Hunter Biden faced his one-time antagonist Lev Parnas, who was at the center of former President Trump’s efforts to dig up dirt on President Biden’s son, in an emotional meeting captured in a new MSNBC/Rachel Maddow documentary — calling the remorseful convict a “hero.”
Titled “From Russia with Lev,” the documentary charts Parnas’s course from his days working for various criminal organizations to a stint in Hollywood to ultimately becoming a central figure in the impeachment investigation into Trump.
Parnas has since recanted his work for former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, where he played a central role in pushing accusations that President Biden took actions in Ukraine to benefit his son.
The result for Hunter Biden has been significant, as accusations from Giuliani and Parnas helped ignite a Justice Department investigation into the president’s son, resulting in a conviction in a gun case and his pleading guilty Thursday in a separate tax case.
Parnas gets emotional, both in speaking directly to the camera and during his meeting with Biden.
“Our actions in Ukraine, pushing all of this disinformation against Hunter Biden, has now caused real problems, real criminal problems that he is now facing,” Parnas says.
“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,” he adds, getting tearful.
The documentary tracks Parnas as he nervously arrives in Los Angeles for a meeting with Biden on July 7 — an exchange that ends with a hug.
“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,” Biden said. He noted that Parnas has gone on TV and in front of a “hostile committee” – in reference to a March hearing in the House Oversight Committee that was probing the Biden family’s foreign business dealings — all “while you’re getting the goddamn hell beat out of you.”
“What I saw was somebody with just an enormous reserve of character when it really counted.”
“So bottom of my heart, I promise you, you’re a hero to me. I was really, really, really proud. I was proud of you,” Hunter Biden added.
The meeting between the two was not initially planned and came together at a late stage in filming the documentary, The Hill was told.
Parnas said it was his work that sparked the investigation into the younger Biden, something he said came at the behest of other figures close to Trump.
“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,” Parnas said.
“You have to understand, Hunter, at that time, I truly believed there was a deep state. I truly believed you were up to some s—.”
In 2022, Parnas was sentenced to 20 months in prison for fraud and campaign finance crimes.
Biden admits he was not bothered by seeing GOP allies abandon the former fixer.
“They turned their back on you, and at that point, just so you know, I wasn’t very sympathetic,” he says, adding later “we get a second chance. Both of us do.”
“I gave them a lot of ammunition,” Biden said. “Addiction is never an excuse, but it’s an explanation. It’s an explanation why I ended up in some of the rooms I ended up in, doing things that I’m ashamed of today.”
Parnas has been active in discounting his former allegations.
In July of last year, he wrote a letter to the House Oversight Committee in the midst of its impeachment investigation into President Biden, saying that despite his months of research, “there has never been any evidence that Hunter or Joe Biden committed any crimes related to Ukrainian politics.”
He also said that Giuliani and all others involved in the matter “knew that these allegations against the Bidens were false.”
Parnas has also written a book about his journey — an effort he said was dedicating to cleaning the Biden name — and also testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this year.
“In nearly a year traveling the world and interviewing officials in different countries, I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine. No credible sources ever provided proof of criminal activity,” Parnas said in the March hearing.
The film premieres Saturday at the “MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024” event at The Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will air on MSNBC at 9 p.m. Sept. 20. It was directed by rakontur’s Billy Corben and produced by Alfred Spellman.
The documentary premieres just weeks after a House Republican impeachment inquiry report asserted that President Biden engaged in impeachable conduct in relation to his son’s foreign business dealings, relying largely on circumstantial evidence and showing no direct evidence that he financially benefited from the foreign business deals.
It also comes after Hunter Biden entered a surprise guilty plea in his tax crimes case on Thursday, citing his desire to not put his family though the kind of “anguish” they endured earlier in the summer in a trial that found him guilty of lying about his use of illicit drugs on a federal gun purchase form.
Hunter Biden is scheduled to be sentenced in the gun case on Nov. 13, and in the tax case on Dec. 16.