the world the truth.

I'm not going to hide from anybody.

Lev, pardon me.

I look forward to defending myself vigorously in court, and I'm certain that

in the time truth will be revealed, and I will be vindicated.

Thank you both for agreeing to do this.

I know that this is a leap of trust to speak publicly in this way for the first time.

Thank you for having us here.

You gave the message of a quid pro quo to Ukrainian officials.

The first quid pro quo again was when we met with President Poroshenko.

I want to talk to the FBI, the DOJ, the Southern District.

Well, nobody wants to talk to me.

Are you afraid, Mr. Mayor, that you could be indicted?

Oh, wow.

What's really interesting is Brie Giuliani has never been

charged for operating as an unregistered foreign agent.

They helped me find people, and as I've said, they did a good job.

The marquee count in the first indictment was

lived somehow exerting suasion on the president.

On behalf of some Ukrainian officials to remove the U.S.

Ambassador Ukraine, with the superseding indictment, the government very quietly

excised their marquee allegation and glummed into

that indictment, a garden variety, fraud case.

The best thing that happened to President Trump and Brie Giuliani is that Igor and

Lev get charged with campaign finance violations.

I'm poor Lev.

I don't know what he's doing.

He's up.

You can now paint them as fraudsters.

How did these two guys, and I don't think it's a stretch to

say thugs, how were they meeting with our political leaders?

None of this raises red flags.

Criminals with no credibility.

Paul Giuliani and associates.

Lev Parnas.

Hey!

I am Igor Ferrimas.

Hey, you guys!

And therefore, their testimony and what they have to say doesn't come.

I don't know those gentlemen.

Now it's possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody.

I don't know them.

I welcome him to say that even more.

Every time he says I'll show him another picture, he's lying.

He's lying.

What people probably didn't expect is that Lev photo documented everything.

He literally had the receipts.

Over 750 pages of those materials formed the basis for the vote on the first impeachment.

On this vote, the A's are 229, the A's are 198, present is one,

article two is adopted.

So I have the 300 page impeachment articles.

A hundred pages of those are my direct evidence.

No, I was not able to testify.

Republicans made a huge thing and they didn't allow me in.

What were they scared of?

Do you know if Mr. Giuliani was ever in contact with Mr. Barr specifically about

the fact that he was trying to get Ukraine to announce these investigations into Joe Biden?

Oh, absolutely.

Mr. Barr knew about that.

Mr. Barr, I have to have known everything.

It was clearly a high level of concern at the highest

levels of the Justice Department and Congress.

A lot of people had to be involved to try to keep the truth from coming out.

Bill Barr, not only politicized, he weaponized the DOJ on behalf of Donald

Trump to go after his political enemies and help his political friends.

Swaddle the critic, shut up the witness, change the charging decisions,

recover to try to protect the President.

I believe that this was worse than Watergate.

Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, sentenced

to 20 months in federal prison in Lower Manhattan.

Parnas has been found guilty of federal campaign finance criminal charges.

Prosecutors accused Parnas of hatching a scheme to funnel millions of dollars in

funds from a wealthy Russian financier in the U.S.

elections.

I was used to watch cult movies.

Well, you know what they think of me?

They think I'm the son of God.

I think, you know, something wrong with these people never happened to me.

People call things, you know, a lie, a lie.

But my God's grace, if I didn't get arrested and died, it decolonized.

Whatever caused me to stop following this madman and to be able to wake up again.

I would have been divorced.

I would have lost my family.

He just got caught up.

And by the time he realized it, unfortunately, he was already behind bars.

Trump inspired me for the first time in my life to vote.

And I did.

I voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Hopefully, it's not too late for other people.

I betrayed Ukraine.

I betrayed America.

I'm sorry.

When I met him, I saw me in that, you know, he was a broken man.

He paid a huge price for all this.

Luckily, he's got a strong family, and that remained.

Since the day of my rest, every day for the past five

years, I've been saying I'm sorry to my wife, to my family.

I'll be saying sorry for the rest of my life.

I saw Marie Ivanovich testify in the impeachment and to see the pain and to see

what she went through, what I put her through.

President Trump said that I was bad news to another world

leader, and that I would be going through some things.

She didn't deserve any of this.

It was a terrible moment.

I feel foolish.

I feel disgusted.

I feel ashamed of myself.

I truly believe that we're helping America.

We're looking back at it now.

We've destroyed America.

We have such division.

People are at each other's throats.

And the sad part, that was exactly what Vladimir Putin wanted.

And we gave it to him in a solar platter.

And how ironic is it?

The Reagan Republicans were that anti -Soviet Union Russia stopped the Cold War,

pushed for democracy.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

And now here we have the Republicans screaming, literally, Russian propaganda.

Why shouldn't that root for Russia, which I am?

Putin ain't woke.

We get along.

I like Putin.

He likes me.

You know, we get along.

Putin's a killer.

A lot of killers.

We get a lot of killers while you think our country's so innocent.

I don't know how anyone can look at Putin and think anything but a monster.

Just like I don't think you can look at Trump.

I can't look at Trump without thinking that he's a monster.

Anybody that's ever been around down Trump to

work for him at the White House knows the truth.

He's unfit for office.

I cannot, in good conscience, endorse Donald Trump.

Pence is joining a remarkably large choir, former Trump

administration officials, who have come out against him.

Trump's former attorney general, two former defense secretaries,

two of his chiefs of staff, two national security officers.

I was as close as you could get to him.

I did all his dirty work, and Donald Trump doesn't care about anybody except for himself.

He doesn't care about the Constitution.

He doesn't care about the United States.

Because Donald Trump doesn't want to be president.

He wants to be a dictator.

He wants to be Vladimir Putin, president for life.

I hope one day not only will the country forgive me, Ukraine will forgive me.

I hope one day Hunter Biden could really forgive me.

I feel a lot of responsibility because of our actions in Ukraine, pushing all of

this information against Hunter Biden has now caused real

problems, real criminal problems that he is now facing.

The first child of a sitting US president has been convicted of a crime.

To watch Hunter Biden, an American citizen that has nothing to do with politics,

a son, and I have sons to watch the pain that caused in his life.

A jury in Delaware fighting presidential son Hunter Biden guilty of three federal counts.

I just hope one day I can say I'm sorry and make a right.

You ready, babe?

Are you ready?

Hunter.

One long time.

Thanks for making the trip, my friend.

2018, November, we were sitting with Rudy in the York of the Grand Habanabro.

And Rudy gets a call from one of his investigators and starts telling him all

this stuff about Marisse Ma and all kinds of stuff.

And Rudy, like usual, he'd sit back down.

We would have drinks at cigars if he'd tell us everything that was going on.

And he starts talking a few months before my partner Igor had sent a video from

Ukraine from one of these that we later found out to be a Russian operative in the

city of your father, basically saying, Oh, son of a bitch.

We got fired.

Rudy took a look at that video and basically said, we got your joke.

A week later, we were at the White House.

Or meeting with Trump in the Red Room.

The week later, we were in Ukraine.

We were looking for Victor Schulke to pressure him to give us darn or make up

information to be able to start this whole thing.

See you in Ukraine soon.

When did it cross over from being a hair -brained Rudy

Giuliani operation in concert with Trump to the DOJ?

When did Trump's lackeys inside the DOJ begin to also conspire to, you know,

to take daily?

I mean, basically from the very beginning.

From that first initial meeting with Trump and right after that, Giuliani started

calling all his contacts at the DOJ and FBI to start putting pressure to look into

you, to look into your dad and all of your Ukraine dealings.

You have to say, Hunter, at that time, I truly believe that was a deep state.

I truly believe that you were up to some shit,

but there was never any criminality and anything.

That's the whole thing.

There were just basically, you know, innuendos, conspiracy theories,

but no actual facts.

The crazy part?

I mean, I feel embarrassed, Hunter.

I mean, you're bankrupt.

How does it get my bank records?

My bank records aren't even on a computer.

I got an email from John Solomon that said that his friends at the FBI got your

records and I don't know where, how, what.

So the FBI secretly subpoenaed and got my bank records under the Trump

administration, handed them to John Solomon, and then Rudy Giuliani

recirculates them back into the DOJ and on the meeting.

Absolutely.

John Solomon, him and Hannity, and Fox had a whole system go up.

Yeah.

So Fox was definitely, like, directly involved?

Oh, 100%.

I watched after you got arrested, and then clearly were kind of chunks.

They turned their back on you.

And at that point, I just say, you know, I wasn't very sympathetic.

Oh, I'm sure.

I'm not sure.

What conversations have you had with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruhman?

I don't know those gentlemen.

What they did, though, is that they so quickly turned you into this supervillain.

It may very well be with these Russian payments to Lev Parnas that Lev himself is

part of a disinformation campaign, a guy that's under indictment,

a guy that's a known grifter, a guy that had a

company called Fraud Inc that he ran into the ground.

The man was a demonstrated liar.

And they, you know, go after your personal life, and they talk about, you know,

that you're really a Russian.

I mean, all of these things, similarly.

I gave him a lot of ammunition.

Addiction is never an excuse, but it's an explanation.

It's an explanation why I ended up in some of the rooms that I ended up in,

doing things that I'm ashamed of today.

The best thing that could have ever happened to me was getting arrested.

That's crazy as that sounds.

It really takes a big person.

To not only admit that they're wrong, but to do

so in public, and to do it on the stage you did.

Lev Parnas was the centerpiece of a bomb -throwing congressional

hearing on the Biden impeachment inquiry this week.

Today, I admit my own wrongdoings.

I have been a convicted federal election campaign

and fraud crimes, and served my sentence.

Despite rigorous attempts by those in power to silence me, I will be silenced no longer.

To go in front of a hostile committee in Congress that you

know has no compulsion to break every role to embarrass you.

And to put yourself in that position just so you can tell the truth.

There are American people have been lied to by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani,

and various cohorts of individuals in government and media positions.

They created falsehoods to serve their own interests,

knowing it would undermine the strength of our nation.

One of the hardest things to do in life is to make amends.

And it's one of the principles of like the

program I follow in terms of my own addictions.

But to do it, the way that you've done it, on TV, in public, where you're getting the

goddamn hell beat out of you.

Sounds like everyone here today, the only one working for a Russian oligarch was you.

They didn't listen to the truth because if they would listen to the questions...

The question Mr. Gates had is for me to hear the truth.

You can't have a lot about Gates.

What I saw was somebody with just an enormous

reserve of character when it really counted.

Today I ask you to consider the following.

In nearly a year traveling the world and interviewing officials in different

countries, I found precisely zero evidence of the Biden's corruption in Ukraine.

The only information ever pushed on the Biden's in

Ukraine has come from one source and one source only.

Russia and Russian agents.

And so, bottom my heart, I promise you, you're a hero to me.

I was proud, you know.

I was really, really, really proud.

I was proud of you.

Everything was for the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump and thereby Vladimir Putin,

who used this narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 elections.

Sadly, they're still doing this today as we approach the 2024 elections.

Hunter, I want you to know I wrote this book to tell the

truth about what happened during the Trump administration.

He used your battle with addiction for his own

agenda to hurt you and your family and your father.

You were a casualty in all of this.

I regret very truly my decision to work with those

that tried to bring you and your family down.

I will do everything in my power to clear your name going forward.

Thank you, my friend.

You know, I'll treasure this.

And one thing I've learned is that truth and love always prevail.

It may take a little while, but the fact of the matter

is we get up every day and we do the next right thing.

We win.

I'm so sorry for that.

Yeah.

Say, it was a bit...

Please, please, excuse me.

Listen, listen.

We get a second chance.

Both of you do.

That's right.

Both of you.

Yeah.

Good evening.

I'm Ali Velsian for my friend, Stephanie Rule. The English Subtitles ripped by: SEsubRIP

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